I've just reread this after 15 years or so and it's just as fresh as the day it was written. Swanwick has been an amazing writer for a very long time. Highly recommended.Ģ021 reread: showing its age a bit - or maybe it's just my bad mood? Anyway, still a good book, but the magic was intermittent this time.

I've now read VF three times (1987, 1993, & 2000), and I expect to enjoy it again in 2007 or so. 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. This was Swanwick's second novel, and first really successful one. 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'.

Swanwick is, surprisingly, one of the few SF authors who've borrowed Freeman Dyson's remarkable biotech space-settlement ideas. 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 wrote 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. And the remote Dyson settlements in the Oort are bucolic biophile semi-utopias, offstage. The cislunar settlements, a no-man's-land between Humanity and the Comprise, are the dark anarchic Mean Streets. People's Mars, an unappealing collectivist state based on classical Sparta, is nonetheless making good progress terraforming Mars. For example, a police raid wouldn't require many police - temp-deputies could be imprinted on the spot.

There is, umm, 'potential for abuse', and Swanwick has fun exploring the consequences of this technology. 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. 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. Vacuum Flowers is a grand tour of the inhabited Solar System, set in a medium-term future.

Vacuum flowers michael swanwick