The following continues the questions that I posed to Mr. Swanwick

Mark: Cyberpunk had been declared dead by Bruce Sterling in 1986 due to what Bruce Bethke called a lack of continued originality, as publishers and fans forced cyberpunk into repetitive and pedantic tropes (paraphrased). Vacuum Flowers was published in 1987, although you’ve stated you didn’t intend for it to be a full cyberpunk book and really wanted to stress its space opera side. You’ve also stated in the past that cyberpunk fans weren’t particularly warm to the book. What was the overall cyberpunk atmosphere like at that time in the publishing industry and among consumers?

Michael: Let’s start with the observation that it was a phenomenon whose time had come. In retrospect, there were a lot of writers (some unlikely) trying to invent cyberpunk before William Gibson succeeded with stories like “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” and then codified it with Neuromancer.  John M. Ford’s Web of Angels comes to mind and Mike Resnick’s Tales of the Galactic Midway series. Nicholas Yermakov had a novel whose title I can no longer remember which had strong similarities to the Sprawl trilogy. Plus, as I said, others, all of them low-advance paperback originals.

Michael: The big difference between these books and Gibson’s was that their protagonists all cared passionately about their situation, where Case was, essentially, a junkie. Bill took all the heat out of the novel and replaced it with chill. But he had a lot of other innovations too. If you read a half dozen of his predecessors and then Neuromancer, you’ll see the scope of his accomplishment. To get the social context, it helps to understand that at that time, the cyberpunks were a close-knit circle of friends—with the exception of Pat Cadigan, who was writing in isolation from the others but whose work was simply too good and too obviously belonged with theirs for her to be excluded. They were all exchanging ideas and manuscripts with each other. So you were either in the inner circle or the outer darkness.

Michael: When Bruce Sterling first assembled the Mirrorshades anthology, his editor, David Hartwell, told him, “You have to have more than four people in your movement” and so he was required to cast a wider net. Cyberpunk as a movement (the Movement Sterling tried to dub it) was an artificial construction deliberately created by Chairman Bruce, as he was commonly called back then, to bring them attention. The late Susan Casper was convinced he modeled it after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He knew that a movement needed enemies and that those enemies could not be mediocrities. So some very harsh things were said about some very good writers. People have by and large made their peace since then, but there were a lot of hurt feelings, a lot of bad blood. Gibson, it has to be said, never wanted to be in a movement and was always a little embarrassed by the whole thing. I cannot resist mentioning that I declared cyberpunk dead in 1986—before very many people had even heard of it—in an essay titled “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns.” I’m pretty sure I beat Sterling to the punch.  

Mark: Was creativity valued in cyberpunk lit?
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Michael:
Obviously, yes. You have only to look at the work being done by Gibson, Cadigan, and Sterling to see that.

Mark: You’ve had a long writing career making substantial contributions to multiple genres. What do you think about the future of cyberpunk?

Michael: Honestly, it all depends on what new writers do with it. Other than the fact that it’s currently an international phenomenon (the last time I was in China, I picked up a copy of Taiyo Fujii’s Gene Mapper, which I quite admired; originally self-published as an e-book in Japan, which once upon a time would have been cyberpunk in itself), I really don’t see it going in any particular direction. But one good writer with a handful of first-rate ideas can make a fool of me and take the form in any direction they desire. I’d enjoy seeing that.
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Overall:

‍It’s difficult to separate Vacuum Flowers from the Cold War atmosphere in which it was written. The book has a strong theme of individualism versus collectivism, and one faction is called the Stavka, indicating there’s a connection to that time period. There are lines such as, “The desire for private gain is a common failing of individual intelligence…The amassing of private wealth is destructive to the personality.” In 1999 Swanwick stated, “I was writing at the end of the Cold War and all these themes...seemed trite and tedious and self-absorbed. They were boring. Something was definitely in the air; it wasn't so very long after that the Soviet Union collapsed…”

Vacuum Flowers is an highly unusual book with a complex plot that holds together. Full of emotion with strong point of view, symbolism, poetic speech, and metaphor, the book is a true delight in most areas. After a third of the book I felt oriented in the world, and by the last third everything was clear. Some of the action scenes started and ended rather abruptly, and the middle wanders a bit, but I enjoyed how the climax was more of a revelation. It’s a great book that holds up well to time, carving out a unique place in cyberpunk’s history that few can emulate. Check it out!

Michael Swanwick's Major Novels:

In the drift -1985
Vacuum Flowers - 1987
Stations of the Tide - 1991 (Nebula Award winner)
The Iron Dragon's Daughter - 1993
Jack Faust - 1997
Bones of the Earth - 2002
The Dragons of Babel - 2008
Dancing With Bears - 2011
Chasing the Phoenix - 2015
The Iron Dragon's Mother - 2019
City Under the Stars - 2020