Air: Or, Have Not Have

This was one of my favorite books of the year. It's outstanding science fiction, but I'm going to give it to friends who don't even think that they like science fiction. They'll like this -- like Snow Crash or Cloud Atlas or Wicked, this is book which should delight readers of all stripes. I couldn't put this book down, and when I had to, I longed to get back to it. Air has the texture, richness, and fantastical complications (ghosts, visions, layering of mythology and folklore and technology and history) of other slipstream Ryman novels. It's a remarkable and magical act of transformation on Ryman`s part, and it's an experience that transforms his reader as well. I fell in love with his characters, and am still carrying them around in my head. The ending is literally transcendent. Air is not only profound, it`s also marvelously written, deeply joyful, and -- even more rare -- optimistic.

I'm not going to do Air justice, but just buy and it and read it anyway. Now. This is an amazing novel of ideas about the future of the internet as well as the future of the third world. The characters are diverse, strange, funny, very likeable, and amazingly real. I have no idea how Ryman can write completely convincingly ( and with his usual high degree of eloquence) from the perspective of a middle-aged uneducated ethnic Chinese woman in a fictional far-East country in the near future (whew), but, well, you'll see. Moving, optimistic (which is such a rarity in science fiction these days!), and resonant, Air really may be Ryman's best. Not to be missed!

Geoff Ryman's Air is brilliant. It's the story of a woman in a small village in Karzistan (a fictional stan country, a mixture of Chinese and Turkish and native people) who encounters a new communications technology, Air, that will connect the entire world. There's a preliminary test of the system, and there are problems so it is delayed for a year, but Mae has already connected with it, and through it with a neighbour who died during the test. Her life is in turmoil, because of this and because of the modernization of her village. As she learns more about technology and the world and about Air and its abilities, her life and society change radically. This is a fascinating, complicated story involving human, village, national, and international politics and the human consequences and benefits of technology. I can't recommend this one too much. I loved the way this novel worked like Air, letting me into Mae's world. I was sorry to leave it.

This has been an explosive and culminating year for cyberpunk, a year in which that genre's trademark techniques of alientation, info-density and kitchen-sink heterogeneity have been applied with climactic success to three very different projects: Rudy Rucker's far-future young adult space opera Frek and the Elixir, Neal Stephenson's stupendous magnum opus The Baroque Trilogy, and now, Geoff Ryman's relatively short and seemingly innocuous AIR, about a remote mountain village in Central Asia, and the efforts of its "fashion expert," a married, middle-aged woman named Chung Mae, to come to grips with the latest version of the Internet. Don't be fooled. Chung Mae's adventures, while limited to her village and the nearby provincial capitol, are the most mind-blowing emotional, intellectual, terror and sense-of-wonder filled thrill ride since Dan Simmons's Hyperion. And in the same way that Neal Stephenson's 3000 page Baroque Trilogy deals with the previous global social, political, religious, scientific, and economic revolution that gave us our modern world, AIR is a rigorous, visceral, intensely moving and completely convincing portrayal of the next one--all from the point of view of an illiterate, "developing world" wife and mother, who happens to be the most real, engaging and three-dimensional character I've ever encountered in any science fiction book. Get to know her, care for her, and, yes, worry about her, and by page 200, you'll witness a series of revelations--personal, social, political, biological, and even cosmological--so explosive, you'll think the book cannot possibly top itself--but you'll be only half-way through. There are several plateaus yet to go, on the way to a climax that had me in tears (literally) and at the same time filled me with hope. This is the year that cyberpunk goes from apocalyptic to revolutionary. The revolution won't be televised. But it will be AIRed.

You never know what Ryman is going to do next. The Child Garden is an SF classic - Was is a superb mainstream novel (well, as mainstream as Ryman does) - 253 is experimental in the best sense of the word, and in my opinion one of the most moving books of the 1990s - Lust is ... uncategorisable. So you pick up Air not knowing quite what to expect. Set in a fictional "stan" where the isolated villagers face the imposition of world e-culture feeding straight to the head, Ryman uses the underlying SF tropes with characterstic lightness of touch to tell a story about the way that people use their lives, and use others' lives. It is a truly brilliant book. It may even be better than the Child Garden - and Was - and 253. And that's not something I ever expected to write. Buy it.