Book: Holy Fire
Nov. 25th, 2003 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Bruce Sterling
Details: (c) Bruce Sterling 1996; pub Phoenix 1997; ISBN 1-85799-884-7
Verdict: Holy Fire is an enjoyable read, recommended.
Reasons for reading it:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lethargic_man wanted me to read HF so that he could refer to something in it. Yes, we do take the whole bacterial sex thing to extremes. What can I say? Anyway, I'm not at all sorry I read HF, cos I got on very well with it.
How it came into my hands:lethargic_man lent it to me.
Holy Fire struck me as a kind of Brave New World for the 21st century. It's very well crafted; the dystopian society seems plausible (even if the underlying science sometimes degenerates into technobabble), and there are strong characters and a good storyline. This is definitely a book I found hard to put down.
Parts of HF are exceedingly funny. The scene where the newly rejuvenated Maya picks up a bloke in Munich is delightful. And there's some lovely satire on things like shareware, childish 'anarchist' politics, fluffy tree-hugging 'spirituality' and so on. I also loved the animated loo brush which attacks Maya and her junkie associates in the squat. And interesting discussions on the nature of art and happiness and things, which however are never intrusive.
I'm not entirely sure I agreed with the view HF seems to be pushing. It didn't quite convince me that giving up all possible privacy in exchange for virtually unlimited resources and healthful longevity was entirely a bad deal. And yes, society is polarized, but basically the have-nots are so much better off than any have-nots in any real society that I found it hard to accept that they were opressed. I found myself in sympathy with the Widow, who is the voice of the status quo that the protagonists are in rebellion against. In other words, dystopian future portrayed in HF struck me as considerably less dystopian than Huxley's version.
But on the whole, HF is well-written, and thought-provoking, and moving, and a thoroughly good read.
Details: (c) Bruce Sterling 1996; pub Phoenix 1997; ISBN 1-85799-884-7
Verdict: Holy Fire is an enjoyable read, recommended.
Reasons for reading it:
lethargic_man wanted me to read HF so that he could refer to something in it. Yes, we do take the whole bacterial sex thing to extremes. What can I say? Anyway, I'm not at all sorry I read HF, cos I got on very well with it.How it came into my hands:
lethargic_man lent it to me.Holy Fire struck me as a kind of Brave New World for the 21st century. It's very well crafted; the dystopian society seems plausible (even if the underlying science sometimes degenerates into technobabble), and there are strong characters and a good storyline. This is definitely a book I found hard to put down.
Parts of HF are exceedingly funny. The scene where the newly rejuvenated Maya picks up a bloke in Munich is delightful. And there's some lovely satire on things like shareware, childish 'anarchist' politics, fluffy tree-hugging 'spirituality' and so on. I also loved the animated loo brush which attacks Maya and her junkie associates in the squat. And interesting discussions on the nature of art and happiness and things, which however are never intrusive.
I'm not entirely sure I agreed with the view HF seems to be pushing. It didn't quite convince me that giving up all possible privacy in exchange for virtually unlimited resources and healthful longevity was entirely a bad deal. And yes, society is polarized, but basically the have-nots are so much better off than any have-nots in any real society that I found it hard to accept that they were opressed. I found myself in sympathy with the Widow, who is the voice of the status quo that the protagonists are in rebellion against. In other words, dystopian future portrayed in HF struck me as considerably less dystopian than Huxley's version.
But on the whole, HF is well-written, and thought-provoking, and moving, and a thoroughly good read.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-30 03:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Are you sitting comfortably? You see, when a boy bacterium loves a girl bacterium very much, and if she loves him back, they find a safe place where they can snuggle up together. And the snuggling up makes them both excited. So sometimes when the boy bactierium is really excited, he can make a long, thin tube called a pilus. The boy bacterium puts his pilus into the girl bacterium's body, and uses it to inject a copy of his genes into the girl bacterium. This makes both the little bugs very very happy.
After that happens, the girl bacterium reads the boy's genes and that means she finds out all his secrets. She even finds out how to turn into a boy bacterium and grow a pilus of her own to make love with another girl bacterium, if s/he wants to.
As far as I know, this is the only example of bacterial romantic poetry translated into human language. (Does anyone know where it actually comes from, cos it doesn't appear to be properly attributed on any of the google hits?)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-01 04:06 pm (UTC)I think Le Guin's done some bacterial romantic poetry somewhere. It'll be in one of the short story collections.
