And the remote Dyson settlements in the Oort are bucolic biophile semi-utopias, offstage. The cislunar settlements, a no-man's-land between Humanity and the Comprise, are the dark anarchic Mean Streets. People's Mars, an unappealing collectivist state based on classical Sparta, is nonetheless making good progress terraforming Mars. For example, a police raid wouldn't require many police - temp-deputies could be imprinted on the spot. There is, umm, 'potential for abuse', and Swanwick has fun exploring the consequences of this technology.

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. 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. (Jan.Vacuum Flowers is a grand tour of the inhabited Solar System, set in a medium-term future. But will that cure return the sufferers to themselves or leave them irrevocably changed? Swanwick weaves the story with characteristic verve and style, and though his exploration of the issues raised by the psychological viruses falls short of its potential, this is an entertaining and provocative novella. As the sane survivors use and sometimes abuse the highly suggestible insane, Gunther and a few others search for a cure.

A terrorist has released an engineered virus into the moonbase, rendering all those within it insane, and Gunther is one of the few lucky enough to have been outside at the time. Later, when a limited nuclear war breaks out on earth, Gunther finds himself in an even more prominent position. But when an unexpected solar flare catches him exposed on the moon's surface and his ingenuity alone saves him from death, Gunther becomes a sort of celebrity. Gunther Weil is an underachieving lunar laborer, content in his routine job and the occasional petty expression of insubordination. Swanwick's ( Gravity's Angels ) latest combines many elements common to his previous work: a solid hard-science fiction setting, an interest in the workings of interpersonal relationships, and speculation about the potentials of the mind and the nature of personality.

Vacuum flowers michael swanwick