Stoking the Holy Fire

Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling (Bantam Spectra $22.95 hard), his seventh novel, is a wondrously edgy construct, a glimpse into the late 21st century where a global gerontocracy has arisen to replace the old guard. It's a prescient, emotionally turbo-charged glimpse at one entirely believable future, but like much of Sterling's fiction, Holy Fire also functions on many other levels than that of pedestrian speculative fiction: No less than the meaning of life is the crux of the matter here, and Sterling's meditations on age and aging throb with impassioned resonance.

Mia Ziemann is a 94-year-old medical economist who comes into possession of a "memory palace" willed to her by an old lover now dead. The palace acts as a computerized extension of the man's thoughts, feelings, and memories. It's not his soul, per se, but it comes close. The only difficulty is Mia's inability to access the palace correctly. When she undergoes a series of age-reversal treatments -- which return her, essentially, to her physical and mental youth -- Mia leaves the safety and security of her San Francisco home and embarks on a worldly (and highly illegal) excursion into the realms of young, "vivid" European bohemians, and the greater world of youth as a whole, all the while searching for the key that will unlock her
ex-lover's palace and the secrets within.

Of course, half of the fun of reading Sterling lies in the details, and his vision of this 21st century is a rich tapestry of the odd, bizarre, and sometimes familiar. In Mia's world, crime is unheard of, dogs talk, Net-linked computers the size and shape of floppy handkerchiefs are all the rage, legal tinctures have done away with rampant drug abuse, and the human life expectancy has been raised by 60-odd years thanks to the constant retooling of human genes and cell codes by the dominant medical establishment and the benevolent gerontocracy. Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there: Despite all the advances in this palace of the aged, young people have been sidelined, frequently force to live in squalor, surviving by wits alone and the occasional state-sponsored pretzel, while the wealthy, elderly elite maintain the eternal status quo. Nobody, it appears, wants their MTV anymore.

It's hardly stretching things to say this is Sterling's best work yet; Holy Fire is a seamless, occasionally wrenching ride, clever, wise, and wryly humorous at times. The cyberpunk literary movement that Sterling helped to establish may be as dead as grunge, but the author is not only alive and kicking, he's also at the top of his form, wild ideas and homebrew attitudes intact.

-- M.S.