My mother didn't tell me about human contraception until I was nearly 22, do you really think she'd have got past our species? (She hadn't even got past the idea of heterosexual safe sex.)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-10 07:20 pm (UTC)I think there are no such rules. Which is a pity, because one ought to apply the same standards across kingdoms, I feel.
I think Le Guin's done some bacterial romantic poetry somewhere.
Oooh! I'll have to look out for that! Actually I don't think I know any Le Guin poetry.
My mother didn't tell me about human contraception until I was nearly 22
Um, with all due respect to your mother, that strikes me as a tad irresponsible, no? I mean, I'm sure by that age you were quite capable of finding the information you needed from alternative sources, but even so. (Mind you, my early sex education got a tad derailed cos I was far more interested in molecular genetics and embryology than boring old sex...)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-11-30 10:27 pm (UTC)I use it as a metaphor for the way that M and I have been catching up on eachothers' intellectual backgrounds, reading eachothers' books, pooling and discussing ideas and all that sort of thing. But reading a whole book simply so that he could refer to something mentioned in it is a fairly extreme version of this!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-01 03:55 pm (UTC)Nonsense. It's an excellent idea.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-01 11:19 pm (UTC)I've been doing that with the fair S, also. Mostly I've been lending her SF and she's been lending me more literary stuff (so we've both read "Closer", too :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-10 07:23 pm (UTC)I like the fair S as an epithet. In my case I'm the one coming from a relatively mainstream background and needing lots of guidance with SF.
Holy Fire, Batman!
Date: 2003-11-30 07:47 pm (UTC)There's lots of nice tidbits in it (I especially liked Paul's sophistry about the Fabergé toad and his sunset photograph), but the book didn't really grab me. And Maya seemed to do a lot of wandering around from city to city in the first half, which meant that by the second half any time that anyone said "Oh, you must come to Bologna", I started thinking "Here we go again".
But a strong plot was never really this book's selling point.
I'm also not very convinced by the characters describing themselves as posthuman; it came across as being because they thought it was cool, and really stood out as meaningless in contrast to the postcanine. Which was possibly Sterling's point. I also had my doubts as to whether they were really going to be the first generation of immortals; I suspect one hundred years down the line they'd be riddled with health problems unforeseen at the time of the book, and possibly their children or grandchildren would the first true immortals.
Which ties in nicely, come to think of it, with our differing views on whether all cancers will be cured in the course of this century (conversation://{lethargic_man,livredor}/cancer/cure#likelihood).
Now (SPOILERS AHEAD), would you be prepared to go through what Mia did, in the knowledge that it would double your life, but as radically overhaul your personality?
What if it only had a lesser effect on your personality?
And for bonus points, compare and contrast Holy Fire with Wyndham's Trouble With Lichen in terms of their attitudes to the population explosion a significant increase in longevity would create.
Re: Holy Fire, Batman!
Date: 2003-12-01 04:11 pm (UTC)I thought the rejuvenation tech was convincing, and convincingly uncomfortable, at a physical level; I have deep doubts about the psychological effects here depicted, which I should probably read the book again before pronouncing on, come to think of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-18 11:53 pm (UTC)I see what you mean, but... As I've been trying to say elsethread, (yes, I am completely wittering about this, and thinking on my feet rather than structuring arguments, so sorry if my comments are a bit all over the place) I'm not sure that what's going on is so much a personality change as the same person in radically different circumstances. Also I got very strong death-and-rebirth vibes from HF, and I think the personality change thing fits in with that theme.
The thought that being rejuvenated would make one turn out one's wardrobe and go for the latest teen fashions
Nice parodic summary, but I think not entirely fair. I chalked most of the silliest excesses up to Maya's being confused after the operation, which added to the realism of it, for me.
I thought the rejuvenation tech was convincing
I didn't. I thought it was good enough to sustain the story, but no more than that. The thing is that when I see technical words, I can't help but switch on the professionally critical side of my brain. And HF suffers badly from technobabble.
convincingly uncomfortable, at a physical level
That, OTOH, is a good point. At least this is tech, rather than magic. It's definitely helpful that longevity in HF has a cost, and a reasonable cost, rather than a cost inserted at random to fit in with a morality that basically assumes people can't achieve happiness through their own efforts.
