Special Circumstances

Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling

Mia Ziemann lives in a world where aging is obsolete. Various techniques exist to extend life, almost indefinitely. But extending life is not the same as being youthful. On the way back from the euthanasia of her college sweetheart, Martin Warshaw, Mia has a chance encounter with a young couple who are having a fight over whether they should take a penniless adventure in Europe. This youthful vigor pushes Mia to apply the most experimental anti-aging treatment available: Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification (NTDCD). In exchange, she has to be part of the research behind the technique and be under constant observation. NTDCD makes her young again, but it also makes her an altogether different person. She escapes medical supervision and arrives penniless at Frankfurt. This begins her adventure. She is literally reborn.

This novel is the traditional science-fiction exercise in prescience and building a probable future society from whole cloth based on scientific extrapolations. The technology in this case is the application of biotechnology in the battle against human aging. A society where death and disease is no longer a barrier to careers means that the resources of the entire society is held by the elderly. The youth have no chance in this economy. As Sterling puts it, it is a society governed by nice old grannies always looking out for the best for everybody and holding all the purse strings. The novel starts out as being about the frustration of the youth in such a society. It changes its theme to a general manifesto about how art would be endangered in such a society and artistic behaviour in general in the face of science. A shorter, more focused book might have been better suited to the material, but there are so many ideas, scientific and otherwise, filled in this book that even the jerky plot structure does not undermine it.

The talking dogs seem to be lifted almost directly from "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. The theme of regenerating a human body from scratch is explored in "Queen of Angels" and "Slant" by Greg Bear although less successfully, in my opinion.

%T Holy Fire
%A Bruce Sterling
%I Bantam Books
%D 1996
%G ISBN: 0553099582 (hc)
%P 326
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2000/11/24