There’s always someone to opiniate, but it was interesting to see in Sterling’s fiction the idea that, after living through an epidemic that killed thousands of people, society has changed into a huge industrial-medic complex. Today, during the Covid-19 crisis, the typical anxiety of our metamodernist condition makes us anxious to know what is going to happen when all this is over - whenever that is. In the case of epidemics, it’s simply a question of “when” and not “if.” Just like Sterling described in his article “The object of posterity’s scorn” for ARC magazine, here the author also recovers historical references to envision the future, which means he sees time in a more cyclical way. In Holy Fire, we follow the adventures of Mia Ziemann, a 94-year-old health economist that is living in a post-pandemic world by the end of the 21st century. Considered a cyberpunk book, Holy Fire ponders the genre and updates it with a more mature writing style if compared to the one that consecrated the subgenre back in the 1980s.
However, in 1996, Sterling published his novel Holy Fire, a fiction that materializes the reflections raised by the author in his aforementioned essay. This is the case of series such as Black Mirror, Altered Carbon and the upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077. In the essay, Shiner argued that cyberpunk made no sense any more, but, in any case, in 2020, several adaptations and new titles kept the subgenre alive (or at least parts of it). This was all concluded eight years after Lewis Shiner, one of the member of The Movement, the group which created cyberpunk as a genre, had already wrote “ Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk” for The New York Times. After all, it’s been some time since “any cyberpunk wrote a truly mind-blowing story, something that writhed, heaved, howled, hallucinated and shattered the furniture.” The essay pondered cyberpunk and its authors, arguing that the “visionary intensity” that was once center to the genre was forgotten as time went by and authors aged - back in the day, they were already 40 years old in average. In 1998, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling published the article “ Cyberpunk in the Nineties” in the magazine INTERZONE. In Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling imagines a post-pandemic gerontocracyĭisclaimer: This article was originally published on Tab UOL, in Portuguese.
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