Customer Reviews

Vacuum Flowers

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I first read this book as a junior-high student and have returned to it every year or two since then. I discover something new each time. The prose is stripped to the wire - practically poetry. Deliciously minimalist, its bare-bones surface hides a wealth of ideas about society, technology and the nature of human personality. William Gibson poses hard questions about the fate of individuals in a technocratic future. Michael Swanwick poses even harder questions about the fate of _individuality_ itself. A love story, an action flick and a sociological treatise rolled into one, "Vacuum Flowers" is the author's finest achievement save perhaps "The Iron Dragon's Daughter."

I only purchased this book because of Swanwick's 1998 short story "Radiant Doors" which was such an amazing story that I knew I had to see if he had written any longer sci fi. I was pretty amazed when I did a search on him and saw how many novels he has written. I have a lot of friends who read sci fi and NONE of them ever mentioned Swanwick.

I am very happy to have stumbled onto this book. What a great read! It has something that you don't always see in sci fi: exploration of thought provoking issues PLUS a fun side that makes the book really enjoyable to read. One of the things this book does best is to put you in it's world and proceed with telling it's story. It doesn't try to explain everything in it's world upfront and doesn't use any cheesy narrative techniques to explain everything. Rather, you learn about how this world is set up through the story itself. Everything fits into place and as I was reading it, I was constantly saying "Ahhh, well that explains that!".

Since this book was written in 1987, many of the topics discussed in it (ie hive mentality, integration of technology into humanity) have been discussed to death in other novels. However, this book stands out in two ways: it was ahead of the rest AND it's better than the rest. This book has elements of Neuromancer, Ender's Game, and even Star Trek (the Borg). But it uses all of those items in such original ways that it stands on it's own. Great sci fi novel, highly recommended.

I don't know how he does it. I mean, you start this book and , BOOM, suddenly you're in the middle of a complex story that is completely out of context to both culture and consciousness as we know them, and you can follow it. Swanwick feeds you just enough info so you can stay with the story. But never too much info, so you don't get a sense that you're reading something different that needs to be explained. It's an amazing balancing act.

The central technological advancement of this book is the plug-in personality. You go into a clinic and get yourself "wetwired" to perform any given task (janitor, policeman, doctor), or simply augment the personality you have (give yourself more confidence, sex appeal, or even make yourself shy and introverted if that's in style). The protagonist, Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, is a recorded personality (a real one) who has taken over the body she's being tested in. She's being hunted by the corporation that "owns" her, and trying to discover why she was created.

This shell of a plot leads us from Eros Kluster, a loose affiliation of space habitats near the asteroid belt, to Mars, a futuristic communist state where citizens are programmed to work on the latest 200-year plan, to Earth, a collective entity consisting of every human being on the planet, known as the Comprise.

The book is generally fun, there's enough action, sex, and funky technology to sustain anyone's interest, and it's not that long. the climactic commando attack on the Comprise is exciting and would make an incredible sequence in a movie or graphic novel.

The problem is that Swanwick is generally more interested in showing us the worlds he's created, and doesn't spend enough time dealing with the story and characters. The trick to that is, he throws out a dozen neologisms every few pages (some of which are inconsequential), and it takes a while for the meaning of everything to sink in. The fact that most of the book takes place in the low-gravity of space stations is barely mentioned. Furthermore, the places the characters visit aren't well-described, at least not in a three-dimensional, physical sort of way, which I found very frustrating. In general, most science-fiction operates like this, so most readers shouldn't mind.

The characters themselves never get quite enough attention. Rebel wants to be the hero, but spends most of her time watching everything else going on, and listening to people speak. The only other character who's present throughout is Wyeth, a man whose personality has been split up into four distinct personas. He's interesting, as are all the minor characters they meet along the way, but he never quite connects. When these two end up in love, I felt like I'd missed a third of the book.

"Vacuum Flowers" has enough hardware to fill out a novel twice as long, so as it is it's a very fast, very crowded little book.

I first read this book years ago - it was one my father hadbought, but not enjoyed. I loved it. It took another couple readingsto realize why I loved it, though. It's because you have to work to read this book. Terms like "pierrette" are used but never explained; if you don't figure it out from the context, you don't figure it out. No spoon-feeding. No "convenient idiot" (the character that is used in most SF by the author to explain things to the readership).

The lack of the convenient idiot makes the book feel less like SF, and more like a piece of literature that just happens to have been written a couple hundred years from now.