I have deep doubts about the psychological effects here depicted
I think I agree. Maya isn't 100% plausible as a person. She's interesting and rounded and believable enough to work as a viewpoint character, but I'm not convinced she adds up.
Re: Holy Fire, Batman!
Date: 2003-12-01 04:15 pm (UTC)Any chance of more detail on this coming up in a format I can read, like plain text ?
I find myself getting Child Garden twitches at this thought.
Re: Holy Fire, Batman -- a cure for cancer!
Date: 2003-12-02 07:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-02 10:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-19 12:02 am (UTC)Through being a tad snippy in response to this, I forgot to mention that I like the way you regard this as a problem of insufficient technology!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-02 09:58 pm (UTC)Any chance of more detail on this coming up in a format I can read, like plain text ?
Why, certainly!
Actually, I don't know what
Of infallible memory, and the Cure for Cancer [TM]
Date: 2003-12-02 10:29 pm (UTC)You'd talked about our discussions wandering in and out of the public domain, and in and out of electronic form. So I provided a hyperlink to a (speech) conversation of ours.
Only it turns out it wasn't speech. I'd thought it was. Probably I got it mixed with with the similar discussion I had with Loriba at CCDE.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-19 12:10 am (UTC)Ah, so it was a hyperlink, and it was me that was confused, not the browser. It's just not a format of hyperlink that I recognize. But I'm inclined to agree with
Probably I got it mixed with with the similar discussion I had with Loriba at CCDE
Ah yes, you mentioned that to me at the time, I think. Cool cool.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-16 09:51 pm (UTC)I think that's part of the form; to an extent HF is framed as a 'journey of discovery', there's even hints of a coming-of-age novel, which is quite clever in the context of a literal second youth.
But it's true that the cities portrayed don't have a lot of character. The device could have been a really good way of showing glimpses of different societies, and somehow that never quite happens. It's possible that the sameness of everywhere Maya goes is part of the whole dystopian thing, but actually boring your readers in order to create an impression of boredom is always a dangerous trick.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-16 09:56 pm (UTC)Ooh, very good point, and I hadn't spotted that one. I think I just took that at face value, largely.
A critical analysis of the posthuman condition
Date: 2003-12-16 10:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-16 10:29 pm (UTC)Feh. Telomerase as the Elixir of Youth? Spare me.
The whole bit where Mia's body is dissassembled down to its constituent cells is undoubtedly clever symbolically, the death and rebirth imagery is nicely done, and not overly blatant. But as a plausible technology, or even a plausibly survivable procedure? Just as well cryogenics or even ובא לציון גואל ...
Sugar and spice and all things nice
Date: 2003-12-16 10:56 pm (UTC)Why? As sole ingredient of it, to be sure, but surely lengthening of telomeres is something that will have to be addressed for multiple lifetimes longevity (along with lots of other things).
ובא לציון גואל*†
<suppresses the urge to respond "ונאמר אמן".>
(no subject)
Hah, gotcha!
No, seriously. You'll amen the Redeemer coming to revive the dead, but you refuse to sing Yigdal on principle?
Oooh, proper Unicode characters. Perhaps I ought to figure out how to do that rather than the clunky character entities I'm using atm...
Do you want to know what I did? I used the 'insert symbol' command in MS Word to select the letters one by one from the character map, then cut and pasted into LJ. Luckily LJ is clever and can do bidi all by itself. But I'm afraid that's at least as clunky as your approach.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-19 10:30 am (UTC)No, seriously. You'll amen the Redeemer coming to revive the dead, but you refuse to sing Yigdal on principle?
I will not amen the Redeemer coming to revive the dead; that's why I had to suppress the urge. Reflexes conditioned over many years die hard.
(And the fact I was tempted to respond "ונאמר אמן" is a giveaway sign I'm more familiar with the Prayer for the Royal Family than ובא לציון גואל in שבת מנחה service.)
I used the 'insert symbol' command in MS Word to select the letters one by one from the character map, then cut and pasted into LJ. Luckily LJ is clever and can do bidi all by itself.
I could possibly get Emacs to set character encoding as Unicode, and Mozilla certainly can handle cutting and pasting Unicode, but I'd need the Unix clipboard to be able to handle wide characters to be able to get it from one to t'other (I still don't use any form of client for LJ), and at present it doesn't.
