Vacuum Flowers

An amusing book: the ideas are great, but the execution isn't very convincing. In the future humans are split into various societies, a cultural divergence because of isolation brought on my different space colonies. We've got hive-mind humans at the service of a new consciousness that spans Earth, a bunch of socialists building a worker society on Mars, and lots of free thinkers and personality reprogrammers hanging out in various small colonies. The interesting idea here is the manipulation of personality, especially the new technology whereby people can be entirely reprogrammed. It's a fertile theme, but I don't think Swanwick treated the scarier aspects of that very well. I'd love to see what P.K. Dick could do with this story. Karl recommended this to me, I think because he likes to think about personality manipulation.