Description

Vacuum Flowers is a sf novel by Michael Swanwick, published in 1987. It’s an early example of cyberpunk, featuring one of the earliest uses of the concept wetware. The protagonist is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, the recorded personality of a dead woman which has become the property of a corporation that intends to sell it as entertainment. Rebel escapes by taking over the body of Eucrasia Walsh, a woman who rents herself out for temporary testing of new wetware programming. While escaping the corporation Eucrasia’s latent personality begins to reassert itself. Rebel’s adventures take her throughout the widely-colonised solar system. She initially lives in canister worlds orbiting the Sun in a trojan orbit, where she sometimes works removing bioengineered weeds (vacuum flowers, a space-tolerant flora) from exterior ports. Since the recording omits most of her memories, she must rely on strangers to help her survive, tho she cannot trust them. Rebel meets & falls in love with Wyeth, a leader whose personality was reprogrammed into a team of four complementary personas. Together they form an uneasy alliance with The Comprise, the hive mind which rules Earth, & encounter Dysonworlders, who live on genetically engineered artificial comets.

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