First book review I have posted here for ages – usually I write them for the week ahead at the weekend, and at Eastercon there was no chance of that happening. Also because it’s Hugo season and I’m involved this year, I can’t do reviews for the finalists. Anyway, here we go with Air by Geoff Ryman, who I bumped into several times last weekend.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
She lay in bed, pushing herself into the corner of the alcove, her face stretched into a grin she could not explain. Her family and friends were crowded around. They knew Mae had been inside Mrs Tung when she died.
When I first read it in 2006, I wrote:
I mostly agree with Gene Melzack and Iain Emsley, and where I differ from them I agree with Claude Lalumière [link dead]. This is a great novel about the changes wrought in our world by the new communications technology. Unlike most such novels, rather than fixating on the technology itself, Ryman looks at what the coming information revolution will mean to ordinary people living ordinary lives. Unlike any other such story I have read, his characters are not teenagers living in Western affluence, but villagers in a fictional Central Asian country, at the intersection of the Turkic and Chinese cultural spheres, in other words about as far from the West as you can culturally get in today’s world. I thought it was fascinating and compassionate.
However. Ryman is a proponent of the “mundane science fiction” school and oddly enough the two most problematic elements for me in the book for me were the two most fantastic ones. The physical flood threatening to overwhelm the village threatened to be a rather overstated echo of the metaphorical deluge of the new technology, but I think Ryman just about got away with it in the end. The heroine’s bizarre pregnancy, however, just did not work for me.
Sixteen years on, I stand by both limbs of that judgement. It’s a great book about the impact of technology on a previously isolated culture, and in a lot of respects feels a lot more prophetic now than it did then – the concept of Air is pretty close to how Facebook developed in our timeline. But I still find it hard to swallow (if you see what I mean) the heroine’s pregnancy, and that kills my suspension of disbelief, however much I liked the rest of it.
Air won all three of the BSFA, Tiptree and Clarke Awards presented in 2006, only the second novel (so far) to have got the treble after Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. I think Air has stood the passage of time better. You can get it here.
Both Accelerando, by Charles Stross, and Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod, were also on the BSFA and Clarke shortlists. Also on the BSFA list were 9tail Fox, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and Living Next Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson. I felt that all of these books had flaws, but would probably have voted for Ken MacLeod. The BSFA Short Fiction award went to “Magic for Beginners”, by Kelly Link, which also won the Nebula and which I loved.
The other three books on the Clarke shortlist were Banner of Souls, by Liz Williams, Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds, which I have not read. I’m surprised that Ishiguro did not win; as a judge I think I’d have been torn between MacLeod and Williams.
I have not read any of the novels on the Tiptree Honor List apart from the winner. The others were A Brother’s Price, by Wen Spencer; Misfortune, by Wesley Stace; Remains, by Mark W. Tiedemann; and Willful Creatures, by Aimee Bender. The shortlist also included short stories by Vonda N. McIntyre and Margo Lanagan, the latter of which I have read but cannot now remember much about. The long list included another twelve novels, four short stories, a website and a non-fiction piece, none of which rings a bell.
The following year, the three awards went to four book, the Tiptree being shared by Shelley Jackson’s Half Life and Cat Valente’s In the Night Garden, the BSFA going to End of the World Blues, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and the Clarke to Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison.
