WARNING: Spoilers? maybe kinda/sorta; but the review might not mean much to you if you haven't read it anyway. Thus:----There's a scene--about halfway through the novel--when Paul says to Maya: "I want you to prove to me that you're not human yet still an artist." Right there? That's basically your thematic thesis.It has been my observation that a lot of folks get introduced to Bruce Sterling by way of the Mirrorshades anthology (one of my top 5 favorite collections of all time) and so follow-up quickly with his other most-well-known werk, Schismatrix; and while both are great, if you pay much attention to Bruce Sterling (i.e., read his running commentary over on Beyond the Beyond), you know that this was the book he was born to write. Virtualities and posthumanism and art and quirky social stratification and European leftism and art and revolutionary politics and atavism-in-a-technological-world and art and the economics of celebrity and sex and art...Sterling presents us with a central conflict that's a classic one: the old vs. the new; the entrenched vs. the (would-be?) ascendant; preservation vs. creation. He toys with one of those fun little paradoxical science fiction utopias where everything is cheap and easy to make, where machinery is almost absurdly efficient, where science gives us nearly limitless lifespans, and where everyone is almost uniformly unhappy. They're unhappy because they're old and are essentially apathetic; or because they're young and politically powerless; or because they're decrepit and their frailties have caught up with them; or because they're young and fearful that their creative wells could (or already have) run dry.Which is where the title comes into play. Sterling works the phrase "holy fire" in there quite a few times, each time changing the meaning just a little bit, but each time linking it rather distinctly with some character's intense feeling of creativity and expressiveness--that her actions are meaningful and lasting, that she is very much present in her existence and very much a part of the world's continuity. Characters feel "the holy fire" when they make something--doesn't matter if it's a mural or a party dress or a child.Enter Paul's remark to Maya.The scifi utopia that Sterling uses as his backdrop has also given us Mia/Maya--a nonagenarian (centenarian?) woman who undergoes a radical experimental medical life-extension treatment that effectively re-makes her at the molecular level into a lithe, apparent-twentysomething. Mia (pre-treatment) is steady and regimented and predictable and safe and it would seem completely disconnected from everything--aloof, if you will. She reluctantly visits an old lover on his deathbed; she is divorced from her husband; she is estranged from her daughter; she has no lovers, and hasn't had one in 30 (40?) years; even her running narrative seems to comment on places she never visited in her lifetime--sojourns she never took, business trips conducted via telepresence instead of physically. Mia has retreated into a world that she can control because she is "good" and because this will help keep her on a path to... what? Immortality in the Woody Allen sense? Certainly she must believe so; and thus her vehicle to conquer mortality is this treatment. But after the treatment: we have Maya--who subsumes Mia, and is in some ways still Mia (some memories, some skills...)--but Maya is very much connected, or else wants very much to be connected. Maya flees her medical custodians to immerse herself in continental Europe (Stuttgart! Praha! Milano!); she seeks out sexual partners; she seeks out mental and spiritual and apparent-physical conspecifics; she seeks out new ways to express herself (clothing! modeling! photography!). Perhaps because she is 90-now-20, perhaps because she is "reborn" into some new and fearlessly mortal ingénue--but Maya seems unconcerned with corporeal mortality. Instead, she seeks--immortality from? celebrity through? catharsis by?--art. She is after that "holy fire", but (somewhat orthogonally to Emil's artistic pursuits) she does not yet feel it, just the yearning for it."I want you to prove to me that you're not human yet still an artist."Is Paul's conundrum a legitimate, phenomenological challenge to Maya? Or is it some tongue-in-cheek taunt predicated on a metaphysical paradox? Would Paul have posed the same question to Plato or Aquinas? What would either of those dogs have said? And would Maya have chosen differently if she had been around for that conversation?----POST SCRIPTS AND OTHER NOTES:(1) Holy Fire was published in 1996, about the same time as William Gibson's Idoru (another favorite of mine) and not terribly long after Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992). Though the three are ultimately wrestling with some different themes and questions, there are also quite a few elements that draw them together: conflicts between the old and new generations (but what great literature doesn't have that?); ubiquitous virtualities that almost feel like invasive species; celebrity-as-currency. It would be interesting to take these three novels together, perhaps teach a class on them, or bang together a nice long dissertation on what I can only think to call "brinksmanship by futureshock".(2) As with any science fiction, it is both blessed and cursed by its time. If Holy Fire was written in 2006 instead of 1996, all that "telomeric extension" stuff would have been (or at least included) something about stem cells as well. But the text seems pretty damn aware of this sort of damning specificity and deals reasonably well with it.(3) I wish Sterling had not played it so safely. Killing off billions of people with plagues in your back-story takes some of the extravagant self-indulgent flair out of "posthumanism" and life extension; where's the ethical damnation there? And there's an unfired Chekov's gun with the Mia/Maya schizoidia; I expected more from that than the way it was invoked there for the climax. Also: there was a real lost opportunity with that translation necklace; 20 more pages and that thing could have gotten treacherous.
