The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [64]
He and Cordelia Naismith trudged off across that alien plain and never looked back.
All four of our children have been nourished on Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, the occasional con, and, of course, books. Lots of books. My crawling infant is now married and the father of two, and murmuring of going to graduate school to study Creative Writing, while Lois's daughter is becoming an artist in metals. Lois and I each have tucked away one moldy old copy of StarDate.
And sometimes, small but distinct on the horizon, we can still glimpse Excalibur, the One Ring, or the Enterprise.
Foreword to Falling Free
James A. McMaster
Falling Free is a futuristic tale of a faraway world, populated mainly by people, even if some have some superficial changes in their bodies. Falling Free is also a brief look into welding engineering, a not-so-well-known engineering discipline that is the science of joining materials, primarily metals. Welding engineering, at least as taught at Ohio State University in the mid-1960s, was a combination of electrical engineering, mechanical and civil engineering, metallurgy, coupled with some courses taught inside the department that looked at the unique and sometimes transient aspects of these engineering disciplines on a weld or a welded structure.
Falling Free is one of the few novels that the American Welding Society has ever offered for sale. There is even a copy in the library of the Edison Welding Institute in Columbus.
Falling Free is dedicated to our father, "Dad," Doctor Robert C. McMaster. He was a student, a teacher, a researcher, a writer, a speaker, and a performer. As I read the book, I looked for and found many of his characteristics in Leo Graf. He had the same dedication to and belief in his ability to use engineering to solve social problems. He had the same sense of ultimate duty to integrity, truth, and honesty. He had the same disdain for people who would use technology to achieve other than ethical and responsible goals. He shared Leo's disdain for management and accountants who, it often seemed to Dad, killed good ideas before they could really be tested. He had the same narrower view of the world, but one which in its simplicity was perhaps more accurate and certainly more provable.
Many of the characteristics of Leo I would attribute to our father. For example, in the classroom where he is teaching the quaddies and the repeated radiograph of the good weld baffles the quaddies, who just can't comprehend the possibility that anyone could do anything dishonest. I can also relate to the loudly delivered "TURN THE POWER OFF" as a quaddie was about to send a stream of electrons off into space. That was how Dad would remind a student of any particular safety precaution that it appeared he was about to violate in one of the many laboratory classes to which we were regularly subjected in our five years at school.
The expression "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach" was one heard around the school and often applied to undergraduate students encountered throughout the university. I don't know if the addition of "Those who can't teach go into administration" was a Loisism or had a different source.
The Welding Engineering Department at Ohio State was an unpolished gem—something that seemed lost on the college administration. It was unique in the country, being the only school accredited to grant a degree in welding engineering. Our class was only thirteen people, the one before just six, making ours the largest ever. OSU was the only school in the country that graduated WE students. I was never sure if that meant that the welding engineering was something no one else wanted so there were no clones, or if it really was the best of the best, but industry paid the highest average starting salary to our graduates of any school at OSU.
I took the five-year Welding Engineering course. I took a number of classes from my father. He was the best and most enthusiastic teacher