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.