Vacuum Flowers

__________________________________________ Vacuum Flowers is a grand tour of the inhabited Solar System, set in a medium-term future. The book opens in Eros Kluster, one of many asteroid-based settlements that form the bulk of Human space, after all of humanity on Earth was absorbed into the Comprise, a world-wide AI- and net-mediated group-mind. The Klusters are frontier-capitalist polities, more or less, with advanced biotech and neuro-engineering -- most people spend their workday wetware-programmed by their employer, a (+/-) reversible process. There is, umm, 'potential for abuse', and Swanwick has fun exploring the consequences of this technology. For example, a police raid wouldn't require many police -- temp-deputies could be imprinted on the spot... People's Mars, an unappealing collectivist state based on classical Sparta, is nonetheless making good progress terraforming Mars. The cislunar settlements, a no-man's-land between Humanity and the Comprise, are the dark anarchic Mean Streets. And the remote Dyson settlements in the Oort are bucolic biophile semi-utopias, offstage. Swanwick notes that he "tried to display a range of plausible governmental systems throughout the System, all of them flawed the way that governments are in the real world..." Nicely done, one of the highlights of Vacuum Flowers. Oh, and the Flowers are pretty little plants, engineered to live in the vacuum & eat garbage, that have become a weedy nuisance -- another nice touch. Swanwick is, surprisingly, one of the few SF authors who've borrowed Freeman Dyson's remarkable biotech space-settlement ideas. Dyson is an extraordinarily inventive and graceful scientist-writer, and I seldom miss a chance to recommend his books -- see [web site] for a bit of Dyson info. This was Swanwick's second novel, and first really successful one. Despite some rough spots -- notably, the cyberpunkish opening --Vacuum Flowers remains an exemplary modern space-opera, one of the best in the extraordinary reinvention of my favorite subgenre during the past two decades. I've now read VF three times (1987, 1993, & 2000), and I expect to enjoy it again in 2007 or so. Highly recommended. Review copyright 2000 by Peter D. Tillman Visit http://www.michaelswanwick.com for full review, and lots more Swanwickian goodies!

I only purchased this book because of Swanwick's 1998 short story "Radiant Doors" which was such an amazing story that I knew I had to see if he had written any longer sci fi. I was pretty amazed when I did a search on him and saw how many novels he has written. I have a lot of friends who read sci fi and NONE of them ever mentioned Swanwick.I am very happy to have stumbled onto this book. What a great read! It has something that you don't always see in sci fi: exploration of thought provoking issues PLUS a fun side that makes the book really enjoyable to read. One of the things this book does best is to put you in it's world and proceed with telling it's story. It doesn't try to explain everything in it's world upfront and doesn't use any cheesy narrative techniques to explain everything. Rather, you learn about how this world is set up through the story itself. Everything fits into place and as I was reading it, I was constantly saying "Ahhh, well that explains that!".Since this book was written in 1987, many of the topics discussed in it (ie hive mentality, integration of technology into humanity) have been discussed to death in other novels. However, this book stands out in two ways: it was ahead of the rest AND it's better than the rest. This book has elements of Neuromancer, Ender's Game, and even Star Trek (the Borg). But it uses all of those items in such original ways that it stands on it's own. Great sci fi novel, highly recommended.

I first read this book years ago - it was one my father hadbought, but not enjoyed. I loved it. It took another couple readingsto realize why I loved it, though. It's because you have to work to read this book. Terms like "pierrette" are used but never explained; if you don't figure it out from the context, you don't figure it out. No spoon-feeding. No "convenient idiot" (the character that is used in most SF by the author to explain things to the readership).The lack of the convenient idiot makes the book feel less like SF, and more like a piece of literature that just happens to have been written a couple hundred years from now.Read it. Then read Swanwick's best (and, in my opinion, one of the greatest SF novels ever), Stations of the Tide.

I first read this book as a junior-high student and have returned to it every year or two since then. I discover something new each time. The prose is stripped to the wire - practically poetry. Deliciously minimalist, its bare-bones surface hides a wealth of ideas about society, technology and the nature of human personality. William Gibson poses hard questions about the fate of individuals in a technocratic future. Michael Swanwick poses even harder questions about the fate of _individuality_ itself. A love story, an action flick and a sociological treatise rolled into one, "Vacuum Flowers" is the author's finest achievement save perhaps "The Iron Dragon's Daughter."

I don't know how he does it. I mean, you start this book and , BOOM, suddenly you're in the middle of a complex story that is completely out of context to both culture and consciousness as we know them, and you can follow it. Swanwick feeds you just enough info so you can stay with the story. But never too much info, so you don't get a sense that you're reading something different that needs to be explained. It's an amazing balancing act.