Holy Fire
Bruce Sterling
Millennium hbk, £16.99; Phoenix pbk, £5.99
Reviewed by David Kendall (1996)

Set at the tail-end of the next century, Holy Fire is the story of Mia Ziemann, a careful 93 year old, and her quest to discover what it means to be posthuman. After undergoing a radical life-extension upgrade, described in stomach-turning medical terms, Mia is young again but still has the memories and attitudes of her earlier self. Mia learns to reinvent herself and rediscover a world now strange to her; not because it has altered, but because her perception has changed.

As usual, anarchic/street kids provide many of the lessons: the youthful radicals who don’t want to make the world a better place, ‘just’ more interesting. Yet this is not the usual cyberpunk glamourisation of the young. Sterling picks apart the generational divides with care. This is a world dominated by the medical-industrial complex, where after being ravaged by successive plagues, the world is interested in safety and long life above all else. No free market, just sensible long term investments:
The polity was a plague-panicked allocation society in which the whip-hand of coercive power was held by the smiling and stout-hearted medical reserve personnel. And by social workers. And by very nice old people.

Not a society that tolerates fools, holy or otherwise, lightly. Those who wish to endanger themselves through drug taking, etc, are credit risks. Points are deducted and you get cheap medical care. This is a scary future because it is so sane, so fucking reasonable. It makes perfect sense. Everyone is taken care of if they want to be. Everybody is watched too, but for the ‘larger good’. Safety first. But the holy fire of the title has nothing to do with safety. It is the deep joy of the creative act, the inner glow of being human, being in love, being a risk taker. A section of Mia’s regenerated brain tissue is virgin; this new tissue is brand new, unsocialised, not imprinted; its nascent connections will shape the posthuman state.

There’re a lot of post things here; post-human, post-art, post-canine talkshow hosts, as Sterling happily defamiliarises the fictional future he helped create. This is a gentler style of cyberpunk, more thoughtful. No longer the shock of the new but an acclimatisation, giving us the chance to examine this vision in detail, though as usual Sterling tosses aside more interesting ideas than most writers use in a dozen novels. Lots of lovely touches that sharpen the focus, tiny branches of meaning that shoot off the main storyline in deceptively simple language. There’s a very everyday acceptance of what are at present only wired dreams. The Net is used with the casual air of people getting the tube, and both are interwoven into Holy Fire in a way that makes them commonplace.

This is a future we can recognise because its roots are in the present. Sterling is adept at using present cultural stereotypes and translating them into future usage. A character refers to a ‘touch-screen’ Net link:
‘It’s from Nippon. The Nipponese love the obscure functionalities.’

This is a world of countless defunct technologies that someone is always going to be using because not everyone can afford the latest superdrive. Just like now we have people using crappy software or driving Cortinas rather than the latest BMW gleam-machine.

In her new body Mia discards her security and strikes out alone, depending on wit and a ninety-three year old knowledge of the world for survival. She arrives in the Prague of 2095, full of young Americans running around desperately trying to be someone, slinking with studied cool into the dark bars and virtual worlds so reminiscent of Prague 1995. The cobbled together radicalism, the grand visions, the frustration of millennial youth. And when Sterling focuses on this frustration of a youthful minority desperately trying to make its way in a world forever dominated by the very old and careful, who may never relinquish their power to the next generation because they may well never die, you get the impression he’s tapping into the Blank Gen’s frustration about how to shift the Baby Boomers out of the way, how to find their own creativity amongst so many well-trodden paths.

As with the earlier Islands in the Net there’s a social group living in the cracks. Here it is the Romany who refuse life extension, refuse to be assimilated by the culture around them. There is a Romantic power in their refusal but Sterling doesn’t dwell on it, just gives us the image of absolute refusal and a cohesive group identity that can exist within a larger, less stable culture.

Towards the end the novel loses a little pace; positive post-human existence seems to mean a kind of techno-Beat lifestyle. Holy Fire is better at describing what we may lose in the future rather than what we may gain, about what it means to be human and what we may have to relinquish in order to mutate and survive.