Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick

Apr 03, 2012 Bruce rated it really liked it

Shelves: sf-fantasy

Swanwick has been an amazing writer for a very long time. I've just reread this after 15 years or so and it's just as fresh as the day it was written. It seems wrong to describe it as cyberpunk as it's got so much more creativity insight and breadth than pretty much anything else in that genre. It reminds me of Samuel R Delaney's work more than William Gibson's.

On the other hand it does all kind of hang on the classic SF trope of the person who has had their memory blasted and so gets a guided t ...more

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Jul 12, 2011 Terry rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi, space-opera, mirrorshade-y

A Persona Bum decides she likes the new personality she just uploaded to her brain so much that she decides to keep it. Unfortunately the corporation that owns the rights isn't too pleased and from there on in we follow Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark (or is it Eucrasia?) on her adventures across a solar system populated by bizarre societies transformed by the inovation of wetware technology and the loss of earth to a hivemind decades before. On the way we get to visit her world as she experiences much ...more

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Jan 14, 2017 Natalie rated it liked it

Dear Vacuum Flowers,

I will not miss reading your pages, as far fetched, right on and eco-cyber-futurist as they may be. I guess if an abridged graphic novel version comes out I'd read that, but you were a bit of a slog for me.

So why'd I keep reading?

What i liked: imagery, futurist scene setting & plot devices, kick-ass female lead (except when not) , promiscuous female lead who faces few negative consequences for casual hookups, characters who move fluidly between socio-economic strata

what ...more

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Jan 02, 2017 Peter Tillman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reread-list, sf-fantasy

*NOTE* $2 ebook special 11/5/17!!

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 *NOTE* $2 ebook special 11/5/17!!

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 my review of Dyson's "The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet": https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...

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. ...more

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Aug 17, 2007 Adam rated it really liked it

Shelves: literature-disguised-as-science-fic

What a ride! I've read a smattering of short stories(of note the absolutely menacing "The Very Pulse of the Machine"..so unsettling) by Swanwick which people claim are his strength but that seems dismissive of his novels..and on completing my first one..I think he might be dynamite novelist, one of our best. Called cyberpunk or space opera but really this is indescribable, a full on plunge into white hot imagination and political outrage tackling ideas of identity(most characters have several),g ...more

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Dec 05, 2014 Suzanne Rooyen added it

I give up. DNF at 50%. The world building is just so chaotic that I don't really know how anything works or why or where the characters even are half the time. As for the characters, I'm seriously struggling to care about them. Just when I think I understand what the story is about and where the plot is going, random stuff happens that makes me all confused again. Sadly, I've reached the point where I just don't care anymore. Time to move on... :(

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Jan 25, 2013 Roddy Williams rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: cyberpunk, science-fiction, gestalt, wetware, self

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. ‘Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is hot property. The body she awakes in isn’t her own: her mind is unique; the agency owning her is deadly. If she stays in the Medical Centre, she has No Future.

So she does what anybody sane would do – she escapes.

And in the sprawling, mad civilisations of the future, she’s in for a very interesting time indeed. If she survives.’

Blurb from the 1989 Legend paperback edition.

The basic pursuit scenario is either that the protagonist is in search of something or someone, th ‘Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is hot property. The body she awakes in isn’t her own: her mind is unique; the agency owning her is deadly. If she stays in the Medical Centre, she has No Future.

So she does what anybody sane would do – she escapes.

And in the sprawling, mad civilisations of the future, she’s in for a very interesting time indeed. If she survives.’

Blurb from the 1989 Legend paperback edition.

