Vacuum Flowers

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Vacuum Flowers is a science fiction novel by Michael Swanwick, published in 1987. It could be described as cyberpunk (some critics credit it as one of the pregenitor works of that genre), and features one of the earliest uses of the concept wetware.

The protagonist of the novel is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, a woman who makes a living renting out her mind for temporary testing of new wetware programming. Soon she is being hunted by the very corporation which last programmed her, eager to destroy the wetware with which it programmed her. Her 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 chipping ice-crystals (the vacuum flowers of the title) from the canisters' exterior ports. She meets and falls in love with Wyeth, a leader whose personality he has reprogrammed into a team of four complementary personas. Together they form an uneasy alliance with The Comprise, the hive mind which rules Earth, and encounter Dysonworlders, who live on genetically engineered artificial comets.