excellent, a really good look at the internet and the third world ( )

A deeply moving account of an isolated villager's perspective on the large leaps in modern technology, and how she rises to the challenge of adapting and making their voices heard. ( )

loved this book and felt deeply moved by Chung Mae's trials as she dealt with the arrival of new technology into her rural community. Her reactions seemed true to life and the only thing slightly corny was her pregnancy.

Air asserts the premise of a telepathic Internet called "Air."
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This is a great novel about the changes wrought in our world by the new communications technology. Unlike most such novels, rather than fixating on the technology itself, Ryman looks at what the coming information revolution will mean to ordinary people living ordinary lives. Unlike any other such story I have read, his characters are not teenagers living in Western affluence, but villagers in a fictional Central Asian country, at the intersection of the Turkic and Chinese cultural spheres, in other words about as far from the West as you can culturally get in today's world. I thought it was fascinating and compassionate.

However. Ryman is a proponent of the "mundane science fiction" school and oddly enough the two most problematic elements for me in the book for me were the two most fantastic ones. The physical flood threatening to overwhelm the village threatened to be a rather overstated echo of the metaphorical deluge of the new technology, but I think Ryman just about got away with it in the end. The heroine's bizarre pregnancy, however, just did not work for me. ( )

I could only hack half of this; while it seemed much too slow for my tastes, I can see why others would enjoy it. ( )