Rating: 
Summary: Impressive Depiction of Age Extension in the Future
Review: Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling is pretty impressive. Sterling really packs ideas onto the page! He furnishes his setting with detail after telling detail: there is a much greater sense, seems to me, that the future being depicted is really in the future, and not just now + a few changes, as in so many SF books. And the details are cleverly backgrounded: offhandedly mentioned here, revealed by a turn of phrase there, implied by a description...(Also, he does stop and lecture on occasion: but the lectures are interesting, not distracting, and important to his story.) Anyway, the way Sterling does this stuff is great fun (in his short fiction too), and he's pretty good at little jokes on the one hand, and telling aphorisms on the other hand. Holy Fire is set 100 years in the future, and the main character is a woman born in 2001 (a symbolic date, I'm sure; as the fact that the book opens with the death of her former lover, born in 1999, is symbolic too). This woman, Mia Ziemann, after attending her lover's "funeral", and receiving a mysterious "gift" from him (the password to his questionably legal Memory Palace) (a MacGuffin if there ever was one!) undergoes a crisis of sorts and decides that it is time to cash in her chips, as it were, and undergo the radical life-extension treatment which she has been planning. She comes out of the treatment a young woman in appearance, and a different person in attitude, and with a different name (Maya). As a result, she runs off (illegally) to Europe, trying to live the life of the late-21st century young people (it seems). The rest of the book follows her somewhat rambling adventures with a variety of Europeans, young and old, as well as eventually getting around to the meaning of the MacGuff -- er, I mean, Memory Palace. The book is very strong on the description and rationale for the culture and economics of a future dominated by medical treatment, life-extension methods, and (as a result of the previous two), old people. Sterling knows that if people live a long time, society will be very different, and he does a good job showing us one way it might be different. His views of both young (say, up to 60 or so) and old (up to 120 or more at the time of the book) people are very well done. Part of the book is an attempt to get at what the difference between a society of very-long-lived people (like up to 150 years or so), and a society of near-immortals (up to 1500 years or more) might be: and here he waves his hand at some neat ideas but kind of fails to really convince. Throughout it is readable, interesting, and funny. The resolution is solid, though as I have suggested, he waves at a more "transcendental" ending, and doesn't really succeed there. But Maya's story is honest and convincing, though Maya as a character is a little harder to believe. She seems to be whatever the plot needs her to be at certain times: this is partly explainable by the very real physical and psychological changes she must be undergoing: but at times it seems rather arbitrary.
Rating: 
Summary: Young Again
Review: Holy Fire-
Is a book about age, and power. It is placed in the future and the elderly are in control. Mia Ziemann is one of these wealthy elderly people who control this society and have all the insight to the technology of the day. Mia is 94 years old and lives in the 21st century; she has lived her life very cautiously, never being too adventurous.
Mia meets an old friend/lover who is on his deathbed. This experience changed her outlook on life. Could there be a chance she could change who she is? How much would it cost her? This brings Mia to the realization that maybe she has been too careful, too unadventurous throughout her life. So now she must escape a team of medical keepers to the underground escaping her life. She then must go trough a very painful procedure that would make her young again. She will enter a false world, a false reality that is just hooked up to a network of computers, in this world is Holy Fire this is a drug that may change all human life forever.
Rating: 
Summary: Sigh, groan
Review: I guess I'm just not a Sterling fan. I found this book to plodding and boring. Yuck.
Rating:
Summary: Good after I finally finished...
Review: I loved this book, but I know that I never in my life would have finished it if I hadn't been holed up in a cabin in the mountains for a week last summer. I had nothing to do but read. And read I did, even though the book was slow and hard to get into between paragraphs when something exciting actually happened. It did have a great storyline, and I love the way it ended. It just didn't reach out and grab me.
Rating: 
Summary: Truly great
Review: I really don't know what to say. This is an absolutely amazing novel. Sterling is a genius.
