A RANTING

which has no business in criticism, but I'm not criticizing, I'm disappointed in myself for not giving this master author the benefit of at least a full read. . .

I have nothing against so-called Space Opera. They're chewy, taste good, and are just downright fun fingerfood. But, I'm sorry, Michael Swanwick can't write in this sub-genre. He's too much of a deep thinker. He can't help but stretch the tools of literature so they go around corners and into places never trekked. He's too interested in, yes, ontological questions and this style of plotting can't hold the weight. Anything deep becomes trivialized with scenes like:

He buried his face in the side of her neck.

“Wait,” Rebel said. “I want the big guy.”

He looked at her questioningly.

“Your warrior aspect. I want to make love to you while you're being the warrior.”

--p.87

I imagine we're supposed to read between the lines where she has an orgasm and sees God. Is “Oh God, I'm cumming!” too tacky for this transcendent swashbuckler? Not if your Ripley-esque* heroine is named Rebel, I contend.

As the great architect Louis Henri Sullivan once said, “form follows function”; even in a literature some consider trashy and picayune. Unfortunately, Vacuum Flowers also lacks the pump of a good actioneer. Swanwick seems too concerned about making contemporary parallels with the inhabitants of “tank towns [that are] being maintained by people who saw them simply as fertilizer farms” (p.34). And, thrown in the middle of a soup where “Earth and humanity are natural enemies” (p.56), beings pose as humans along with cyberbots, and God knows how many personalities are inside one body, let alone how many times it has died and been re-born, became too long a swim to the cuplip to achieve a cohesive perspective. With everything swirling, nothing becomes clear enough to care.

Of course, I felt the same way starting Stations of the Tide and look where that one went. And, The Iron Dragon's Daughter (read my notes here) should be on the Crawford List, but I felt like the Pulitzer Prize jury when, after voting Gravity's Rainbow to top honors, it was challenged by the Board as "unreadable" and noone could render a convincing defense. No award was given for Fiction in 1974. (BTW, I agree with them. V. is Pynchon's magnum opus.)

Dead at page 80 out of 248.

*this is a reference to macho-fem Ellen Ripley of Alien fame, not the Believe It Or Not guy.

© copyright 02/07/2007 by Larry Crawford