Customer Reviews

Air: Or, Have Not Have

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Air is a brilliantly conceived book that- at its very core- is a damning indictment of the "civilized" world's immoral disregard of cultures considered "primitive" and therefore inferior, even expendable. At the same time, it's also a novel about hope, and the remarkable resiliency of the human spirit. These messages shine brightly together in Ryman's clever story, where a Karzistan village- filled with people living meaningful, dignified lives in their own way- is disrupted and change forever when the villagers are selected as guinea pigs in an ill-fated United Nations experiment involving Air, a quantum device intended to transmit a flood of worldwide information directly into their targeted brains- in essence, "westernizing" them in an instantaneous and overwhelming fashion. The result is chaos for the villagers, even death, and the beginning of a strange, almost magical journey for Chung Mae, a village elder who becomes a seer of sorts, and a warrior for survival of her people. Although very different from those of us in the west, Ryman's characters are not only believable, but universal and immediately familiar. As intriguing as the book's premise is, it's these sharply defined characters that keep the pages turning, as we weep for what they lost forever and cheer them on to victory. I can't recommend this book highly enough, especially for those who "hate" science fiction because they have no idea what it's capable of. Air will change their minds.

Another science fiction novel that touches on the themes of dignity and resiliency of the human spirit is An Audience for Einstein, an intelligent young adult title. I'm far too old to wear that young adult label myself, but still found it enjoyable and highly worthwhile.

Air is not only one of the best sci-fi novels I have read in a long time, but one of the best novels as well. Ryman's characters are portrayed so convincingly, and their world is so vivid that the reader is completely enveloped in their strange and all-too-human story. It's a book that I finished with great regret, for I will never be able to visit a world like this again, and that's what makes a great piece of fiction. Chung Mae takes her place among fiction's great heroines. A superb and satisfying read with every page. I simply loved it.

This is a beautiful, elegant and enigmatic story. Its heroine is Chong Mae, a self-styled fashion consultant in what may be the remotest village in Kyrgyzstan in the year 2020. The book is concerned with what happens to Mae and the other people in her village when an attempt is made to test a new form of communications system, Air, which will link all of the people in the world in a kind of mental internet.

Although Air is the speculative fiction device that seems to drive the novel, the book is really about sociological phenomena including social organization, the place of the individual in society, the acceptance and rejection of technological change, rural versus urban society, the elements in society that are first to capitalize on technological change, and the role of early adapters. That broad range sounds quite daunting. But when told from the perspective of Mae, it is also about more basic human elements like family, love, friendship and responsibility.

By incorporating forces unleashed by the test of Air, we are also able to examine the relationship of the past to the present and the present to the future.

With all these elements one might expect Air to be a gigantic sprawling novel, but in fact it operates on an intimate scale, following Mae around while she performs her daily activities, aimed at furthering her own life as well as preparing her village for inevitable technological change. Some of the elements are exceedingly simple and commonplace, yet reflect larger social forces. For example, Mae is attuned to the traditional activities of her village, and, as her vision of the world becomes expanded, can see how there might be a market for the decorative collars handmade by the women in her village. She ends up in internet contact with a fashionista in New York, who helps to make the collars a cutting-edge fashion and political statement. At the same time, Mae develops a relationship with her New York contact that will eventually allow one of her neighbors to preserve her oppositional beliefs to the national government. And yet, this political scale develops in an organic way so naturally from village life that one scarcely notices the transition to national politics.

Two elements make the book enigmatic. The first is the appearance of unexpected phenomena that we might find easier to accept in a more technologically developed world at a later date. The second is the author's reason for introducing these phenomena. One expects that they have some purpose in the author's scheme, especially since the author explores a society substantially different from the reader's, to illuminate our understanding. And yet the author is so skillful in his writing that even though we may not immediately understand his purpose, we accept the phenomena. Finally, even the secondary title "Have Not Have" remains an enigma.

Don't read this book if you are looking for high adventure amidst titanic events. But if you are looking for an examination of the life of a dynamic individual in a small society, you are sure to enjoy this book.

This was a thoughtful and interesting book, but there were some major flaws, too. With a good editor, it could have been five stars. First, there is a ridiculous, anatomically impossible pregnancy that seems to have been thrown in for fun, and second, the last third of the book drags on and on with needless complications that do not serve the plot. Worth a read if you like sci fi, as it has all the good *and* bad points of the genre. Not for the general reader.

Mae is the "Fashion Expert" of a remote village in Central Asia. For her, and the village, life as they know it will be forever changed after a disastrous test of a new form of "internet" called Air, and this is the story of how they all learn to cope with the coming new world.

If you like your Sci-Fi full of action and battles then this book will not appeal to you. Instead you are given a cast of characters who you gradually come to care about. The book starts a little slow till the test of Air occurs and then it settles into itself and easily keeps your attention till the end.

I was glad I read this novel. Its one that'd I'd heard from other people was good - and I was happy to find that the grapevine was right in this case. This is different from most other Sci-Fi novels I've read. It's about people - and in this case the have-nots of society and how a radical change of technology affects their lives. Deprived and uneducated does not necessarily mean stupid and its something that the developers of technology ignore at their peril as this novel clearly illustrates.