Rating:
Summary: A breezy but plausible look ahead
Review: I thought that Sterling's world was one of the more well-thought out extrapolations of the future that I've read in a while. Too many sci-fi tales seem to use Blade Runner for a template, so it's refreshing to see a world where technology and people have evolved without some cataclysmic event forced into the narrative (although long-over plagues are alluded to). The book takes place in a future when most of the terrible woes of the 20th century have been fixed, and people now occupy themselves with trying to find purpose, or at least amusement, in a world that's become a little too safe and dull. Sterling keeps it going with breezy wit that half admires and half mocks his characters, and a satirical vision of technologies like genetic manipulation and virtual reality becoming toys for a wired leisure class. Sometimes it gets a little too breezy, and you get the feeling that Sterling's more interested in sly commentary than a sensical plot or realistic characters, but as it was, I enjoyed the humor. The characters, though they could have been better explored, were futuristic sketches of people we actually know. The ruling class that Maya leaves behind seems like a committee of fretting, but permissive grandparents. The young bohemian society that she hooks up with after her transformation comes across as a literary blend of the roaring 20's, the superficial 80's, and the dot.com 90's, whose profound soul-searching is actually also quite narcissistic. Yeah, I could see a future like that. Maybe we should hope for Blade Runner.
Rating:
Summary: Holy Smoke! Where is the Fire?
Review: I was pretty disappointed with this book. I kept waiting for something to happen. I can write about shacking up with tortured painters in Prague.....The intelligentsia she starts hangin with struck me as no more than today's elitist club kid group....is this what you do when you are given a new lease on life? Gerontological Elitism huh? Interesting twist and extrapolation of current trends, I just couldnt get into where they were going......and nothing really blew up like in Heavy Weather...
Rating: 
Summary: Holy Fire: Too Much Smoke, Not Enough Light
Review: I wonder why I continue to purchase Bruce Sterling's books. This is a good example of a second-rate work of science fiction that has achieved its prominence by riding on the coat-tails of the author's earlier work. Holy Fire is in dire need of new, novel ideas; Sterling merely rehashes old themes and concepts that have achived prominence through other writers' efforts. The concept of talking cyborg dogs has, for instance, been much better done in short stories such as Ron Goulart's classic "Prez." This book fails largely in two areas. First, characters were only given the most shallow descriptions. Second, the Mia's introspective processes were poorly explained and barely explored, a significant weakness in view of the book's focus on the tumoil of inner life in the age of synthetic utopia. In summary, this boring and disappointing book ultimately goes nowhere.
Rating:
Summary: Ageing as a treatable, preventable, illness
Review: If you have an interest in the biology and biochemistry of disease, this book will interest and probably fascinate you. The hypothesis is plausible, that we will understand more and more of the biology of ageing and find ways to prevent it, with varying degrees of success. The concept of a society controlled by a gerontocracy that rewards those who take care of themselves with an opportunity to try the latest and most promising therapy for prolonging life is believable. Wish there was a more satisfying ending to the novel, but well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Living Longer Better!
Review: Imagine yourself, as a very old person, suddenly made very young again. Would you want your old desires and passions back, if they were forced upon you? Most would say yes, and Bruce Sterling writes a wonderful and enlightening tale centering around a woman named Mia and how human desires and values change as we grow older and how our basic drives can be turned upside down if we became young again. Older people sometimes get set in established behavioral patterns and Sterling gives thought to this in addition to possible societal views and monetary structures that may accompany vastly extended life spans. Sterling writes of a world in the process of achieving the goal of extending human life spans indefinitely, set late in the 21st century. Sterling uses the term 'posthuman' often in this novel, I believe he should have used the term 'transhuman' as this term more accurately describes the characters in this novel. As I understand it, a posthuman is one who has access to very advanced medical care and his/her body is effectively immortal, or as much as is practical or theoretically possible, and yes, I am probably splitting hairs here. But in fact, one could argue we have transhuman medical care in existence already, with the advent of artificial hearts, etc.. This novel is wrote in an easy to read, flowing style, a pleasure to read, much of the plot had the character Mia living a wandering and aimless lifestyle, but the story was well executed. I found it a cute story, much human interest, with humor mixed in. It's premise of a society transformed by long life spans could be a portent of things to come, and how ultimately we may be able to use our science to bootstrap ourselves out of our own mortality.
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