Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. It is a world of synthetic memory drugs, benevolent government surveillance, underground anarchists, and talking canine companions. People's health is monitored very closely, and it is very public: in a world where upwards of 90% of the population died from plague, an individual's health came to be seen as everybody's business.“The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical industrial complex dominates the world economy. It seems to be a post-scarcity society, and there is what seems at first like a very strong social safety net, but which some find intrusive and stifling. The result is a much more global society war is ended, and so is most violent crime. As for the 2050s, the stunts they’d been calling “medicine” back then (which had seemed tremendously impressive at the time) scarcely qualified as life extension at all, by modern standards. There had been limit-shattering paradigmatic breakthroughs in life extension during the 2060s and 2070s.
The experience of massive dieback, of septic terror and emptied cities, had permanently removed the culture's squeamishness. You were a credit risk and a bad business partner. If you were on a conspicuously public metabolic bender, then you weren’t the kind of person that people trusted nowadays.
People who publicly destroyed their own health had a rather hard time staying wealthy-not because it took good health to become wealthy, but because it took other people’s confidence to make and keep money. Nowadays mere wealth guaranteed very little. Once upon a time, having money had almost guaranteed good health, or at least good health care. Careless people had become a declining interest group with a shrinking demographic share. The survivors were a permanently cautious and foresightful lot. hygienically careless people had died in their billions during the plagues of the 2030s and 2040s. I've enjoyed some of his other books more, but I found this one timely because of the future history he wrote: the world Sterling created is based almost entirely on the world's response to decades of plagues that decimated the population. Holy Fire, by Bruce Sterling, was published in 1996.
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