Subject: Review: Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling

From: [email-masked] (SFReviewer)
Date: 18 Sep 1996 16:56:18 -0400

Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling
		Review Copyright 1996 Ernest Lilley

 We are too soon old, too late smart.  - Yiddish folksaying

From crone to European runway model, Holy Fire takes us on a breathless
search for sex and self through the internal adventure of an old woman
suddenly turned young by a radical life extension technology.  In her new
self, she forsakes the dryness of her former life in order to seek the Holy
Fire, the conceit of the generation's artistic vision.  In the end, it is
provided more by the acceptance of self.  Bruce Sterling's latest book may
well be his best.  I was easily caught up in this world of human and post
humans, not to mention post-canines, and wholeheartedly recommend it to both
genre and non-genre readers alike.

Life extension figures into much science fiction, more so as the population
ages, but often as a side bar to the main story.  As we come to grips with
the problem in real life, the measure of difficulty represented by serious
life extension is reflected in fiction.  Larry Niven's (Ringworld) tree of
life root gives way to Kim Stanley Robinson's (Blue Mars) complex and
piecemeal bolstering and replacement of one's failing body.

Bruce Sterling, with typical panache and expressing the consumer expectation
of a generation of aging boomers, takes both tacks.  In setting up the
story, he introduces us to Mia, a vital, if very careful, woman of 94
(incidentally the age my own Grandmother died a few years ago - a vital, if
very careful woman) who has maintained herself in the accepted way: diet,
exercise, and the expensive avoidance of death.  After the death of an old
lover and an encounter with a young woman living the very vivid life of
youth she realizes that she cannot continue her desiccated, post-sexual,
post-human existence.  Enter the big gamble approach to life extension.
Essentially by regrowing her body in a vat while she's in it she emerges
young, vital, and out of control in a rush of hormonal energy she had almost
forgotten existed.  She is most definitely not the old woman who entered
treatment, and escapes her treatment consortium to live on the run among the
artists and gypsies of Europe.  The internal consequences of life extension
are the crux of this book, and the reader is whirled along in the vortex
created by Mia, now Maya, as she integrates her new and old self and comes
to accept coming of age for a second time.  This time around though, she
definitely has the advantage of fore- and hindsight.  The characters have
that noir edge of rebellion that makes Sterling s writing so attractive, but
it is tempered by the central character having been the establishment, and
carrying her comprehension of the structure of society with her through the
hubub of dissidence and youth.

From a technical standpoint, I was most intrigued by the author's premise
that if one replaces the 10% or so of brain tissue that dies off in the
course of a lifetime change in the basic self is inevitable.  As a reader,
while I enjoyed Mia's romp through the new old world, I think that
Sterling's choice of a artificially beautiful central character in the
throes of the hormones of youth and the glitter of art, echoes something of
the beginning premise of the book.  We never really grow old, though we may
pretend, as we long for that powerful confusion and energy that slips away
with time.