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Review by Gerard Martin
Imagine that your deepest thoughts and desires could be mapped and stored in a sacred and recreational if artificial paradise -- a memory palace, if you will -- in a world so apart from yourself that when you die, this virtual embodiment for your soul survives you. This is but one of the many versions of immortality explored by science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling in his latest novel, Holy Fire.
In a story about the future of our humanity, Sterling shows and describes a time that is not so unlike our own that we cannot relate to his characters. They all want the same things. They want health, happiness, and unbridled success in their endeavors.
Or do they?
The time period is late twenty-first century earth. The story takes place long after the plague years; quite a few natural disasters ahead of our time. Mia Ziemann is a 94-year-old medical economist. She is a gerontocrat, a techno-crone, a posthuman woman. Because she is also well-to-do and, above all, takes good care of herself, she is able to afford the best life extension.
Mia undergoes Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification, or NTDCD, a radical new cell age reversal treatment that promises youth and beauty with a maintenance and upgrade plan that virtually insures immortality.
Or does it?
Mia wakes up another person. Why is everyone calling her Mia when her name is really Maya? What's worse is that Maya has desires that don't accord with the status quo. She disappears under her new identity to explore the world in ways that the old Mia secretly desired but never would have indulged herself.
Through escapades and occasional tragedy, the story of Mia/Maya recounts the plasticity that is the progress of the body and soul through a lifetime. The myriad changes taking place from birth and death are no freak shows of nature. In times of change, one of society's marks of maturity is the individual's acceptance or rejection of individual responsibility.
Holy Fire is the personal odyssey of the soul in virtual flight through the extremities and limitations of being human, where the very striving to exceed these restraints may very well lead to the soul's complete undoing.
Sterling's parable of science and society has clear implications for our own time. No matter how long we are able to make our lives, the years will forever be too short once bereft of the things that make life worth living.
Also available in December is Schismatrix Plus (Ace, $13, 0441003702) -- a volume of everything Sterling has ever written on the world of the Schismatrix, the full-length novel and the short fiction.
A writer in southwestern Louisiana, Gerard Martin lives on the ancient meander of the Mississippi River.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.