Book 46: "Air" by Geoff Ryman
Friday, June 19th, 2009 12:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwake"We are the party of progress in our village. Ah? But there is another party. It goes around destroying the TV sets. My brave boss Mrs Chung Mae tries to teach our children, our women, our men, how to use Air when it comes, she teaches us on the TV. And the Schoolteacher prevents her! The Schoolteacher actually tries to stop us learning. He breaks the TV! That is what we face! While all of you are going to the moon!"
Air is the future, it is Internet inside your head, and it will be universal. As soon as she hears about Air, Chung Mae realises that her job as her village's fashion expert is threatened, and that her village is in danger of being left behind as the rest of the world surges ahead into the future. She may be a peasant from a small country in central Asia, living in a remote mountain village which has only recently received its first communal television, but Mae faces the coming changes head on.
The book skips between the small world of the village, with its resistance to progress and suspicion of government interference, the rest of Karzistan, as a group of villagers go to the city to attend a conference about the coming of Air, and the wider world beyond, as Mae's new business brings her into contact with the net savvy denizens of New York.
The mood is constantly changing between hopes and fears for the future, the villagers in conflict and co-operating, happiness at government help and fear of government clamp-downs. "Sizzling Sezen's Pop Picks" made me laugh when I was reading her forthright opinions of Karz musicians, but just a few pages later the tone became much darker as Mae and her friends risk falling foul of the Karzistan government.
The only thing I didn't like about this book was Mae's monstrous pregnancy and the child's strange birth. Mae could have realised that severely disabled people would be able to communicate and operate equipment via Air, without the author needing to introduce this element of outright fantasy.
Air is the future, it is Internet inside your head, and it will be universal. As soon as she hears about Air, Chung Mae realises that her job as her village's fashion expert is threatened, and that her village is in danger of being left behind as the rest of the world surges ahead into the future. She may be a peasant from a small country in central Asia, living in a remote mountain village which has only recently received its first communal television, but Mae faces the coming changes head on.
The book skips between the small world of the village, with its resistance to progress and suspicion of government interference, the rest of Karzistan, as a group of villagers go to the city to attend a conference about the coming of Air, and the wider world beyond, as Mae's new business brings her into contact with the net savvy denizens of New York.
The mood is constantly changing between hopes and fears for the future, the villagers in conflict and co-operating, happiness at government help and fear of government clamp-downs. "Sizzling Sezen's Pop Picks" made me laugh when I was reading her forthright opinions of Karz musicians, but just a few pages later the tone became much darker as Mae and her friends risk falling foul of the Karzistan government.
The only thing I didn't like about this book was Mae's monstrous pregnancy and the child's strange birth. Mae could have realised that severely disabled people would be able to communicate and operate equipment via Air, without the author needing to introduce this element of outright fantasy.
