Title:
Holy Fire
Author:
Bruce Sterling
Publisher:
Bantam Books, New York, 1996
ISBN
0-553-09958-2

"Of course that's not really a valuable Faberge heirloom," Paul told them all, casually. "It's an identical museum replica. The Faberge original was laser scanned to an accuracy of a few microns, and then instantiated in modern vapor deposition. [...] About a hundred toads were made in all."

"Oh, well, of course," said Maya. She looked at the little red toad. It was somwhat less beautiful now, but it was still a remarkable likeness of a toad.

Sterling, in the persona of Paul, first describes a beautiful gem ruby, carved into the likeness of a toad by Faberge. During the course of Paul's description, the object mutates from a priceless exemplar of human creativity into a cheap knick-knack, and back into one of Faberge's masterpieces. Beauty, he illustrates, is more essentially in the eye of the beholder than that old saw can even begin to convey.

Bruce Sterling tackles in 326 entertaining pages that for which philosophers have killed entire forests. It is a story of a future in which one of the holy grails of twentieth century science seems within the grasp of humanity: immortality. And for some reason the glistening prize now seems tarnished and much less desirable.

Mia Ziemann, a boring, and bored, 94-year old woman living in 21st century San Francisco has come to the point where she will avail herself of the boon of rejuvenation, which she has earned over a lifetime of careful adherence to her society's rules. With her new youth she explores a world in which youthful enthusiasm confronts not only the conservatism of maturity, but also the paralysis of decrepitude. Bruce Sterling makes the essential nature of the conflict quite clear when Maya, the emergent personality of Mia Ziemann's rejuvenated existence muses,

Radical students, Maya thought. Aflame with imagination because they were so wonderfully free of actual knowledge.

As Maya metamorphoses from a formless personality without even the will to feed herself, to a willful woman taking on her peers, we are offered a vision of the dangers Sterling sees in this future of wonders. The holy fire, he warns, is what makes everything possible or worthwhile. But immortality, he suggests, will extinguish the holy fire.

Sterling even offers the reader a "Deus Ex Machina", a manufactured way out of the dilemma, but even this, he suggests, may be useless to any but those who don't actually need it. The story ends with Maya restarting her life in her rejuvenated body, meeting her aging daughter, and her former husband, and trying to finally create something from herself. Sterling will not offer closure because the problems that he wants the reader to consider haven't been solved.