Oh, fardles!
4 stars
it's a fairly entertaining oldish novel about a woman who has been implanted in a spaceship.
Raises a lot of interesting moral questions: from what I understand, she and her peers were born immobile, and of course becoming a brainship gives them mobility—but still, the conditioning necessary for this takes place from birth, and so they obviously can't give consent. Also, they are essentially indentured serfs to the Central Worlds until they can "Pay-off"—which sometimes takes hundreds of years. I didn't feel that these ethical issues were quite well enough explored.
I will forever find Helva's declaration "Imagine calling red hair and freckles sweet!" bewildering
It's a "fix-up" novel (made up of several previously published short stories), which accounts for its episodic nature. I thought the second half was better than the first (it was also written later).