(And what's "bidi"?)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-21 09:58 pm (UTC)Ah, I'd assumed that the supressing came in because it was obviously inappropriate in context; my comment was not a prayer that required a response, but simply an example of an implausible life-extension 'tech'.
Reflexes conditioned over many years die hard.
I won't disagree with that. But it does strike me that a reflex that leads to you amen stuff you actually disagree with seems rather an unfortunate habit to have acquired, no?
a giveaway sign I'm more familiar with the Prayer for the Royal Family than ובא לציון גואל in שבת מנחה service.
While I probably could have worked that out if I'd really thought about it, I'm not sufficiently familiar with either part of the Orthodox liturgy for this to be obvious to me. (We pray for the Royal Family in English; it's one of the very few prayers that there's a consensus for doing in the vernacular. I'm surprised there is such a consensus, actually, cos none of the reasons I've heard for this custom hold any water at all!)
And what's "bidi"?
Bi-directional text handling. I type Hebrew in the obvious order in Word (such that it appears wrong), and when I paste it into the comment box, it automatically gets reversed, while leaving the English letters following it left-to-right. Clever, no?
Uses of Hebrew and English
Date: 2004-01-29 07:40 pm (UTC)There's a reasonable consensus for doing it in English in the Orthodox as well; it wasn't until I came to London that I heard it done in Hebrew.
I type Hebrew in the orbvious order in Word (such that it appears wrong), and when I paste it into the comment box, it automatically gets reversed, while leaving the English letters following it
left-to-right. Clever, no?
That's part of the Unicode standard. It should type right-to-left in Word too; sounds like you've got an out-of-date version of Word.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-01-31 06:10 pm (UTC)There's a reasonable consensus for doing it in English in the Orthodox as well; it wasn't until I came to London that I heard it done in Hebrew.
Oh yes, I have heard it done in English in Orthodox services, I'd forgotten that. And The Supreme King above the King of Kings is a cooler epithet for God (cos, yay random ancient culture references!) than Whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. But the Orthodox version goes downhill from there I think; there's a lot of stuff that's unnecessarily monarchistic, ours is much more neutral in that respect.
Prayer for the Royal Family
Date: 2004-02-01 12:27 pm (UTC)מלך מלכי המלכים, yes? It's true, it is cooler (and mistranslated "the Supreme King of kings" in the Singer's), and I never understood it until I was in my late twenties and discovered that "King of kings" meant High King.
But the Orthodox version goes downhill from there I think; there's a lot of stuff that's unnecessarily monarchistic, ours is much more neutral in that respect.
You mean your one is a prayer for the government rather than the Royal Family? I can sympathise with that; the government only gets the briefest of mentions in the Orthodox wording ("and all her counsellors"). That's due to the text dating from the monarchism of Victorian times, but also, I suspect, looking back to a more distant time when the Jews were at the whim of the monarch, rather than their government ("G-d keep the Czar... far away from us!").
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-17 09:57 pm (UTC)I know we've discussed this a bit, but I want to have another bite at the cherry, cos I've been turning it over in my mind in the past few weeks. Plus it's interesting enough to merit being in public.
The thing is, as presented the alternative is death (with the pain and infirmity of real life old age only slightly diminished by the proposed future tech), as witnessed at the beginning of the book with the death of Mia's lover (whose name I've forgotten right now). That seems to be a non-choice, really. Of course one can have endless philosophical debate about the nature of identity, or slightly more concretely whether Maya is really the 'same' person as Mia. But on a personal level, who wouldn't choose an effective second lifetime, with memories of the first more or less intact, over annihilation? Especially given that both lives are fairly guaranteed to be materially pleasant.
but as radically overhaul your personality?
I wouldn't describe the effect is all that radical. I don't think Maya's rebirth alters her any more than any dramatic experience alters one's personality. My reading is that the main change in Maya is that she no longer has so much at stake; Mia absolutely has to conform in order to safeguard her health, but Maya, being effectively young, can get away with rebelling against the system.
I don't think her choosing to live her second lifetime differently from her first is anything other than a sensible decision. The circumstances are different, a century further on; as Maya points out herself, in order to survive the 21st century at all, one had to be hyper-conservative and toe the line to the fullest extent. Her existence as a 'gerontocrat' is quite explicitly portrayed as arid. Maintaining that status is not an end in itself, but instead a means to gain access to good enough rejuvenation tech that she can enjoy the fruits of the 22nd century. That's no more a change of personality than, say, an entrepreneur who makes millions, and then spends it all on something he's always wanted.
