sdwoodchuck 's review for:

Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick

5.0

---

 

Rebel wakes in the colonies to find she has died—again—and this time finds herself in a new body, with its own residual memories and inclinations taking up mind space. She falls in with a man who is actually four personalities working synchronously, and gets pulled into his mission to undermine the expansion of The Comprise—the entire population of Earth, which now exists as a shared hive-mind.

The world-building here is nutty, and a lot of fun. It has a lot of the grit of the cyberpunk movement, but becomes something more of a space opera in its scope. It’s comfortable in weird spaces and comfortable with sex, without ever falling into the pitfalls of many 80’s works in which women are defined by their sexual availability (in fact that dynamic gets playfully turned on its head here a fair amount).

I don’t think everything works, but so much does, and it’s so ambitious, that I just really enjoyed the ride throughout. A+