Read it. Then read Swanwick's best (and, in my opinion, one of the greatest SF novels ever), Stations of the Tide.

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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 [web site] for a bit of Dyson info.

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.

Review copyright 2000 by Peter D. Tillman
Visit http://www.michaelswanwick.com for full review, and lots more Swanwickian goodies!

I just recently re-read Vacuum Flowers for the first time in probably 15 years; I read it in College when it first came out and then recently came across another copy. Has anyone else noticed the *astonishing* similarities between the Comprise as described in Vacuum Flowers and "the Borg" in the Star Trek series? It seems like every Borg plot device was taken from this novel!

The basic idea of cyborgs with implanted tranceivers that link them together as a group mind where any individual can speak for the whole collective.

The description of the way in which partial thoughts proceed through the group mind in fragments of speech.

The rapiciousness with which the Comprise absorbs humans into its collective.

"Billy" being removed from the Comprise and turned into a "real boy" -- sounds suspiciously like what ST:TNG did later with "Hugh".

Even the description of how the comprise members have their skin dyed -- something that goes away when they are removed from the collective...

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 (more or less) 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. You'll find my review of his fine The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolution (Nypl/Oup Lectures) (see sidebar).

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.

Here's Amazon's main page for Vacuum Flowers

Review copyright 2000 by Peter D. Tillman

Seldom does one find such invention, such superb writing, and such command of the narrative in one writer. In addition, Swanwick's ideas on how technology may shape society are inspired. The characters are acutely drawn, the imagery beautiful, inspiring, scary. A jewel. I admit that the narrative technique might leave the less literate a little confused, but if you don't need everything spelt out for you, you really will get a lot of pleasure from this book.

I often read two books at the same time, swapping time from one to another in the course of a week. As I was reading Gather Darkness by Fritz Leiber, I fingered to the back page to see an advertisement for the Wizard of Oz series. I thought it strange but I idiomatically wanted to try to find a link between the Wizard of Oz and Vacuum Flowers... so of I set upon my own little yellow brick road since I wasn't enjoying the first third of the book very much.

Rebel (Dorothy) and her alternate psyche Eucrasia (little dog, Toto, too) traverse the intersystem from her Dyson sphere home in the Oort Cloud (Kansas) to the idea of a green Earth (the idyllic Emerald Palace) to seek answers. Her posse includes the four-minded Wyeth (The brainless Scarecrow [though I stop the comparison at the sexual relationship]), the seemingly logical cybernetic Bors (The heartless Tinman) and finally the simple-minded Nee-C (The cowardly Lion). Rebel even has a `wizard-mother' (Good Witch of the East?) who assists her in her journey. The enemy is a more nebulous type, perhaps because of the unclear distinction between rivals. The mind-linked Comprise (flying monkeys) and the sinister back figure of Deutsche Nakasone (Wicked Witch of the West) detail most advances at the elimination of Rebel and her posse.

It was all a fun game to play while reading the novel... until I came to page 228 of 248 when one character says, "Last of all, Rebel, we come to you. Rebel, you want a pair of ruby slippers... You want to go home." My jaw dropped! I could NOT believe my time-passing fantasy manifested itself onto the pages! My second thought was that Pink Floyd might provide an excellent soundtrack to this book.

Comparisons aside (though it's hard to look past it all!), I found the book a jumble of fleeting thoughts, brief (and very frequent) sexual encounters, short-lived sub-plots and transitory peoples. When a sci-fi grandmaster has too many thoughts in a novel, they tend to have the skill to weave them in a solid tapestry of awe and depth. However, when an inexperienced author attempts to put all their thought into one book, the result reads like the above adjectives: fleeting, brief, short-lived and transitory. Swanwick mentions again and again the `rude boys' of the outer system and the wolverines of the planet Earth but he doesn't go into depth about how they fit into the universe which he has written an entire novel about. It's full of ideas of empty of effort. This applies to other scenarios, as well: the Comprise shy-apple eating boy, the Orchid village and the Island habitation- mere ideas built without scaffolding.

Lastly, I'm sick of sci-fi authors who think they can characterize a `strong female heroine' simply by sexualizing her. It's a major cop-out and Swanwick takes it to a new level with a total of eight sex scenes, where anything less than three would have been suffice. The novel actually reminds me MUCH of John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline, where a women (while exploring her `strong female heroine-ness') is split into cloned bodies as she travels out of the system.