This book is a masterpiece. Sterling takes a single seed of an idea, radical life extension, and grows it into a mighty tree of a setting, with eminently realistic politics, economics, and design centered around the status quo of a world controlled by very responsible, very kind, and very old women. It a world that has gone through a great Crisis, and come out in some ways a utopia, but in other ways a perfectly padded prison that eats its own young like Saturn. And around the setting, Sterling builds an entire ecosystem of thought on youth, age, ambition, art, aesthetics, and what it means to be a human being.

Books like Holy Fire are why I read science-fiction.

*** UPDATE ***
On a reread 11 years later, some of the book's flaws become more apparent. The theory on art, artifice, and artificiality comes off as clunky and very obsolete. I'm not entirely sure that Sterling can write women well enough to make them a viewpoint character, though Maya is definitive not a woman, rather some kind of post-womanly being going through another puberty.

The setting still absolutely slams. Their gerontocracy of responsible old ladies trying to live forever in a polity where a near majority of people have retreated into artificial realities of VR and drugs is a lot better than our gerontocracy of lurching and erratic billionaires and the propagandized post-factual social networking. The questions of what it means to be human, to become more than human, and to be possessed of the Holy Fire necessary to create authentic art are as vital as ever.