[BOOK][CYPHERPUNK] "Holy Fire"

[Brian D Williams <talon57@well.com>]

Bruce Sterling has a new cyber/cypherpunk novel, "Holy Fire" (ISBN
0-553-09958-2). Enclosed are a few exerpts, I'll lead with the
"list appropriate" one.

Brian



 "This was a very unhappy interface. And small wonder. No doubt
this entire virtual environment was being encrypted, decrypted,
reencrypted, anonymously routed through satelites and cables,
emulated on alien machinery through ill-fitting, out-of-date
protocols, then displayed through long-dead graphics standards.
Dismembered, piped, compressed, packeted, unpacketed, decompressed,
unpiped and re-membered. Worse yet, the place was old. Virtual
buildings didn't age like physical ones, but they aged in subtle
pathways of arcane decline, in much the way that their owners did.
A little bijou table in the corner had a pronounced case of bit-
rot: from a certain angle it lost all surface tint."



 "Attendants opened the hinged white lid of the emulsifier, took
the thin shroud from Martin's wasted, puckered body, and slid him, 
with reverent care, feetfirst into the seething gel. The scanners
set to work, Martin's final official medical imaging. Gentle
ultrasonics shook the body apart, and when the high-speed rotors
began to churn, the emulsifier's ornamental flowerbeds trembled a
bit. Autopsy samplers caught up bits of the soup, analyzed genetic
damage, surveyed the corpse's populations of resident bacteria,
hunted down and cataloged every subsymptomatic viral infection and
prion infestation, and publicly nailed down the cause of death
(self-administered neural depressant) with utter cybernetic
certainty. All the data was neatly and publicly filed on the net."