Air, a meditation on how the future hits

I just finished reading Air by Geoff Ryman. I had gotten most of the way through it–it’s deceptively long, the edition I have has nice small print–and then I had lost track of where I set it down. But now I’ve finished it…

Usually books about how the future is going to hit are somber affairs that try to scare the future-thinking out of you. Ryman here has written a book where the future, and the interconnectedness that the titular Air (a sort of mental Internet) brings, are indeed frightening and even deadly, but are still something to embrace. It’s a book about adapting to change, rather than only fearing it.

The Net-jargon throughout is cute and correctly used, which is refreshing! More importantly, however, the novel is cast fom the point of view of a rural area somewhere in the west of China, so all the jargon is fresh and unfamiliar; this makes for a real change from something like Cory’s books, where the jargon is immediate and assumed as part of everyday life. Here the story is one of culture clash, where one of the cultures is still very much an agricultural one.

If you can handle the slow, somewhat dreamy pace of the narrative, it’s definitely worth reading. I believe it just picked up an award in Canada–well-deserved.