Unfortunately, the story itself is less engaging – a well-behaved old woman decides on a promising new technology, which revitalizes her body but also messes with her mind, so she leaves the US to bounce around Europe with young Eurotrash, talk about art, and try to learn photography. That’s a great idea, when so much sf assumes monolithic and non-improving technology. Sterling’s great idea here is that the technology advances in spurts and in competing options, so people have to choose – and if you get life-extension now, you may not be able to use the better tech that comes along in five years. In the near future, life-extension technology is available to those who have the money and stay well-behaved, which means that the people in power are extremely old and well-behaved and the young don’t think there’s much left for them. “The future Sterling traces is plausible and provocative, particularly his consideration of several contrasting cultures, and of the disenfranchised who are unable to become ‘post-human.’ Those interested in serious speculative conversation set within a very strange near-future will find this much to their taste.” - Publishers Weekly Read more “A patented Sterling extra-special.” - Newsday “An intellectual feat, it is also a treat for the spirit and the senses.” - Wired Holy Fire may very well be best work.” - Speculiction In the end, Holy Fire is one of the most interesting, imaginative, and subtly humorous-and relevant for it-novels the cyberpunk/post-human era has produced. . . . Art, artifice, the pursuit of immortality, and youth and aging bounce around the story, the characters, and their conversations in imaginative, engaging fashion. . . . “Ideas-big ideas-lurk beneath Mia’s romp through Sterling’s delightfully imagined newly post-human Earth. After her dramatic transformation, Mia finds herself lost in an avant-garde world of passion, designer drugs, and creative expression . . . In this futuristic paradise, ninety-four-year-old Mia Ziemann longs for something different and undergoes a radical new treatment that restores both her body and mind to that of a twenty-year-old. Existence itself has become relatively easy-if boring. In the late twenty-first century, technology has lengthened lifespans far beyond what was once medically possible. Memory, morality, and immortality merge in this “haunting and lyrical triumph” from the bestselling author of Schismatrix Plus ( Time).
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