The basic pursuit scenario is either that the protagonist is in search of something or someone, the discovery of which is of vital importance to the outcome of the story, or else the protagonist is the pursued and his or her capture, or that of whatever he or she possesses, is of vital importance.
In ‘Vacuum Flowers’ - the title refers both to the genetically engineered blue flowers which grow in vacuum on the surface of asteroids and to the many societies which have flowered in various exotic habitats within the Solar System – the element sought is the persona of Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. Personas (or personae) are wetware programmes with which users can augment, supplement or overlay their personality. Persona bums (such as Eucrasia Walsh) are hired to test the personas before they go on the market, but in this case Eucrasia liked her persona so much that she ran off with the original copy still in control of her mind.
The Deutsche Nakasone Corporation want the persona back all costs while a rival bidder, fronted by an avatar called Snow, also gets in on the act.
Rebel escapes again and again, while in the meantime undergoing personality disorders because of the battle going on in her mind between the new Rebel personality and the repressed Eucrasia.
Meanwhile, we discover that Earth has been subsumed by the Comprise, a gestalt human cyborg organism, ‘comprised’ of billions of individual human units forming a single consciousness.
The Comprise have existed in an uneasy truce with the rest of Humanity since the time they attempted to absorb them into the cyborg collective. As it transpired the Comprise cannot sustain communication with Earth over distances beyond the Moon’s orbit and their attempts to create Comprise off-shoots have failed, so the Comprise are effectively confined to Earth.
Rebel teams up with Wyeth, a tetrad; his mind divided into the four separate aspects of Warrior, Leader, Mystic and Clown, and their journey, attempting to evade both the assassins of Nakasone and the offers from Snow, takes us on a fabulous journey through the Solar System in which Swanwick throws out inventive wonders, marvels and biological impossibilities seemingly effortlessly.
They visit Deimos where for a brief time they are employed by ‘People’s Mars’, a socialist collective who are fanatically dedicated to their long-term plan of terraforming the Red Planet, and though a cheerless bunch are meticulously efficient and frugal.
The fines from the mining of Deimos, for instance, are ejected into areosynchronous orbit to create a reflective cloud which focuses additional sunlight on the planet.
The pace is relentless and Swanwick’s style is so full of poetic if sometimes bewildering terms, it becomes redolent of Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or Hoban’s ‘Riddley Walker’.
Wonders abound and there is a restless energy which permeates the book urging the reader and the heroine on.
The central figure, Rebel, eventually comes to terms with the part of her which is Eucrasia and finally learns the nature of her own self.
Swanwick is a very individual writer. Although employing elements of cyberpunk and hard scientific premises he extrapolates some elements to the heights of the fantastic.
When Wyeth is contracted to oversee the transfer of ‘tank slums’ and its population of workers to Deimos, a habitat is created by the Comprise within a geodesic sphere based around a giant free-floating orchid within whose branches the workers create small villages and communities. The Comprise (their exponentially heightened intelligence putting their science centuries beyond Man’s) have created a transit ring which essentially shifts space itself from one point to another, and the entire sphere, occupants, orchid and all are packed up and put through and sent to Mars.
It’s also a love story since Wyeth, who knew Eucrasia before she became Rebel (it was Eucrasia who split Wyeth’s head into four separate divisions) falls in love with Eucrasia’s new self and she with him, despite her misgivings.
Although fast-paced and light-hearted in tone there is a depth and a sophistication in the intricate background detail which raises this well above the norm. ...more

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Aug 18, 2015 TomF rated it really liked it

Earth is a hive-mind, police forces are press-ganged criminals, and aboriginal hunting parties can reside inside a single head. These are a few of the quirks and inventions in this 80s sci-fi. Along with the conceptual creativity, one of the best aspects is the seamless ecology of the asteroid worlds & the gradations between their gravities and cultures. It becomes a rich backdrop to the breakneck race for survival our heroine takes us on. I felt a genuine claustrophobia & disorientation ...more

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Jul 02, 2016 Christy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: from-tom-s-library, sci-fi-fantasy

Swanwick has constructed an impressive world in this book, but he does it without acknowledging the reader's unfamiliarity. From the very beginning, it's written as if the audience is contemporary to this world; details are included to enhance the picture, but not all details are explained. Just like someone wouldn't feel the need to explain how a telephone call works in a story of our time, he assumes the reader knows (or will figure out) what is happening. At times it made for slow, muddy read ...more

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Nov 08, 2014 Nigel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This doesn't feel like a cyberpunk novel, because most cyberpunk feel very much of their time, whereas this has a freshness to its exuberant vision that seems to disdain such strictures.

