Air (2004)

Tiptree winner 2005 ( )

The premise: ganked from BN.com: Chung Mae is the only connection her small farming village has to culture of a wider world beyond the fields and simple houses of her village. A new communications technology is sweeping the world and promises to connect everyone, everywhere without power lines, computers, or machines. This technology is Air. An initial testing of Air goes disastrously wrong and people are killed from the shock. Not to be stopped Air is arriving with or without the blessing of Mae's village. Mae is the only one who knows how to harness Air and ready her people for it's arrival, but will they listen before it's too late?

My Rating: 7 - Good Read

The writing is excellent. I loved the heroine Mae, I loved her character and her journey, her village and the world she lives in the and the world she's trying to be a part of, the world she's preparing her village for. Frankly, I had planned on rating this book an "8 - Excellent" all around, but there's one bit of magical realism that's meant to reinforce the overall message and metaphor for the book, but I just can't reconcile it, not in a book that's so SF-nal otherwise. Still, fans of soft, social science fiction need to get their hands on this book and check it out: it'd be a shame to miss on so many levels. Thanks to my readers, who made this my February Dare!

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Yay to the nth degree. If you want to remain unspoiled, do not read the full review at my blog. If you have read the book, then feel free to hop on over! As always, comments and discussion are most welcome. Just click the link below to go directly to the full review!

REVIEW: Geoff Ryman's AIR

Happy Reading! ( )

Air brings to mind the novels of Ursula Le Guin: it is the warm but probing kind of science fiction more concerned with the details of the societal and interpersonal implications of technology than with the technology itself. While the world moves towards a radical connectedness in the form of "Air" (a kind of telepathic Internet), the people in a rural village in Central Asia do not even have cell phones. They will be connected, like it or not, and their struggle to make sense of the new world they are forced to inhabit, and to discover opportunity within it, is at the core of this book. The story is a bit too optimistic for my taste, and too mystical, but I appreciate its heart. ( )

There are a lot of interesting ideas in this near-future science fiction novel, but I don’t think they came together in the end.

AIR is set in the year 2020, in a remote village in a fictional country west of China. The villagers are a mixture of Chinese, Muslims and the fictional natives, the Eloi. All poor rice farmers, the villagers just got their first combination television/computer. But a new technology is coming called Air that will allow everyone to communicate mind-to-mind. When Air is first tested in the village, the results are disastrous; one of the villagers, Chung Mae, is connected to an old lady when she dies in an accident, and the old woman’s consciousness becomes trapped in Mae’s mind.

This is just the first in a series of incredible things that happen to Mae, and I was never sure whether these events were literally happening, whether they were occurring in some virtual, Air-created world, or both. Ryman was playing with these ideas, I think, but couldn’t get them to gel. The plot proceeds in fits and starts, sometimes dragging for pages and pages, sometimes rocketing along; the novel never finds its rhythm. In addition, my copy was riddled with typos and grammatical errors, which were very distracting.

So while I mostly enjoyed the novel, Ryman never quite convinced me of its reality.

I read this book because it appeared on a lot of speculative fiction award lists (2010). ( )

"We are the party of progress in our village. Ah? But there is another party. It goes around destroying the TV sets. My brave boss Mrs Chung Mae tries to teach our children, our women, our men, how to use Air when it comes, she teaches us on the TV. And the Schoolteacher prevents her! The Schoolteacher actually tries to stop us learning. He breaks the TV! That is what we face! While all of you are going to the moon!"

Air is the future, it is Internet inside your head, and it will be universal. As soon as she hears about Air, Chung Mae realises that her job as her village's fashion expert is threatened, and that her village is in danger of being left behind as the rest of the world surges ahead into the future. She may be a peasant from a small country in central Asia, living in a remote mountain village which has only recently received its first communal television, but Mae faces the coming changes head on.

The book skips between the small world of the village, with its resistance to progress and suspicion of government interference, the rest of Karzistan, as a group of villagers go to the city to attend a conference about the coming of Air, and the wider world beyond, as Mae's new business brings her into contact with the net savvy denizens of New York.

The mood is constantly changing between hopes and fears for the future, the villagers in conflict and co-operating, happiness at government help and fear of government clamp-downs. "Sizzling Sezen's Pop Picks" made me laugh when I was reading her forthright opinions of Karz musicians, but just a few pages later the tone became much darker as Mae and her friends risk falling foul of the Karzistan government.

The only thing I didn't like about this book was the element of outright fantasy introduced toward the end. It didn't add anything and spoiled the whole story for me. Until then this book was heading for 5 stars and a permanenent place in my bookcase. ( )