Geoff Ryman

This novel is beautiful, disturbing, intriguing, challenging. We are all so familiar with the Wizard of Oz--primarily through the film, but also through the books--that we may think there is nothing new to be said. (Certainly not after Maguire's Wicked came out.) But Geoff Ryman has visualized the real lives of Dorothy, of L. Frank Baum, of Judy Garland (indirectly) and of new characters whose lives are enriched because of the story that each of the others has told. How did Dorothy come to show more live with her aunt and uncle? Life in a land that was black-and-white was difficult at first, horrendous later. And what happened to her later? I finished reading this novel months ago and scenes still haunt me, both in a positive and a negative sense. I admire Ryman's imagination and his prose. show less

Air takes place in the near future, in a poor village high in the remote mountains of a fictional central Asian republic. Just as the village gets its first joint TV and internet connection, a global test takes place for a new technology that allows every human being on the planet to access the web directly without the interface of a computer or machinery or any kind. Publicity for the test – only heard in the village at second hand from the nearest town – says that this technology, Air, show more will change the way everybody lives. In the few minutes that the test is active life is changed forever for Mae, fashion guru to the women of the village.

This allows Ryman to examine the impact of technologies that are often talked about as having the potential to level the playing field, to more easily bring information to those that have not had it in a world where information is the basis of power and wealth. One one level he uses this to do the classic science fiction job of using the future as a mirror for the present – the Air technology representing the effect of the World Wide Web – and how claims of empowerment are often made false by the forces of established commerce and unthinking cultural imperialism.

Ryman, however, goes much further than this. He uses the events to create a conversation between past, present and future, and explore the complex relationship they have in all of us, ultimately suggesting that if in our headlong rush into the future the we lose sight of our past it will leave us as impoverished as as if we dig in our heels and refuse to accept progress at all.

For me, this book reinforced just how good a writer Geoff Ryman is. The sense of place and culture he evokes is superb, quite alien no doubt to most readers and yet rendered utterly real and personal by the well drawn characters and their social interactions. He makes huge themes approachable by exploring them on a personal level, as they affect small, everyday lives. This is also excellent science fiction, although it does not necessarily fit with Ryman's recently stated aim of making a science fiction that was meticulously realistic “hard SF”; there is something archetypal about it, something mythic. In this collision of past, present and future, of East and West, of Have and Have-nots, Ryman has given us a fable for the cyber age. show less

This is one of those books that I put off reading because I knew it was going to be so good. I’m a depressive, and sometimes exposing yourself to a truly great writer and a truly great book makes it difficult to keep the shields up and stop yourself responding to the emotions generated by reading it. It’s tough enough to keep an even keel as it is. I paid the price for this, along with one or two others, but it was worth it in the end. Certainly the best science fiction novel of the new show more century, if not one of the all-time greats. A beautiful, heartbreaking, hopeful joy of a book. I have this fantasy that maybe The bloody Tubridy Show on Radio One will adopt it for their book club and it’ll sell loads and the world will genuinely become a better place as a result. If the plain people of Ireland could handle Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, they could sure as hell handle this, is what I think. show less

I must admit I became enamoured of Geoff Ryman’s work after reading The King’s Last Song, a superb tale which relates the story of an archaeologist working on the stupendous site of Angkor Wat where he finds a book of golden leaves which is a memoir written by Jayavarman Seven, one of the first Buddhist kings in Cambodia. The second story reveals the contents of the memoir as its being written. The third story revolves around a former Khmer Rouge policeman. The intersection of these show more stories haunts me still, years after having read it.

Since then, I’ve read just about everything Ryman has written, and have always been deeply affected.

Ryman’s latest novel, Him, surpasses anything he has written thus far. In my opinion, the skill and scope of the novel firmly places him in the same league as Rushdie and Atwood. And like those luminaries’ works, Him is destined to not only become a classic in literature which transcends genre, but join that cannon of books which are banned and burned.

Him is a reimagining of the mythology of Jesus, and what Ryman creates is believable, sensitive, devastating. As always, his writing is precise, his characters clearly defined, his pacing and plot fraught with tension.

Ryman’s exploration reveals a pregnant woman married off to a man who is essentially the village idiot. She cannot account for her pregnancy, thus the virgin birth. He has been exiled for preaching questionable views of the Torah. The marriage is difficult in that neither wishes any sexual congress, and yet they do somehow manage children. The eldest child, born female and named Avigayil, becomes a transgender individual, and after serving an apprenticeship as a stonemason, goes on walk-about preaching a new interpretation of the Hebrew texts. As expected, their following grows. The essential points of the Jesus story are followed.

But what Ryman does with the characters and events is startling, provoking, and utterly memorable. Maryam’s shock, fear, and disgust of her daughter’s actions is made abundantly clear, to the point she refers to her daughter, now identifying as male and Yeshu, as It, or the Cub.

Yosef barLevi, the hapless husband and father, stumbles his way through existence, incapable of providing for his family, of demonstrating any act of connection.

And Avigayil-become-Yeshu, rockets through phases of recklessness, demand, and grief, until embracing their course of action as a teacher, a prophet, and in the end a god.

Ryman examines profound discovery and self-realization, ripping away any sentimentality and doctrine, and in the end exposes the core of what it means to be human, and to love.

I will not reveal the last passage of Him. Suffice it to say I read it at 3:00 a.m., weeping because of the beauty of what Ryman had written, and the emotional impact of what he had to say.

If Him doesn’t make the shortlist for the Booker, the Giller, and the GG, there is something truly wrong with our understanding of stunning literature. And you should go out right now, obtain a copy, read it, weep, and then give Him a permanent place in your library. show less