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Cover art: Rich O'Donnell
Blurb: “Michael Swanwick's short fiction first hit the SF field in the early 1980s and immediately began appearing on Nebula and Hugo ballots as nominees for best of the year. Then his first novel, In the Drift, was published as one of the prestigious "Ace Special" paperbacks and received enthusiastic praise. Roger Zelazny: "A tough, keen-edged blade of a story. The author's hand is steady and sure, the results powerful and moving." And George R. R. Martin:
"Fulfills the promise of his short fiction.
Swanwick's clean, strong prose makes the story compulsively readable." Locus called it "beautifully written and compelling." And now, in Vacuum Flowers, Michael Swanwick achieves a synthesis of the color and energy of John Varley and the razor-edge clarity and intensity of William Gibson's hip cyberpunk style in a science fiction novel of potent impact. Swanwick himself describes the novel as "an ontological space opera, the story of an unconventional love between a man with four totally independent personalities and a woman who has died twice before the novel begins." Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine calls Vacuum Flowers "a pyrotechnic and fast-moving tale, jam-packed with inventive detail, that moves at a headlong pace across the solar system from the swarming space
habitats of the asteroid belt to the haunted vistas of Old Earth." In the sprawling civilizations of the distant future out in space, after an artificial intelligence net has taken over Earth and integrated earthbound humanity into a malign group mind. In the midst of this fertile swarm of interplanetary lifestyles, a woman is given an artificial personality that revolutionizes her life, and makes her an object of value to the powerful corporations that control society.
Awakening in a medical center, she escapes, and sets out on a thrilling and dangerous quest for survival and self-knowl-edge, an odyssey that takes her from planet to planet and calls into question the nature of the human future.“