Holy Fire [Import] [Hardcover]

Bruce Sterling (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Orion; First British Edition edition (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857984625
• ISBN-13: 978-1857984620
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,902,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not your typical science fiction., November 21, 1999

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Holy Fire (Bantam Spectra Book) (Paperback)

This book has a lot of the trappings of science fiction-- life extending technology, genetically engineered pets, virtual reality games-- but the center, in the end, is the search for emotional completion engaged upon by Mia Ziemann, the protagonist of the book.

Ziemann goes through a radical life extension procedure that pushes her past the life of the young and vivid and out the other side through to the Holy Fire. She embarks on a quest for completion that is not aided by hidden magical talents, destiny, or instant success. Instead, she becomes a person who can live her own life with will and sustained follow-through.

Many things impressed me about this book, and I found it very hard to put down, but one of the things I liked the most was the high quality of the characters, and their very real emotional responses. I have some minor quibbles-- there were some loose ends in the book (I felt like the memory palace and the Plato sequences were never developed fully enough) but the book itself was strong enough to carry them. Definitely recommended.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sterling's best; one of the all-time great sf novels, September 10, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Adelphi, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Holy Fire (Bantam Spectra Book) (Paperback)

Holy Fire is Sterling's best book and occupies a place on my small shelf of sf classics. The compelling hook is Mia's psychological journey in search of satisfying life, in both the physical and creative sense. The choices she makes lead to an explosively unstable mix of anguish and pleasure, horror and contentment. The book's structure is episodic, with little or no plotting (a quality Sterling himself has commented on). The descriptions of future technology are unfailingly inventive and convincing; I particularly enjoyed the "obsolete" computers which would be wondrous to the present age. A heroine with zest and adaptability, Mia is a sublimely bittersweet and engaging central character.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book that makes you THINK at every page, August 28, 2000

By 

Igor Birsa (Trieste, Italy) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Holy Fire (Bantam Spectra Book) (Paperback)

One of the best books I ever read.

In the long run, the author poses to the readers a question that cannot have an unique answer: Above all, who's right, the young or the elder? We can say: obviously none, and both, it depends of your point of view. So what's the final answer?

According to Sterling, the social role of the elder (the medically treated people, who live VERY long) is to mantain the status quo, to control the crazyness of the young, to *CONTROL* the society, by means of the fortunes and political strenght they accumulated. The young instead can 'follow the rules' or be repressed, and indeed the brighthest of them, the 'artists' (those who possess the 'Holy Fire', the capacity to *create* art and ideas) must hide and go in the underground. Here they try to add some new flesh to the human culture, and obviously the elder constantly try to stop them. But sometimes a new idea is good enough, and nothing can stop it, so it eventually becomes part of the status quo, along with their creators. Those same creators will then become elder with time, and will not allow any variation of this idea, acting effectively in the same way the elders of his young age did.

The book goes through all this gradually, showing the elder, the young geniuses, and also the not-so-brilliant wannabe-genius youngsters. As Maya travels across Europe, she matures from an elder, to a newborn young, to a prominent figure in a underground movement.

As always the reading is pure intellectual joy: Sterling's insights in the very nature of human culture, the differences between the old world and the new, the fantastic scenarios of future European cities and so much more.

If you are searching pure action and special effects, you will not find them here. But if you want to *think* when reading a book, this is definitely a good choice.

Worth every page.