Rebel wakes up in Eucrasia's body. Rebel is an artificial persona that has come to life, though she is marked for death by the corporation that owns her. Literally of two minds, she escapes and goes on the run with Wyeth, a friend of Eucrasia's with an interesting mind-state of his own, and they jaunt across the ...more

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Apr 10, 2014 Nelson Minar rated it it was ok

An amusing book: the ideas are great, but the execution isn't very convincing. In the future humans are split into various societies, a cultural divergence because of isolation brought on my different space colonies. We've got hive-mind humans at the service of a new consciousness that spans Earth, a bunch of socialists building a worker society on Mars, and lots of free thinkers and personality reprogrammers hanging out in various small colonies. The interesting idea here is the manipulation of ...more

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May 05, 2009 Petr rated it it was amazing

Shelves: crazy-worlds, one-of-a-kind

I don't remember "cyberpunk" book that was more unsettling than this - pure in-depth horror of our future where the very essence of humanity will become completely and routinely correctable. This book gives more perspective on that subject than any dystopian book I read or heard of. Because author creates not simple story to tell some warning, send a message or paint a bleak picture, he creates absolutely balanced and self-contained normal world where people live and prosper, going forward and s ...more

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Apr 10, 2018 Dana Cameron rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018

This book is so good I could have sworn it was written by a woman. The lead female protag is very real and believable—she even manages to be *sexual* without being *sexualized*, which can be a hard line for some authors to walk.

I was thinking how this might be the best 80's era cyberpunk/scifi novel I've read yet, and then Swanwick referenced Kobo Abe, my fav surrealist author.

Like, this book isn't tinged with the misogyny and racism so many other books from this time are, that we try to overlo ...more

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Sep 01, 2013 Kevin Conod rated it really liked it

A cyberpunk classic. It takes place in a far-flung future where humans have colonized the solar system and can be programmed like computers. Even though it was written in 1987, it still holds up. Though in some spots the author plops in items without explanation (not everyone knows what a dyson tree is).

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Jun 28, 2007 Cass rated it it was amazing

This is an overlooked cyberpunky gem. It features interesting tech that asks the question: if you could change your personality at will, who would you be?

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Mar 10, 2017 Bbrown rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Vacuum Flowers has a lot of things going for it, but I enjoyed it less than the sum of its parts. Immediately upon starting this book it reminded me of When Gravity Fails by Effinger, a book published a year earlier than Vacuum Flowers that also has downloadable personalities and skill sets as its central sci-fi premise. When Gravity Fails, however, botched that premise by not fully engaging with is, such as by having the main character be against ever using the technology (a virtual luddite, gi Vacuum Flowers has a lot of things going for it, but I enjoyed it less than the sum of its parts. Immediately upon starting this book it reminded me of When Gravity Fails by Effinger, a book published a year earlier than Vacuum Flowers that also has downloadable personalities and skill sets as its central sci-fi premise. When Gravity Fails, however, botched that premise by not fully engaging with is, such as by having the main character be against ever using the technology (a virtual luddite, given the setting, something only weakly justified). Where When Gravity Fails failed, however, Vacuum flower succeeds, immediately engaging fully with the premise by giving us a main character that has downloaded a personality that has subsumed the natural personality she had before.

Desperate to keep her personality, Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark escapes from a corporation that is attempting to mass-produce the personality for profit, though it quickly becomes apparent that other parties are also interested in getting the Rebel personality for other reasons. This arrangement with the main character is rather brilliant, as we get to know the dominant Rebel personality (who is struggling with her "birth" into this new world), but the book also slowly introduces us to Eucrasia Walsh, the suppressed personality. Because of the nature of artificial personalities in Vacuum Flowers, there's also an inherent tension created by the dual personalities of the main character, since such personalities can't co-exist indefinitely.

