Bruce Sterling's "Holy Fire" presents a rich, disturbing, and in many ways believable image of life in the late 21st century. With the caveat that I'm certain I didn't totally understand this book (more on that later), I'll give it a "+."
We've all read the statistics about how the average age of people worldwide is rising. The usual (and overly simpleminded) assumption is that we will have a cadre of old, sick people that burden the young with their medical bills and need for home care. Sterling turns this assumption on its head. The world of "Holy Fire" is run by "gerontocrats"-- elderly people (mostly women, of course) who have undergone medical life extension treatments to keep them healthy and quick-witted well past the century mark.
Gerontocrats are a formidable bunch. Freed by advanced technology from the natural declines of old age, they accumulate wisdom, experience, and expertise over many decades as if they were living through their 20's again and again. The result is a group of talented "posthumans" with whom actual young people simply can't compete. The gerontocrats are the only ones with "real money"; everyone else uses barter. Senior citizens have instituted a powerful bureacracy that is like today's insurance industry-- multiplied by ten and spread across the whole government. People who lead safe lives that protect their health are rewarded with opportunities for life-extension treatment; others are classified as "dead at forty." "The polity" sees and hears most of what goes on within its tight system and acts to maintain the status quo and concentrate power in the hands of cautious, artificially healthful posthumans. And of course, they all vote.
Mia Ziemann is as straight-and-narrow as they come. Born around Y2K, she is now one of the rich and doctored-up gerontocrats who made good by playing by the rules. At the beginning of the book, she realizes that her success is built upon an empty foundation; she has never taken a significant risk. In a brash decision worthy of a 20-year-old, she undergoes a radical new medical treatment that is supposed to actually return her body to its 20-year-old form, rather than simply preserve her 94-year-old one. It appears to work.
The rest of the book is about Mia's attempt to live the youth she never experienced. Although the subject matter sounds trite (yet another book about recaptured youth, getting a second chance, realizing that risk is the spice of life, yadda yadda), Sterling does an excellent job with it. You have not read this book before under other guises. Sterling uses Mia's journey to comment on politics, art, psychology, religion, and social activism along with youth, risk, and the generation gap.
Mia's doctors did not figure that she would want to be 20 as soon as she looked 20-- young people are not respected in the world of "Holy Fire." Mia becomes something of a fugitive, living under the radar of the polity with a wild crowd of artsy young Europeans. She finds out firsthand what it is like to be young in the world her generation controls, and it is not pleasant.
The aspect of the book I know I did fully grasp has to do with the culture of the art crowd. Don't be fooled by the "science" in science fiction; Bruce Sterling is an artsy kind of guy, and that often comes out in his stories. He weaves together a rich cast of characters engaged in a form called "artifice," which they assert is not art. Artifice is the cultural manifestation of what is happening overall in the 21st-century world of medical manipulation. Art imitates life, and these fashionably-clad chic types (who hang out in bars drinking "mineralkas") are exploring what is real, what is beautiful, and what is created in a world where those lines blend far more than they do in our world today. The hippest of this crowd are called "vivid" people-- note the reference to "life."
But life also imitates art. As Mia learns to lead the vivid life, she confronts in a very personal way the degree to which humans use and indeed rely upon artifice and artificial structures in their personal lives, jobs, governments, and social relationships. I won't even try to describe all the nuance that Sterling gives readers about this complex topic, and I probably missed some of it too. The contradictions of humanity are laid bare and left unresolved.
The book contains a number of quirky ironies. Some are spoilers, so I won't give details that would ruin the book. Let's just say that as always, systems contain the seeds of their own destruction... although you still have to be careful about jumping from the frying pan into the holy fire.
Copyright © Kim Allen 2000
