Books like Vacuum Flowers

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 my review of Dyson's "The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet": https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...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.