It isn't just through the main character that the book engages with the central premise of downloadable and modifiable personalities, nearly every character has been changed using the technology, from recreational users to people that are more robot than man, to more fanciful constructs. Even the settings are infused with the technology: Earth is inhabited by The Comprise, a hive mind that arose in the earlier days of the technology. The Mars terraforming efforts are principally conducted by a huge number of people running the same programmed personality that puts efficiency above all else. The bioengineering focused societies that live on massive trees grown into colony ships have made their very food capable of changing personalities of the consumer. What I liked most, though, was the smaller-scale exploration of the idea, like when police raid a massive slum that Rebel is hiding in. There are only a few "true" policemen to search the massive slum, but that's not a problem when you can override someone's personality and upload one of your choosing, the ten policemen grab a civilian and a few seconds' download later there are now eleven policemen, repeat as necessary.

As touched upon above, there a variety of settings, with Swanwick taking you on a tour of nearly the entirety of this universe. It's a large universe, too. I appreciated each setting and what it was meant to communicate, but my favorites were the ones that hewed closest to the cyberpunk aesthetic rather than other branches of sci-fi. The initial space station where Rebel awakes, with the usual cyberpunk milieu of slums, corporate agents, hackers, enclaves of the rich, and more is right up my alley. Later on, the dilapidated Hongkong orbitals, created during the earliest days of man permanently escaping the bonds of Earth, were also enjoyable in their picture of urban decay in outer space.

There are other virtues to this book as well: Rebel is not the only interesting and multi-layered character, and the love story at the center of much of the book is a solid one. I even liked the mystery set up of why everyone is so interested in Rebel's personality. Overall, however, despite the strength of the premise, the characters, the settings, and more, as a whole this didn't match one of Swanwick's other works, Stations of the Tide. I've identified two main reasons for this. First, the books suffers a little bit from the common science-fiction syndrome of too many ideas being thrown at the wall. Like I said earlier, nearly every character and absolutely every setting brings a new aspect and perspective to this personality-fungible world, and certainly every character and setting should do that, but Swanwick throws so many characters and settings in this rather short book that it's a rush in both a good way and a bad way. Second, and more important, the way in which Swanwick strings together all of these settings and characters never felt fully satisfying. Now Rebel is escaping the corporate lab, then runs into a tech from that lab who brings her to a mysterious woman, who in turn helps her escape to where she takes up a menial job to lay low, then meets up with an old associate of her subsumed personality that hides her in a slum, then the slum is raided so she escapes and impersonates a sex slave to get into a high-class area, then she visits somewhere she shouldn't and has agents on her tail, and all that's over the course of a little over fifty pages and a small fraction of what Rebel does over the course of this book. Each individual step is at least weakly justified, but Vacuum Flowers' through line often seems weak or obscured throughout this game of hopscotch. Vacuum Flowers doesn't lack range, and doesn't lack depth, but often feels like it lacks focus. This isn't helped by ambiguities raised in the climax and epilogue.

Good cyberpunk is hard to find. Vacuum Flowers is pretty good cyberpunk, with a lot of things going for it. I just didn't feel like it had the cohesion it needed overall. It is, however, certainly better than When Gravity Fails. 3.5 stars, and I've rounded down. ...more

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Jul 08, 2017 Donovan Hastie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Some spoilers here, I don't go into great detail, but beware.

I think any rating/review must take into account that this book was first written in 1987. With that in mind it truly is an amazing book. For me it's right up there with William Gibson's Neuromancer series (although I consider those to be better).

