Notes on 'Vacuum Flowers' (1987) by Michael Swanwick (b. 1950)
Michael Swanwick’s work is hard to categorise as it often mixes different sf subgenres. Still, his truly imaginative tales have had a huge influence on a new generation of sf writers, not least New Weird fiction. Vacuum Flowers is a conflation of cyberpunk and space opera that interrogates the psychology of existence between mind and machine, envisioning a society where the recorded minds of the deceased can be commoditised and sold for entertainment purposes.