he isolated mountain village of Kizuldah, Karzistan, is the last place in the world to go online. "After that," Geoff Ryman tells us, "everyone else went on Air."
The Kizuldah villagers learn that the United Nations will conduct a worldwide test. For a few minutes, the entire planet will go on Air, a new format that will make the present online world obsolete. The people of Kizuldah, who have next to no experience with computers, fear for their traditional lifestyle.
Chung Mae is a "fashion expert" in Kizuldah. The day of the test, she's in the company of her neighbor, Old Mrs. Tung. While Mae goes deeper into Air than authorities predicted, Old Mrs. Tung dies as a direct result of the test. Somehow, Mrs. Tung's Air imprint survives, combined with that of Mae. After the test, Mae, unbeknownst to the authorities, retains contact with Air.
Throughout Karzistan, the test is a disaster. Nevertheless, in one year, the whole world will go on Air. In the meantime, villages are supplied with online televisions, so people can learn about Air.
In addition to having to deal with Old Mrs. Tung's invasion of her psyche, Mae must cope with her hopelessly naive husband, Joe, who accepts money from the local loan shark. Joe's inability to pay back the loan imperils the family's home and farm, and the ensuing conflict exacerbates deep schisms within the community.
Mae must also confront newfound erotic passions, a bizarre pregnancy, a global market for her fashion business, an ideological war between the traditionalists who fear Air and the progressives who yearn for it, her status as a social pariah condemned for her iconoclast ways, and government forces who want to exploit her peculiar condition for their own benefit.
And regardless of what occurs in Karzistan, Air will sweep the world.
The have-nots don't always want to have
Expanded from his April 2001 Fantasy & Science Fiction story "Have Not Have," Geoff Ryman's novel Air is something of a return to the approach that characterized the author's celebrated early works: a female protagonist perceived as being powerless, often brutally oppressed by forces who benefit from the status quo. That said, Ryman seems to be more unabashedly brutal in fantasy settings such as The Unconquered Country and The Warrior Who Carried Life. His two SF novels—Air and The Child Garden—are less harsh physically, although no less psychologically profound and probing.
Air's exploration of colonialism allies it with The Unconquered Country most of all, but the scenario of an outcast woman whose particular skills enable her to transform not only herself but her larger community recalls Milena's travails from The Child Garden.
One of Air's great strengths is its refusal to either condemn or condone the changes brought about by technological innovation. The people of Ryman's Kizuldah are materially poor and are not too proud to desire help, but they value their lifestyle and their communal identity. Air, a technology imposed by the colonializing United Nations, threatens to both improve and destroy their lives. Ryman's charmingly eccentric and willful protagonist, Chung Mae, who accepts the inevibility of the world-opening Air, encapsulates this ambiguity in one of the novel's most strikingly memorable pieces of dialogue: "I'm sure the people who do this think they do a good thing. They worry about us like we were children. [...] We don't have time for TV or computers. We face sun, rain, wind, sickness and each other. It is good that they want to help us. [...] But how dare they? How dare they call us have-nots?"