The concept of vacuum flowers all by itself is completely original, but the way he uses wetware technology here is just plain cool. It makes having multiple personalities not just cool but a ...more

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Feb 05, 2018 Peter rated it really liked it · review of another edition

In a future where personalities can be temporarily written to brains in a short time, the practice is used in law enforcement, espionage, and even entertainment. Exciting personalities are big business, and when Rebel Mudlark, the hot new personality marketed by a major corporation is tested for the first time, the tester breaks out of the facility, determined to stay Rebel... but the personality is copyrighted and she's got the only clean copy in her head, and the corporation will do anything t In a future where personalities can be temporarily written to brains in a short time, the practice is used in law enforcement, espionage, and even entertainment. Exciting personalities are big business, and when Rebel Mudlark, the hot new personality marketed by a major corporation is tested for the first time, the tester breaks out of the facility, determined to stay Rebel... but the personality is copyrighted and she's got the only clean copy in her head, and the corporation will do anything to get it back, so that means she has to go on a run, a journey that takes Rebel her through wild orbital societies, to Mars, and even to the hive mind that now controls Earth.

I'll be honest, I was a little leery of this book going in. What little I've read of Swanwick in the past, he seemed a little too self-consciously artsy for my tastes. But I wound up really enjoying it. It's not perfect, but I quite enjoyed it and I was surprised to find it was written in 1987.

Surprised because this book is listed as Cyberpunk, and it was written right in Cyberpunk's short dominance phase, but really, this feels like it's already post-cyberpunk, a story from the 90s or even 2000s. If it was written later, it almost certainly would have been considered such, so I guess you could say it was 'ahead of its time' in many ways. But rather than the traditional cyberpunk stories, which often feature low-level street-based characters with low moral fibre and some sort of cybernetic enhancements in noirish stories of drugs and betrayal, this feels almost like dipping a toe into the postsingularity and transhumanist stories of imaginative ways humanity could develop, wild biotechnology and more focused exploration of minds as copyable, editable things... sure, still with a few of the cyberpunk tropes, but not many.

It also reminds me of Schismatrix Plus, maybe even influenced by it and moving a step beyond (with Schismatrix already being on the far edge of Cyberpunk). One of the big similarities is in storytelling style. Both books jump around from location to location, offering a tour of different societies and situations with the plot connecting them almost an afterthought. Vacuum Flowers had a stronger plot thread throughout, but it still felt mostly like an excuse to do wild adventures. I also think Vacuum Flowers was the better of the two books both as a story and as a set of smaller stories.

There were things I didn't like so much about it (aside from generally preferring stories with a stronger narrative throughline) but most of them were minor. Things like never quite buying the central premise that there was only one copy of Rebel's personality, or desiring more concrete details on where they were and what living in such an environment was like (mostly they seemed to be in fragile and subsistence-level zero-G environments and it was hard to see exactly how they were living).

Still, overall I quite enjoyed it and I think I'll give it four stars. Might not be for everyone, but it hit a few things I really liked and some fascinating ideas. ...more

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Oct 26, 2017 Cesar Felipe rated it it was ok

The problem I had with this book is perhaps something that others may like: a unique bizarreness in its settings, its characters, its scenes, and its general plot.

The heart of this book lies in the solar system it presents. But it was often difficult to wrap my head around what exactly it was portraying about it, simply because it uses a language of made-up concepts that aren't explained, ambiguous wording that can be imagined in different ways, and obscure and archaic terms, all of which are u ...more

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Jul 29, 2018 Andi rated it it was amazing

This is the book that introduced me to Michael Swanwick in the early nineties, and I have read it several times. A few years ago I decided that since I loved this novel so much I would work my way through Swanwick's entire oeuvre. After reading every novel and almost every short story still in print (and quite a few out of print), I have circled back around to Vacuum Flowers. I was curious whether my feelings about this novel would change after reading so much Swanwick but while I have loved man ...more

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Jul 31, 2018 Lawrence rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi, cyberpunk

Swanwick has such a creative mind! This was mind blowing in the same way as Snow Crash or Neuromancer. I am shocked that he's not mentioned in the same way that Gibson or other stars of the cyberpunk genre are.

The wetware and personality conflicts and world building around this is pretty great and novel.

