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The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical industrial complex dominates the world economy. It is a world of synthetic memory drugs, benevolent government surveillance, underground anarchists, and talking canine companions. Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. Meanwhile, the young live on the fringes of society, ekeing out a meagre survival on free, government-issued rations and a black market in stolen technological gadgetry from an earlier, less sophisticated age. Mia Ziemann is a 94-year-old medical economist who enjoys all the benefits of her position. But a deathbed visit with a long-ago ex-lover and a chance meeting with a young bohemian dress-designer brings Mia to an awful revelation. She has lived her life with such caution that it has been totally bereft of pleasure and adventure. She has one chance to do it all over. But first she must submit herself to a radical--and painful--experimental procedure which promises to make her young again. The procedure is not without risk and her second chance at life will not come without a price. But first she will have to escape her team of medical keepers. Hitching a ride on a plane to Europe, Mia sets out on a wild intercontinental quest in search of spiritual gratification, erotic revelation, and the thing she missed most of all: the holy fire of the creative experience. She joins a group of outlaw anarchists whose leader may be the man of her dreams...or her undoing. Worst of all, Mia will have to undergo one last radical procedure that could cost her a second life. In Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling once again creates a unique and provocative future that deals with such timeless topics of the human condition as love, memory, science, politics, and the meaning of death. Poginant, lyrical, humorous, and often shocking, Holy Fire offers a hard unsparing look into a world that could become our own. From the Paperback edition.… (more)
User reviews
The future society is very believable, and Sterling put a lot of good thought into an artistic world a century from the time the book was written. The story itself has world-sized problems without world-sized solutions; it’s a good cautionary tale that warns of what can go wrong, but only provides a basis for speculation about how to do things right.
Life-prolongation techniques and their possible consequences to society are venerable old
Mia found herself in an architect's office. There was a big desk in simulated woodgrain, and painfully gleaming brass lamps, and algorithmic swirls of simulated marble. The chairs were puffy, overstuffed, and swaddingly comfortable. Old people's chairs. They were the kind of chairs that top-flight furniture designers had begun making back in the 2070s, when furniture designers suddenly realized that very old people possessed all the money in the world, and that from now on very old people were going to have all the money until the end of time.
The posthumans are set in their ways and exceedingly cautious with their health, since medical records are available for all to see, and the best upgrades are only available to those who have taken good care of themselves. This is the story of what happens when one of them, 93-year-old Californian medical economist Mia Ziemann undergoes a radical new upgrade technique which seems to make her truly young again. Escaping from medical supervision during her convalescence, she rejects her old life and name, running away to Europe to hide as an illegal within the vivid subcultures of the young.
When Maya saw the raw shots on Novak's notebook screen, she was elated and appalled. Elated because he had made her so lovely. Appalled because Novak's fantasy was so revelatory. He'd made her a bewitching atavism, a subterranean queen of illicit chic for a mob of half-monstrous children. Novak's glamour was a lie that told a truth.
I liked the postcanines, talking dogs with artificially augmented intelligence that can work as anything from bouncers to chat-show hosts, and for some reason the idea of having bean-bag seats on trains and aeroplanes really appealed to me.
Mia Ziemann, a careful, cautious and rather stuffy old woman in a future mainly controlled by the old, signs up for an experimental
The book manages to both incorporate a host of hilarious details, and meditate seriously on issues of youth vs. age, power vs. the lack thereof, and the nature of true artistic inspiration....