Air: Or, Have Not Have

Author: Geoff Ryman

The internet changed our lives in ways that, even now, we probably don't fully appreciate. But what is the effect of the internet? To what extent are we different from how we were before this instantaneous contact with the world? In Air, Geoff Ryman takes us to a remote village in Central Asia, a village that is aware of the modern world but is not part of it and, so far as it is aware, has no need of it. Meanwhile, a new advance on the internet is being developed, something called "Air" that gives you a direct mental connection to the world. By pure chance, Chung Mae, an illiterate peasant woman, gets Air downloaded into her brain before anyone else in the world. She is smart, running her own little fashion business which makes her the automatic repository of the hopes and worries if the other village women. Once she gets used to this strange thing that has happened to her, she sees how much it is going to affect life in the village. Slowly, she starts to prepare her fellow villagers for a transformation she sees as inevitable, but in the process unleashes social and personal troubles that affect her and everyone she has ever known. Air recounts the wrenching transformation of an ancient, ageless way of life into hyperfast modern connectivity. It is a painful, moving, and in the end beautiful account of the terrors of our fast-moving and uncaring world, and of what is lost in any abandonment of tradition. Air won the Arthur C. Clarke, the BSFA and the James Tiptree Jr. Awards. It is a prime example of the movement Ryman himself has dubbed "mundane sf", fiction that focuses on the world around us and the everyday consequences of contemporary science and technology.

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The Child Garden, which won the Arthur C, Clarke and the John W, Campbell Memorial Awards, is set in a future where global warming has transformed the world, and where everything is bioengineered so that houses are actually life forms. So prevalent is the reliance on genetic engineering that viruses are used for everything, including education. The story is centred on an actress who is immune to these viruses, and whose attempts to stage an opera based on The Divine Comedy brings her into contact with the gestalt mind that rules the world.

Anyone interested in the idea of mundane science fiction would be advised to seek out When It Changed: Science Into Fiction edited by Ryman. For this project, 15 writers were paired with 15 scientists and wrote stories inspired by their ideas and research. Authors featured include Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod, Adam Roberts, Liz Williams, Simon Ings and Justina Robson.