Bruce Sterling’s Holy
Fire is a satirical reimagining of human society in the distant future
where cats and dogs are modified to speak and only the oldest and most model
citizens have any kind of financial power. The young people, however, are
ignored and treated worse than animals. The main character, Mia, is a
94-year-old medical economist, who spends ninety percent of her life’s earnings
on an advanced medical procedure to make her body young again. The government
or authority in the book is called the Polity. Geriatric, very polite, rich
people who have survived so long because of their will to adhere to what it
means to be a strict ideal citizen run the Polity.
Early in the novel, Mia makes the shift to her new body and
with it she dawns herself Maya, a nineteen-year-old girl full of naiveté and
spirit. This shift is fully realized when Maya realizes she desires to be a
photographer. Midway through the novel, we are presented with the philosophical
approach to beauty and art after Mia has discovered she yearns to be an artist.
The whole metanarrative hinges on the exploration of art and beauty between
post-humans and human humans. The bridge is consciousness, and Mia’s newfound
youth and exuberance allows her to pursue her wildest intellectual dreams – becoming
a famous model – the object on the other side of the photographer’s lens. Why
would Bruce Sterling make this choice in what was unfolding as an intriguing
undoing of a coming of age story? Perhaps her career needed to match her
post-human body’s age, but this seems a far cry from her previous career as a
medical economist. It is possible Sterling was trying to make a point about the
irony in the objectification of her post-human body portraying the literalized
figure of herself in the 2020s during the fashion show with Josef Novak.
This establishes the idea that despite the medical and
technological advances of the future, society still encourages the
objectification of the female body for the male gaze. The part in the novel
where Novak, met only with a little persistence on Maya’s part, sweeps her up
and takes her to model the 2020s look, seems eerily like a kidnapping, which is
exactly how it feels when men encourage you to do something you’re not sure
about. Is this attempt to shift the line of narrative away from Mia’s interests
in being an artist is certainly a reflection upon how it is to want to be an
artist in reality. Everyone is pushing you into something you don’t want to do
despite your efforts.
However, becoming a famous model is probably the highest
status a young Mia could attain in this satire on our own society. Doing so may
even place her higher than talking dogs and cats, which seem to be of great
importance to include in the polity. This reconnection with her more human side
through her post-human body is particularly intriguing when you consider the
effects the age-reversal procedure on others like Mia.
Will they succumb to the humanity in their young post-human
bodies? More perceptive characters in the book do notice that Mia is not what
she seems. Whether they notice her as an exotic beauty, or they can see the
years of experience behind her eyes, there is a difference between her
post-human body and human bodies.
It is pretty clear by the end of the novel, that post-human
and human are connected through art. Where the imagination exists, so too does
the necessity to create beautiful objects and concepts. And beauty can emerge
through fragmentation – in the metanarrative structure of the book, in the
fragmentary nature of the characters’ lives, and in the actual fragmentation
and rebuilding of Mia’s cells in order to undergo her elaborate rejuvenation
treatment.
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