Me, I'd take the doubled lifetime at almost any price, (short of spending the whole of the second lifetime in pain and misery, and even then I'd hesitate). A rebirth where I couldn't remember anything would be effectively no better than death, but assuming I had enough to maintain the illusion of identity, sure.
I think, just to pick a random example, Orlando's becoming a polis citizen in Diaspora is a much more radical change than what Mia goes through. There's no question there that it would somehow be preferable to die on Earth simply because his polis self is so different from his Flesher self.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-18 08:21 pm (UTC)I think I'll play, mainly cos I adore Trouble with Lichen. Though I should admit I haven't reread it in a while.
I think the huge difference here is that TwL postulates a literal elixir, which is however in limited supply. Quite a different situation to a highly specialized medical procedure as in HF. (Of course, TwL was written at a time when it was thinkable that chemical synthesis of a desirable biochemical was likely to present a serious obstacle.) The problems of short-sightedly exhausting the supply of 'antigerone' are completely different to the problems of deciding who can benefit from the rejuvenation process.
As to the social effects of increased longevity, I'd say both books pretty much gloss over them, because both are set at the dawn of the new technology. TwL speculates vaguely about needing to revise the marriage laws, IIRC. And HF shows that the young, who expect to be immortal, are worried, but there's not much detail of exactly what they're scared of or whether their fears are justified. Both books talk about societal stagnation resulting from extending people's working life, but neither goes into much depth.
Overpopulation is certainly not a problem in HF; the world in that is still recovering from the effects of plagues, wars etc, and also technology appears to be quite good enough to support everybody. And I don't remember much about overpopulation specifically in TwL.
Finally, it's striking that both books (both written by men, incidentally), seem to think that women are likely to be better able to cope with longevity and the associated social changes than men.
The population explosion longevity would cause
Date: 2003-12-18 08:53 pm (UTC)Overpopulation is certainly not a problem in HF; the world in that is still recovering from the effects of plagues, wars etc,
I think Sterling wimped out here. There would be a real problem in terms of overpopulation and competition for resources if the Elixir of Life was found; it'd an issue which has to be addressed and Sterling went for the easy route of depopulating the Earth first.
In Trouble With Lichen, at the end the Chinese bulldoze (what they believe to be) the only supply of antigerone. The Chinese have already been wrestling with the problem of overpopulation; they could see that an Elixir of Life was just too dangerous to be unleashed on the world. Unless the birth rate dropped instaneously to zero -- which would never happen -- there'd still be a gigantic population explosion due to people not dying. It would level off eventually, of course -- but not until population levels that make the population explosion of the twentieth century seem a mere squib.
If we were lucky, we'd get by without a Malthusian crash; if we were really lucky we'd get by without major wars. Necessity would be the mother of invention; how lucky we would be in terms of the above would depend on whether the solutions we came up with could be implemented fast enough to keep the Earth's carrying capacity (which, as I have mentioned before, is a function of technology, not an absolute) above the current population levels.
For example, space colonisation would relieve the burden on Earth; but I would imagine it would take a period of over a decade between the start of the programme and the first viable self-sufficient offworld colony; and at least another decade before the programme began to seriously take off.
I've a sneaky suspicion both you and
Bacterial sex
Date: 2003-11-30 07:58 pm (UTC)ROTFL! :-D :-D :-D
<recovers> No we don't! You've read "Closer"...
There's also a very disturbing image from Doctor Who ("Snakedance" (5th Doctor), and also the Paul McGan made-for-TV film) lurking in there.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-01 04:13 pm (UTC)I'm not sure that this metaphor sits well with me, because so many of these books appear to be ones
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-01 10:23 pm (UTC)Book recommendations
Date: 2003-12-02 07:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-21 10:07 pm (UTC)<contrite>
Date: 2003-12-21 10:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Rather belatedly by now, I realize, but I apologize. That'll teach me to think through the implications of my metaphors! I was going to point out that a great deal depends on context, but I think I'll just apologize unreservedly, rather than start digging.
Memetic mimesis
Date: 2003-12-21 10:20 pm (UTC)