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3.49 AVERAGE
3.49 AVERAGE
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 the main character's bearings, all in the name of asking whether one can retain their personality in a time when a new culture and new perspective is knocking on the door every day.
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... :(
Swanwick, Michael. Vacuum Flowers. 1987. Open Road, 2016.
Michael Swanwick is a writer who should be better known than he is, despite one Nebula award for his novel Stations of the Tide and three Hugo awards for his short fiction. He caught the cyberpunk bus early on, and in Vacuum Flowers he extends its reach into the kind of space opera I usually associate with John Varley’s Eight Worlds series. The story is set in a solar system that is inhabited all the way to the Oort Cloud with “cannister habs,” “Dyson trees,” and a partially terraformed Mars. Most of the solar system is dominated by large corporations, but not Earth. It has been taken over by an AI that has incorporated all its residents into a hive mind. Our heroine, Rebel Mudlark, is resurrected into a body not her own after her death by suicide. Her persona with all its memories and skills is owned by a corporation, but Rebel lives up to her name. She is “wetware” who does not accept her programming. Her story is fun to follow, and if I have one complaint about the novel it is that the world-building too often leaves Rebel in the background. Nevertheless, Swanwick is a writer I will revisit.
Michael Swanwick is a writer who should be better known than he is, despite one Nebula award for his novel Stations of the Tide and three Hugo awards for his short fiction. He caught the cyberpunk bus early on, and in Vacuum Flowers he extends its reach into the kind of space opera I usually associate with John Varley’s Eight Worlds series. The story is set in a solar system that is inhabited all the way to the Oort Cloud with “cannister habs,” “Dyson trees,” and a partially terraformed Mars. Most of the solar system is dominated by large corporations, but not Earth. It has been taken over by an AI that has incorporated all its residents into a hive mind. Our heroine, Rebel Mudlark, is resurrected into a body not her own after her death by suicide. Her persona with all its memories and skills is owned by a corporation, but Rebel lives up to her name. She is “wetware” who does not accept her programming. Her story is fun to follow, and if I have one complaint about the novel it is that the world-building too often leaves Rebel in the background. Nevertheless, Swanwick is a writer I will revisit.
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 personality, especially the new technology whereby people can be entirely reprogrammed. It's a fertile theme, but I don't think Swanwick treated the scarier aspects of that very well. I'd love to see what P.K. Dick could do with this story. Karl recommended this to me, I think because he likes to think about personality manipulation.
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 entertainment. The real her is a personality bum, a chronically depressed loser who tries on new personalities before they hit the market. She escapes, falling in with an ally from her former life, and discovers that she has actual talents as a wetware artist-capable of reprogramming minds. Hunted by cops, corporations, and hyperintelligent hiveminds, she has to embark on a quest to save humanity, and the plot accelerates from there
Lots of interesting things are pointed at. Spacer humanity lives in a culture and economy based on wetware-programming people into useful specialties and personalities. Alien as this is, it's set against the hivemind Comprise, which subsumed the billions of people on Earth and is locked in a planetary cold war with the spacers. Some intelligence are post-human, pushed past reasonable limits of intelligence, or containing multiple minds in a single body. Corporations have rights and people have none. Low-wage space janitors scrape vacuum flowers off the hulls of stations while the elite party in their sheraton command centers. But the cool ideas mostly go nowhere, sex and violence are used for prurient purposes rather than to advance the plot, and the charcterization and style just isn't good enough to anybody who doesn't already love late 80s space opera.
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 entertainment. The real her is a personality bum, a chronically depressed loser who tries on new personalities before they hit the market. She escapes, falling in with an ally from her former life, and discovers that she has actual talents as a wetware artist-capable of reprogramming minds. Hunted by cops, corporations, and hyperintelligent hiveminds, she has to embark on a quest to save humanity, and the plot accelerates from there
Lots of interesting things are pointed at. Spacer humanity lives in a culture and economy based on wetware-programming people into useful specialties and personalities. Alien as this is, it's set against the hivemind Comprise, which subsumed the billions of people on Earth and is locked in a planetary cold war with the spacers. Some intelligence are post-human, pushed past reasonable limits of intelligence, or containing multiple minds in a single body. Corporations have rights and people have none. Low-wage space janitors scrape vacuum flowers off the hulls of stations while the elite party in their sheraton command centers. But the cool ideas mostly go nowhere, sex and violence are used for prurient purposes rather than to advance the plot, and the charcterization and style just isn't good enough to anybody who doesn't already love late 80s space opera.
Satisfying though sometimes convoluted trip through a cyberpunk future full of altered minds and over power corporations. Generally an interesting book and I am increasingly appreciate Swanwick.
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 i didn't: no sense of humor (or one i don't share? ), kick-ass female lead (who wasn't ? ), promiscuous female lead who faces few negative consequences for casual hookups, stereotypes instead of archetypes
Worth reading for the "going to the bank scene" alone - i'll remember it a long time .
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 i didn't: no sense of humor (or one i don't share? ), kick-ass female lead (who wasn't ? ), promiscuous female lead who faces few negative consequences for casual hookups, stereotypes instead of archetypes
Worth reading for the "going to the bank scene" alone - i'll remember it a long time .
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 cylinder cities and dyson spheres and ice comets of the solar system looking for answers and adventures and finding both.
It's a marvelous read, bright and energetic and crisp and fun, full of invention and strangeness. The cover for my edition is awful, but it isn't inaccurate and as such is just a single glimpse of the dizzying wonders of Swanwick's strange and alien future.
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 cylinder cities and dyson spheres and ice comets of the solar system looking for answers and adventures and finding both.
It's a marvelous read, bright and energetic and crisp and fun, full of invention and strangeness. The cover for my edition is awful, but it isn't inaccurate and as such is just a single glimpse of the dizzying wonders of Swanwick's strange and alien future.