---item---
storytitle: Air: Or, Have Not Have
firstname: Geoff
lastname: Ryman
booktitle: Orion 2005
publisher: St. Margin's Griffin
year: 2004
htmldescription:
                    <table width="100%"  border="0" cellspacing="3">
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                        <td class="style3" scope="col"><div align="center"><img src="images/RymanWisCon.jpg" width="144" height="203"><br>
                                <em>Geoff Ryman wearing <br>
              the Tiptree <a href="javascript:popitup('images/tiara1.jpg',185,310)">tiara</a> </em></div></td>
                        <td scope="col"><img src="images/Air.jpg" width="144" height="221"></td>
                      </tr>
                    </table>
                    <p>What happens when all boundaries are crossed,
                        national, cultural, and individual, when &#8220;Air,&#8221; an internet-in-your-head
                      technology, connects people with drastic consequences.
                      Mae, the book&#8217;s heroine, is a rural dressmaker, fashion
                      consultant, and entrepreneur. Flooded with the memories
                      of her 90 year old neighbor, she struggles to maintain
                      her identity against madness. Political machinations and
                      a flood threaten to overwhelm her country and her village
                      in &#8220;Karzistan.&#8221; Mae has to act quickly. The
                      unusual pregnancy in mid-book is jarring, which challenges
                      readers&#8217; expectations of what boundaries stories
                      can push. That level of wrongness dislocates the reader,
                      to give an analogous experience of the boundary-violations
                      the characters are experiencing. [LH] </p>
                    <p>What&#8217;s amazing about Air is not just
                      what it accomplishes but what it avoids. There are many
                      ways this novel could have gone wrong, and as I read it
                      for the first time, I was torn between excitement at having
                        discovered something truly special and fear of the inevitable
                        false step that would ruin it. But Geoff Ryman never
                      stumbled. </p>
                    <p>Air is a smart, moving story about men
                      and women&#8212;especially
                      women&#8212;striving to adapt to a new technology and the
                      threat and promise of cultural change it brings with it.
                      Though the issues it dramatizes are all too real, is never
                      preachy. Its characters are not props in service of a polemic,
                      but three-dimensional human beings you can believe in and
                      care about. And while Kizuldah is a fictional village in
                      an imaginary country, it feels more genuine than many a
                      third-world literary setting I could name. In short, it&#8217;s
                      fantastic. Read it. [MR] </p>
