Science fiction writers can’t predict the future but some aim to speculate on times to come by extrapolating current trends. One of the most famous SF novels to do this was Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, his 1968 novel that anticipated the world of 2010. Bruce Sterling’s 1996 novel Holy Fire tries to imagine life in 2096 via speculation and extrapolation. Do I recommend it? That’s hard to say, even at the current Kindle price of $1.99.

How self-aware are you regarding the selection of the science fiction you read? Does your mind crave a tightly plotted story? If so, Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling might not be for you. Or do you love reading novels with characters you care about, even identify with, and want to vicariously live their fictional adventures? Again, Holy Fire might not be your cup of tea. If you are the kind of science fiction reader who resonates with dense science fiction speculation, reading Holy Fire should definitely be for you.

We judge such speculative fiction in two ways. Does it jive with our own efforts to imagine the future, and now that the novel is almost thirty years old, how well has it done so far? Evidently, back in 1996, Sterling saw that medical technology, changing trends in family size, and population demographics would lead to a world where there were far more old people than young people. The exact opposite of the Baby Boom generation I grew up with. All the current 2024 demographics point to such a future.

Sterling solved the overpopulation problem that many science fiction writers before him saw by having a great pandemic in the 2020s. And he imagined that networks, artificial reality, and artificial intelligence would reshape society. Instead of predicting gloom and doom like so many science fiction novels from the late 20th century, Sterling imagines a near-liberal utopia and a post-scarcity society. The problems faced by the characters in this novel divide between the old and young. The old strive to find purpose with an ever-lengthening lifespan, while the young feel crushed under the weight of a gerontocracy that advises the youth to learn from their experience and live longer.

Because humans have been trying out medical life-extension procedures for decades, a growing percentage of the population is old. These elders have the wealth and power and dominate politics with their gerontocracy. Mia Ziemann, Holy Fire’s protagonist, is 94 at the start. Because she has led such a cautious life and is in such good shape, the medical establishment offers her the latest life extension treatment, one that goes way beyond any previous effort. The procedure is so arduous, that it can be fatal. Mia comes through the process and now looks 20, although some of her memories are gone.

Mia’s doctors consider her an expensive experiment and legally bind her to them for years of research. Mia runs away to Europe and hides as an illegal alien, living among a youthful bohemian crowd of revolutionaries. She changes her name to Maya. On nearly every page of Holy Fire, Sterling speculates about the future evolution of society, technology, and politics. Strangely, climate change is never brought up. But then, Holy Fire came out a decade before An Inconvenient Truth.

Sterling doesn’t focus on space flight, but it happened. The focus of the story is finding meaning in everyday living on Earth. Dogs and other animals have been uplifted, and talk with computer-aided voices. Governments take care of the needy. People use public transportation. People engineer their minds with designer hormones and neural transmitters. And the net and virtual reality is everywhere. Holy Fire makes me think that Bruce Sterling had abundant optimism for the future in the 1990s. I used to have such liberal optimism but it was crushed in 2016.

Sterling’s future is not quite a utopia, because segments of the population are discontented, especially the young who are too brilliant for their own good. That’s the crowd Mia/Maya, embraces. They want the freedom to fail.

Sterling calls Mia/Maya and others in this book posthumans, and that’s where this story shines. His posthumans aren’t silly comic-book superheroes like in many 21st-century SF books. Virtual reality is toned down too from 21st-century SF stories of people downloading themselves into virtual realities. Sterling tries to stay reasonably realistic and scientific. Holy Fire reminds me of the dense speculation in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Sterling doesn’t take it to narrative gonzo extremes like Brunner.

Holy Fire is a somewhat picaresque novel, with one reviewer comparing it to Candide. Of course, Candide is considered a broad satire, and I’m not sure that’s true of Holy Fire. I didn’t read it that way, but I could see how a filmmaker could present Holy Fire as a satire. The novel attempts to be transcendental, you might have guessed that from the title. The youth rebellion in Sterling’s 2090s is like the 1960s involving art, music, drugs, and mind-expansion — adding networking, AI, and AR.

The problem with picaresque novels is they are episodic. The hero is exposed to a series of people and subcultures, and that’s what happens to Mia/Maya. There are so many different characters it’s hard to keep up with them or even care about them. Most of the story is about how they impact Mia/Maya, whereas I believe a novel about a 94-year-old woman becoming 20 again should be about her inner transformations.

Mia is an uptight old lady who protects herself by hiding from life, and Maya is a free-spirit young woman giving everything a try and throwing all caution to the wind. We are told that Mia lost some of her memories, but would she lose all wisdom from living to 94?

Response to Holy Fire is all over the place. Hundreds at Goodreads gave it five stars, a few more hundred gave it four stars, but plenty of folks just didn’t care for the story.

Reviews were also mixed. Tom Easton in “The Reference Library” for the March 1997 issue of Analog has this to say:

Norman Spinrad’s “On Books” from the August 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction also compares Holy Fire to William Gibson’s Idoru but comes to a different conclusion. Both novels are later cyberpunk works from the two leading founders of the cyberpunk movement, so it was logical to review them together. Spinrad is the more insightful of the two reviewers.

Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo in Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 had this to say about Holy Fire.

That Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo would recommend Holy Fire as one of the best SF novels from 1985-2010 is high praise. But why don’t I hear more about this novel after all these years? My assumption, is most science fiction readers don’t particularly care for serious speculation about the future and would prefer to read stories that compel you to turn the pages because of tight plots and characters they care about.

This is my second reading of Holy Fire. I first read it when it came out from the Science Fiction Book Club. I bought it then because its plot sounded similar to a 1926 novel I was trying to find, Phoenix by Lady Dorothy Mills. That book was also about an old woman undergoing a rejuvenation process and then running off to Europe to join a bohemian crowd. I finally found Phoenix several years ago and it’s more of a love story than science fiction. I need to reread it and compare the two.

For my second reading, I listened to it on audio. I’ve started rereading it again with my eyes. I never developed an emotional bond with Holy Fire like I have with the novels I consider my favorites. However, I admire it intellectually. It could have had the emotional impact of Flowers for Algernon because Mia/Maya goes through a similar arc of intellectual development. We just don’t see her experiences as tragic.

I think Sterling tried though. Throughout the novel, Mia/Maya experiences epiphanies that should have had a deep emotional impact. To me, they were just intellectually interesting. The ending should have been profoundly spiritual, like something from Hermann Hesse. Instead, it just seemed like a logical way to end the story. The choices Mia/Maya and her former husband, Daniel made in the end are vivid, even dramatic in concept. That just didn’t make an emotional impact on me. I assume Bruce Sterling wanted the ending to be an emotional epiphany. The ending does say a lot about how a posthuman would react to becoming posthuman.

Please leave a comment if you’ve read Holy Fire. I’m curious if you had an emotional response to the story. I found it intellectually exciting. I would recommend it on that level. However, it didn’t touch me, so I’m hesitant to say it’s good. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

James Wallace Harris, 12/18/24