The way he envisions the colonization of our solar system is also fascinating. There is an Earth vs the rest, along with an outer planets vs inner - 20 years before James SA Corey wrote it. Howe ...more

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Feb 21, 2018 Micah Horton hallett rated it really liked it · review of another edition

What a terrible cover for an otherwise good book. What is with that? Why are science fiction editors compelled to rifle through soft porn magazines for the covers of male targeted SF, and "women's" magazines for aspirational figures to stick on female targeted SF? Aren't we past the age of pulp? Can't we let this go? Why is this apparently targeted at males anyway? There is a strong and complex female protagonist getting down in some old school cyberpunk action full of wetware, rogue AI's, gesta ...more

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Oct 23, 2017 Kat La russe rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

This was very fast-paced, and I went in expecting to love it, since it's written by Michael Swanwick. This book resisted my loving it. It sort of repulsed me at first, with the fast pace and the seemingly uncomprehensible mishmash of technology and nature, unlikeable protagonist, and, and and...

I still loved it. This is not really a plot book, it's more an ideas book. There is a plot, and characters, and it all ties together so well in that tried and true Swanwickian way, but I found the worldb ...more

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Mar 04, 2018 Savannah B rated it liked it

A love story and self-discovery tale strung together with manic, glittering concepts swiping the pages by. Who are you?, we watch the story ask its protagonist in as many ways as it can, from sensual contact to tinkering with programmed personalities to a lover with four personas in one body, through fringe societies living in secret jungles and canisters. Overstimulation jerks and wheels like a high-octane performance specifically to entertain a desensitized audience, and to give a beating to t ...more

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Apr 27, 2018 Sahelanth rated it really liked it

Extremely beautiful imagery, striking and original ideas. Plus a few that were original in 1986, but are everywhere in scifi now.

The plot isn't very clear, nor especially interesting. There are a few character moments meant to be surprising that don't land, because we know too little about the characters to be surprised. But the atmosphere and scenes are excellent, and Swanwick's vision of a culture where people buy and sell personalities to layer over their own is compelling.

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Aug 29, 2017 Matt rated it really liked it · review of another edition

An early blend of Cyberpunk and Space Opera that relentlessly introduces new ideas several times a page, bizarre cultures residing all throughout the solar system, crazy organic space habitats of multiple variety, programmable minds, devious Ai and characters you probably can't trust. A story that disorients as often as entertains. Which I’ve come to expect from good, classic Cyberpunk.

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Nov 09, 2017 Byron 'Giggsy' Paul rated it liked it

Shelves: cyberpunk, speculative-fiction, virtual-reality, artificial-intelligence, biopunk, singularity, transhumanist

good cyberpunk, to some even a minor classic. Many cyberpunk titles wither with the real technological future that became our present. This suffers some, but not enough to take off your to- read list

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Apr 10, 2018 Florian Holzner rated it really liked it

I like a lot of the world building and ideas for the biotech. This could've been a major inspiration for for some of the technology in the Quiet War trilogy.

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Dec 05, 2014 Michael Burnam-Fink rated it liked it

Shelves: 2014, sci-fi

Vacuum Flowers is brightly burning science fiction, half cyberpunk and half space opera, but it's very much style over substance, and while Swanwick is good enough as a writer, he's no master wordsmith a la Gibson or Sterling.

The story starts in Eros cluster, with a woman waking up in the hospital about to have her identity erased by an evil and mysterious corporation. It turns out that her personality as space adventuress Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is an artificial construct, designed for entertai ...more

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Mar 04, 2015 Juliana Rew rated it it was amazing

In Michael Swanwick's now-classic 1987 cyberpunk novel, "Vacuum
Flowers," Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark wakes up to find herself in the body
of Eucrasia Walsh, a recently deceased cyber expert. Her "persona" has
been sold to a megacorporation for use as an entertainment
personality. The concept of uploading yourself into other bodies was a
precursor to other great SF novels, such as David Brin's "Kiln
People." But Rebel is worried that the strong personality of Eucrasia
will overwhelm her own.

Rebel escapes f ...more

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