motile scrotum with human eyes and the legs of a human toddler interspersed with octopal tentacles,” and it speaks in a sweet, ingratiating voice. Later we learn that the humble prairie squid is in fact none other than a resurrected form of that greatest Meta alien of all, our Savior Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Yes, Him . “Crucified, this time, in disfigurement; in the dislocated shape of a land octopus. Jesus in a prairie squid. Christ in a cephaloped.” Here an extra element of deep funniness derives from the fact that the “prairie squid” is an icon of the Church of the SubGenius, a half-serious mock religion in which John Shirley is a high-ranking official.
And—I told you this book was shaggy—there’s even some mystical physics. Here’s a rant from a guy called The Street Sleeper, telling about his mad-scientist friend The Middle Man.
“Okay, lemme see: There’s a subatomic particle called the IAMton. Physicists, they speculate about it, but the Middle Man knows. He was a cutting-edge hot shot at Stanford. He isolated the IAMton, using a wetware subatomic scanner that re-created the thing in his natural cerebral imaging equipment, and when he did, it spoke to him . It spoke to him! Can you fade that? A subatomic particle that tells you, Yeah! You found me!… Actually, see, it was all the IAMtons on the fucking plane t that spoke to him, in the local macro-octave. Spoke to him through the group of ‘em he had contained in the tokomak field and scanned with the electron microscope interfaced with his wetware. You know?”
Yeah , I know, John. This is music to my ears, man. This totally makes sense. As Shirley puts it, “Science Fiction, see, is humanity’s way of warning, readying itself; it’s what goes on under the racial Rapid Eye movement.”
One final gem of wisdom. “The universe is alive, but it is not ‘God.’ And…it is not friendly. Nor unfriendly. However, we do not wish to make these distinctions with the American public.” Too true.
Daringly set in the late twenty-first century—well, hey, the twentieth century’s all done!—Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire is about an extremely old woman who gets a radical rejuvenation treatment and becomes a beautiful twenty-year-old. Due to this extreme change in her body she is no longer human in the old sense of the word; she’s post-human. Other SF writers have come up against the task Sterling faces here, how to depict people after technology has made them into superhumans; I would say that no other writer has ever succeeded so well. Here’s one of Sterling’s statements about post-humans: “Machines just flitted through the fabric of the universe like a fit through the brain of God, and in their wake people stopped being people. But people didn’t stop going on.”
Bruce Sterling in 1983.
In person and in his journalistic writing, Sterling is loud and Texan, but in his novels he is the most thoughtful and civilized of men. In Holy Fire he transforms himself into this wide-eyed rejuvenated old lady and takes us on a tour of marvels, a wanderjahr in Europe in search of the holy fire of artistic creativity.
She arrived at the airport. The black tarmac was full of glowing airplanes. They had a lovely way of flexing their wings and simply jumping into the chill night air when they wanted to take off. You could see people moving inside the airplanes because the hulls were gossamer. Some people had clicked on their reading lights but a lot of the people onboard were just slouching back into their beanbags and enjoying the night sky through the fuselage.
When science fiction performs so clear and attractive a feat of envisioning the future, its like a blueprint that you feel like working to instantiate.
Instantiate , by the way, is an object-oriented-computer-programming word that, in Sterling’s hands, means “to turn a software description into a physical object.” Such as a goddess sculpture derived from studies of the attention
And—I told you this book was shaggy—there’s even some mystical physics. Here’s a rant from a guy called The Street Sleeper, telling about his mad-scientist friend The Middle Man.
“Okay, lemme see: There’s a subatomic particle called the IAMton. Physicists, they speculate about it, but the Middle Man knows. He was a cutting-edge hot shot at Stanford. He isolated the IAMton, using a wetware subatomic scanner that re-created the thing in his natural cerebral imaging equipment, and when he did, it spoke to him . It spoke to him! Can you fade that? A subatomic particle that tells you, Yeah! You found me!… Actually, see, it was all the IAMtons on the fucking plane t that spoke to him, in the local macro-octave. Spoke to him through the group of ‘em he had contained in the tokomak field and scanned with the electron microscope interfaced with his wetware. You know?”
Yeah , I know, John. This is music to my ears, man. This totally makes sense. As Shirley puts it, “Science Fiction, see, is humanity’s way of warning, readying itself; it’s what goes on under the racial Rapid Eye movement.”
One final gem of wisdom. “The universe is alive, but it is not ‘God.’ And…it is not friendly. Nor unfriendly. However, we do not wish to make these distinctions with the American public.” Too true.
Daringly set in the late twenty-first century—well, hey, the twentieth century’s all done!—Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire is about an extremely old woman who gets a radical rejuvenation treatment and becomes a beautiful twenty-year-old. Due to this extreme change in her body she is no longer human in the old sense of the word; she’s post-human. Other SF writers have come up against the task Sterling faces here, how to depict people after technology has made them into superhumans; I would say that no other writer has ever succeeded so well. Here’s one of Sterling’s statements about post-humans: “Machines just flitted through the fabric of the universe like a fit through the brain of God, and in their wake people stopped being people. But people didn’t stop going on.”
Bruce Sterling in 1983.
In person and in his journalistic writing, Sterling is loud and Texan, but in his novels he is the most thoughtful and civilized of men. In Holy Fire he transforms himself into this wide-eyed rejuvenated old lady and takes us on a tour of marvels, a wanderjahr in Europe in search of the holy fire of artistic creativity.
She arrived at the airport. The black tarmac was full of glowing airplanes. They had a lovely way of flexing their wings and simply jumping into the chill night air when they wanted to take off. You could see people moving inside the airplanes because the hulls were gossamer. Some people had clicked on their reading lights but a lot of the people onboard were just slouching back into their beanbags and enjoying the night sky through the fuselage.
When science fiction performs so clear and attractive a feat of envisioning the future, its like a blueprint that you feel like working to instantiate.
Instantiate , by the way, is an object-oriented-computer-programming word that, in Sterling’s hands, means “to turn a software description into a physical object.” Such as a goddess sculpture derived from studies of the attention
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