Subject: Postview: "Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 01 Jul 1999 17:32:48 -0400

"Holy Fire" by Bruce Sterling
	A Postview, copyright 1999, p-m agapow

It is the late 21st century.  Every year medical science comes up with new
and bizarre schemes to extend the human lifespan.  Every year the
population gets older and older.  Every year the old consolidate their
power and wealth a little more.  Mia Ziemann is typical of the elderly
elite: 94 years old, physically and mentally fit, wealthy and on the
A-list for experimental life extension.  But when her treatment regresses
her body to that of a 20 year old, she flees her medical keepers and
escapes to Europe with the key to an elusive database ...

The description above and that on the back of the book, makes the plot of
"Holy Fire" sound leaden and unoriginal.  Elderly person realises their
life has been passionless, takes one last chance at adventure, celebrates
youth, etc.  In fact, that is an accurate description of what happens.
Fortunately, Sterling's world is much more interesting than this synopsis
might suggest.  Unfortunately, his world is more interesting than the
plot.

As always with Sterling, the niceties please.  To receive life extension,
patients invest money for decades in biomedical companies.  So much money
is tied up in this investment that the global economy is long-term stable.
Housekeepers for the elderly double as benevolent government spies.
Emergent diseases require constant sterilisation of clothes and utensils,
and combating with friendly microbial flora.  "Post-canine" dogs have
implanted computers for intelligence so they may speak and act as
servants.  Net access businesses keep a backlog of old equipment to access
ancient data and protocols.  It's an interesting world.

In one of my crueler moments, I characterised the plot of Larry Niven's
"Ringworld" as "Louis Wu - and his mates - go to the Ringworld, hang out
for a while and then go home."  (As distinct from "Ringworld Engineers"
which is "Louis Wu - and his mates - go to the Ringworld, have sex with
aliens, and then don't go home.")  Along this line of reasoning, the plot
of "Holy Fire" is "Maya Ziemann is old, becomes young, runs away to Europe
and mixes with a lot of Eurotrash."  Sadly, if this book were stripped of
its SF fittings then it would contain barely enough to fill a very slim
airport lounge book.  Mia gets a job working in a shop.  Mia hangs out
with arty types.  Mia travels to a new city.  Mia boffs a young stud.
It's the sort of action that would be rejected from an Australian soap
opera as too mundane.  Perhaps we find out so much about the world because
there is so little happening.

I don't wish to bleat on about "Holy Fire"'s faults, making it sound worse
than it actually is, but another point bears airing.  The dialogue, much
of which concerns the eponymous holy fire (what it is, I still do not
know) seems to have been written by drunken arts students:

   "Intimacy was not a prospect that appealed.  It would take a
   woman of enormous self-abnegation and tolerance to endure the
   torment of that much clarity on a day-by-day basis.  If he had
   a girlfriend she would sit across the breakfast table from him
   with fork in hand, and every day she would be impaled on the
   four steel tines of his intelligence and his perception and
   his ambition and his self regard."

Say what?

   "We must prepare to take creative possession of the coming
   epoch.  An epoch so poetically rich, so boundlessly
   victorious, so charged with meaning, that only those prepared
   to bath in cataclysm will transcend the singularity.  Someday,
   we will render powerless all hatred of the marvelous.  The
   admirable thing about the fantastic is that the contained is
   becoming the container; the fantastic irresistibly infiltrates
   the quotidian ...  there is no more strength left in
   normality; there are only routines."

   "What you just said.  It's so beautiful."

It's like Ed Wood crossed with Baudelaire.  It's characters babble about
being post-human and the singularity, but their behaviour is as if they
were in a sex-and-shopping novel by Jilly Cooper.  Although not bad as the
heroine of "Islands in the Net", Mia drifts through the plot, doting on
boyfriends and drifting from job to job, being propelled by the actions of
other people.  I suspect that some may think that "Holy Fire" is a
feminist novel or that it has a strong female lead.  It takes more than a
female protagonist to satisfy either of those objectives.

Is Postviews getting too crabby about wanting a plot?  Hardly - "Heavy
Weather" has little plot still came across as tremendously exciting and
vibrant.  "Schismatrix" was mainly a Cooks Tour of an interesting world,
but still compelled.  A mildly disappointing entry, Postviews awaits
Sterling's next book with hope.  [**/ok] and drunken conversations at a
student party on the Sid and Nancy scale.

%A Bruce Sterling
%T Holy Fire
%I Bantam Spectra
%C New York
%D 1996
%P 358pp
%G ISBN 0 553 57549 X
%O paperback, US 6.50

Paul-Michael Agapow ([email-masked]), Biology, Imperial College
"We were too young, we lived too fast and had too much technology ..."