Holy Fire

By Bruce Sterling

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307796776

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction writer, born in Brownsville, Texas on April 14, 1954. His first published fiction appeared in the late 1970s, but he came to real prominence in the early 1980s as one of several writers associated with the "cyberpunk" tendency, and as that movement's chief theoretician and pamphleteer. He also edited the anthology Mirrorshades (1986), which still stands as a definitive document of that period in SF. His novel Islands in the Net (1988) won the John W. Campbell Award for best SF novel of the year; he has also won two Hugo awards, for the stories "Bicycle Repairman" (1996) and "Taklamakan" (1998). His 1990 collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, was an important work of early steampunk/neo-Victoriana. In 2009, he published The Caryatids. In 1992 he published The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, heralding a second career as a journalist covering social, legal, and artistic matters in the digital world. The first issue of Wired magazine, in 1993, featured his face on its cover; today, their web site hosts his long-running blog, Beyond the Beyond.

Reviews for Holy Fire

[rue_full · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Staunch sci-fi lovers rejoice - it's future building that still hasn't come to pass and is therefore - still spooky interesting. Extreme age extension leads a woman t o chase the singularity, when medical advancements will let her live forever. She doesn't make it, but it's a wild ride. How's this for some teasers - spend yuour vay-cay getting away from it all while de-evolutionized into an ape-man, or take a plunge into the cutting edge of social networking by swimming in 'liquid math.' Crazeee fun! don't miss! Hugo winner, I believe.

[portialong · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Near future cyber punk. Some interesting speculation on political, cultural, economic and artistic implications of life-extension. The details of the near-future world were well developed. Some of the characters were interesting but several fell flat for me. Personally I felt bad for the pets...

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Holy Fire is a fascinating story about the social changes caused by readily available rejuvenation technology. By the end of the 21st century it is possible to be active and working well into your second century and rejuvenation techniques are getting better every year, but although bodies can be rejuvenated attitudes can not and the rejuvenated old, known as posthumans, are very different from the truly young. The world is a gerontocracy, with all money and power in the hands of the old, while the disenfranchised young are treated dismissively and patronisingly by the old, almost as if they are pets. The young have all the imagination and inspiration but live in a cash economy, unable to get hold of 'real money' (i.e. investable currency) or make progress in their chosen careers, since the old no longer make room for them by retiring.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.

[scottcholstad · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Just plain bad, from a writer I usually respect and enjoy. Couldn't finish. Not recommended.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the year 2095, 94-year-old Mia undergoes an experimental youth-restoring treatment. She emerges from the procedure a very different person and quickly ditches her medical monitoring and runs off to Europe. Life-prolongation techniques and their possible consequences to society are venerable old SF subjects, but Sterling somehow manages to make them feel surprisingly fresh. His world-building is top-notch: detailed, well-thought-out, imaginative and original. And he touches on a great many weighty topics -- age, youth, creativity, identity, technology, rebellion -- in ways that may not be extremely cohesive, but are nevertheless fascinating. There's not really all that much the story itself, and some of the most significant plot points seem to happen off-screen, so to speak, and are only lightly sketched in. Plus most of the characters are hip, pretentious, arty types, which is something that normally puts me off. So I think it really says something about Sterling's writing that I found this extremely absorbing, anyway.

[steevc_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some interesting ideas, but just didn't grab me

[slothman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 2095, the world has been through some rough pandemics and wound up run by a gerontocracy facilitated by advanced medical technology. Mia Ziemann has been careful enough to make it to age 94 before finally deciding to try a full rejuvenation treatment, and decides to try the new cutting-edge technology— which, in addition to restoring physical youth, also adds a lot of fresh new brain cells to replace the ones lost over the decades. And with a head full of fresh neurons and a body coursing with youthful hormones, the rejuvenated Mia finds that she has an all-new set of priorities that don’t match the life she led before. This carries her off on an escapade into Europe and a world of disaffected young artists who aren’t so thrilled to be in a society run by and for the aged.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.

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've kinda always regarded Bruce Sterling as something of a wanna-be William Gibson, and I *do* like Gibson's stuff better - but this is a pretty good cyberpunk book.
Mia Ziemann, a careful, cautious and rather stuffy old woman in a future mainly controlled by the old, signs up for an experimental rejuvenation treatment which not only gives her the appearance of a gorgeous 20-year-old, but causes a radical personality shift as well... soon she's running away from her medical staff, and making her way through a kaleidoscope of radical friends and lovers - the disillusioned, the disenfranchised, artists and hoodlums, anarchists and junkies....

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....

[gilroy_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Struggling to find a character I can connect with so far, with me barely 30 pages in. Maybe the dog. The "tech" of the science fiction is .. unique but being made to feel outdated, even by the story's standards. The whole story seems to be linked to an older brain, older generation. Maybe that's why I'm struggling. Will keep attempting for now...

[sgarnell_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As always, I find Sterling to be one of the most prophetic writers of our times. This book describes how man will break through the age barrier, and begin his ascent into immortality. Scary to think, but this will all one day become true in one form or another. A must read for all cyberpunk fans of Sterling. A writer who dares to guess our future just 50 years out. And without surprise-- who turns out to be right!

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In the near future, life-extension technology is available to those who have the money and stay well-behaved, which means that the people in power are extremely old and well-behaved and the young don’t think there’s much left for them. Sterling’s great idea here is that the technology advances in spurts and in competing options, so people have to choose – and if you get life-extension now, you may not be able to use the better tech that comes along in five years. That’s a great idea, when so much sf assumes monolithic and non-improving technology. Unfortunately, the story itself is less engaging – a well-behaved old woman decides on a promising new technology, which revitalizes her body but also messes with her mind, so she leaves the US to bounce around Europe with young Eurotrash, talk about art, and try to learn photography. I liked her older, soberer version better, which I probably wasn’t supposed to. Some of the young folks think they have a way around the gerontocracy through virtual reality tech, but I wasn’t excited by the possibility of their success – or failure.