Air by Geoff Ryman

Yesterday we had the second meeting of my little book club. This meeting got postponed several times, but we finally got together to talk about Geoff Ryman's award winning Air: Or, Have Not Have.

This is a wonderful book, no wonder why it's won the awards that it has - it's won British Science Fiction Awards, Arthur C. Clarke Award and James Tiptree, Jr. Award, as well as being nominated for a Nebula. It's literary value is undeniable: it's one of the best written books I've read in a while. The story takes place in a little fictional country somewhere in the border of China, but the way Ryman describes the culture, the people and the relationships is so vivid you can just see everything in your mind's eye as it happens.

Although the base story is science fiction - coming of Air, a new post-internet 11th dimension networking technology to a backward isolated village - the real value and meaning of the story is in the characters and their relationships. The main character is a woman named Mae who has an accident when an Air test is performed in their village, and who is determined to make sure that the village is ready for the inevitable coming of the technology. Ryman is one of those very rare male writers who can write good and believable female characters - as you would imagine, in a little mountain village the basis of the society are the women, and Ryman describes them with superb finesse and sensitivity. In fact, all his characters, male and female, are some of the best written characters I've come across with.

These were all the thing we agreed on. However it's not a book of the year for me for two reasons. Firstly, no matter how good the writing was - and I can't emphasize enough that it was really first class - the book is not a page turner. It's a delight to read, but on the other hand it's just as easy to put aside - there are only few scenes where you have to keep reading. Second reason was purely to do with a plot element that would be too much of a spoiler to go into, but it's enough to say that there was one thing in the book that was completely imaginary while everything else was realistic and it really bothered me.

It's a good book though, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone. Because it's rare literary value I would recommend it to people who normally don't read science fiction - they might even enjoy it more, especially if you consider the plot element that I had problem with an allegory (I'm just too damn literal for it). I wouldn't be surprised to see this book in the Hugo short list later this year.

You can't add any more comments, but if you wish you can email the author.