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mburnamfink 's review for:
Vacuum Flowers
by Michael Swanwick
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.