What would you do if you had a second chance at life? If you found the fountain of youth? Apparently the answer is "go apeshit crazy and live like a BoHo, wandering around Europe." Snark aside, I wanted to like this book; I felt like I *should* like this book, but there's just something about his writing style that I just can't get through. It's set far enough in the future that things are supposed to be familiar-yet-foreign, and the author seems to dwell on descriptions of things that are supposed to be common. He seems to stand up and say "hey! look at how weird this is! Isn't this weird?!?!" and it's just plain distracting. For example, apparently 100 years in the future, animal cruelty is accepted practice, and rich people's pets can be "augmented" with technology to be plot devices, appearing at just the moment when the narrative has fallen so deep into a rat hole that nothing but a mad talking dog can get it out again. To be fair, one of the talking dogs (yes, there are more than one) is a bit of a slap for the main character, revealing in one brief scene that the do-whatever-the-hell-I-want attitude of the main character and her new social group does indeed have consequences. In fact, that seems to be the only major consequence of ANY of the characters actions. There's this feeling that these characters are supposed to be "edgy" and "outside the law" but with the exception of one law enforcement official that has very little actual presence in the action of the novel, there's a lot of laying/sitting/standing around and not a lot of "running from the law." And don't even get me started on the "But we're ARTISTS!" thread. The title of the book, "Holy Fire" is a metaphor for the inner passion felt by an artist, that force that drives them to create, and the fuel that powers their creativity. There is constant referral to "artifice" which I think we are supposed to think of as a future melding of all of the creative arts - architecture, painting, photography, etc. Supposedly all these artistes are creating amazing things that are going to change the world, but at no point are we really ever told about them. There's reference to some of the characters programming human-machine interfaces that apparently intend to do what they've been torturing animals with for a while, but the work of the rest of the characters doesn't seem to have any influence on the world. And maybe that's the point? I certainly can identify with the frustration that the youth of this novel feel, trapped under the control of an aging aristocracy; a theme that is perhaps even more relavant today than when the novel was written over a decade ago. But it's hard to see how they're being oppressed. Socialism is widespread, drugs are readily available, and there seems to be a magic "tincture" for everything, and escapism on the 'net is common. I... just don't know about this one.
What do You think about Holy Fire (1997)?
a very well-developed and convincing work highlighting how likely it is that the future will most certainly be shaped by the exponential development of technology and 'biomedical' enhancements hand in handthere is a lot going on in this book, far too much to explain here (without giving anything away, anyway!)i highly recommend it to anyone who likes considering all the potential futures of humanity....in terms of genre, interestingly this book itself is cited in the Wikipedia article on "postcyperpunk" : typical postcyberpunk stories continue the focus on a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information and cybernetic augmentation of the human body, but without the assumption of dystopia - i'd definitely say that is accurate.very much looking forward to reading more Bruce Sterling!
—dani-elle
I was intrigued by the premise of this book, the ultimate Boomer Utopia: old people control society and use technology and, er, well, let's not spoil things...to stay young. An old woman gets a new body and then travels to Europe where the book suddenly veers into the world of contemporary fashion and yet another anarchist character is presented as a sham loser (why can't anarchist characters ever be like real anarchists? Why do they always have to be exposed as frauds and valueless wimps?). Strong start, dumb ass conclusion, sorry, Bruce.
—Ryan Mishap
Ouch. A Bruce Sterling book that didn't work for me.Like many of the other reviews here for this book, Sterling has some nifty concepts and a strong character and setting, but the follow-through is slow and meandering.I never got the 'holy fire' aspect. Yes, I understand that it's our heroine's search for her 'holy fire' (art), but it isn't delivered strongly enough to carry on as the theme of the book (and if that isn't the book's theme, then what is?).This book felt as though Sterling had a pretty good concept, but had trouble finding his own 'holy fire' to accomplish the goal and the publisher was breathing down his neck for a finished product.Just not fulfilling.
—Daniel
