"Giving an account of oneself": ethics, alterity, air.(Air by Geoff Ryman)(Critical essay)

 
"Of Ground, or Air, or Ought" 
  --Emily Dickinson ("After Great Pain") 

* Despite its own format--the mundane credo and uncluttered, accessible prose--Geoff Ryman's Air (Or, Have Not Have) rides waves of central metaphors, images or motifs of change and transformation concerning both self and community. Flood, time, knitting, and birth are perhaps the most prominent, repeated again and again with increasing frequency until they are woven together in the final pages, with the "the second coming of the Air" (387).(1) In the precipitated epiphany of a child in swaddling clothes, the unnamed messiah's secular holiness is ironically deflated by context--not the lowly manger where the magi found the Christ-child, but the central square of the rebuilt village, where everyone gathers to await the blessed event. The tense excitement deflates when one youngster, affixing televisions to the new bridge, yells "Dad! We'll need more duct tape!" (383). That odd irony--duct tape for the second coming--disrupts the tone and presages a litany of the lost, augurs "mourning" (37) as much as "redemption" (198).

But however ironically undermined this second coming, the child brings a gift: "The babe had been Formatted" (389). The precise nature of this otherworldly gift is knowledge, and the wounds it heals are not the self-inflicted stigmata of some mysterious god's goofy theology, but simple human ignorance, the sort of ignorance that has always produced uneven distributions of power within human societies: "poverty afflicts everything" (149). With the singular technology of Air, every person on the planet--especially the "information have-nots" (9, 19)--will now have unfettered, free access to most of the forms of information that would comprise a high quality education. While information does not constitute knowledge (63), Mae represents the common yearning for a knowledge (11, 99) that would render everyone "experts" (19). The technological conceit upon which the medium will work is called a "Yearning Field" (10), though to justify the science flyman makes oblique references to quantum theory (307) and string theory (10).(2) What precisely Air will do is gift everyone with instant connection to an advanced internet, one circa 2019-20 CE. Once the failures of an initial test format are resolved, it can do so quietly, imperceptibly, and efficiently. When it comes the second time, "Air bloomed as gently as knowledge itself; thing after thing was learned, as ignorance was healed like a suppurated wound" (389).(3)

"Time for a complete makeover" (2)

Air opens memorably: Chung "Mae lived in the last village in the world to go online" (1). With the conventional phrasing of the sentence set against the fact of post-industrial capitalism spreading its profitable technologies to the last, most remote markets on the planet, this rich mix of fairy tale allegory and brutal, melancholic realism nicely frames the contradictions in Kizuldah. a secluded village in the fictional country of Karzistan. Vaguely modeled on present day Kazakhstan, Karzistan is a Central Asian country mixing Turkic and Chinese people, culture, religion, and politics. Only recently finding its independence after years of rule under Chinese communism, the country keenly desires modernization yet also remains anxious about any threat to its international image, something best represented in the novel when Mae's friend Wing Kwan produces a website dedicated to the repression of her own ethnic minority, the Eloi (134, 243-48, 270).

Populated primarily by peasant rice farmers, Kizuldah rests on the threshold of metamorphosis. Between the first test of the Air technology and the second coming, it has a grace period of just one year (56) to make the emotional and psychological preparation necessary for such a radical transformation. Indeed, that is the situation at the beginning. With grown children and a lazy, drunken, disrespectful husband (Chung Joe), Mae supplements her family's meager income from subsistence rice fanning by consulting as the village's "fashion expert" (1), counseling women on cosmetics, providing fancy high-school graduation dresses, and combining the subtle sophistication of city fashions with unsophisticated country taste for gaudy affectation. The village so values her contribution that Teacher Shen presents her with a graduation certificate in "Fashion Studies" (20), even though the 46-year-old Mae actually never completed her own schooling and is functionally illiterate (150, 155). But the initial test of the Air technology disrupts the village; the format's flaws provoke adverse affects in some people. Kuei Ken's wife goes insane and throws herself into a well (31-32). Old Mrs. Tung, who had once been Mac's teacher and is Ken's grandmother, dies of trauma--but not before affecting some magical sort of personality amalgam with Mae (25-29); Air catches or captures or conflates their consciousnesses, and throughout the book Mrs. Tung will occasionally overwhelm Mae and take over.

But that sort of personality fusion is precisely one of the effects Air will produce. It will be a technology for "shared thinking" (208). It presages "ko lab-oh" (65)-collaborative, parallel human consciousness that gets its name from the improvisational music (called "collabo" [111]) that Air's massively multiplayer platform can produce and enhance: "it bounced jagged, strange, brave, bold, stupid, smart" (111). This sort of personality change will produce a moment of singularity, completely transforming human life (224). Later in the novel Mae will say the test caused her own death (128) and revealed that the village itself "has died" (127). Almost immediately following the test Mae comes to believe that she must serve what she eventually calls "the common good" (138), first thinking she can use the new technologies for personal gain, but soon understanding the truly radical empirical change that Air will bring. Her present task becomes preparing the village for that ineluctable moment when (new) knowledge will flood (117, 252, 388) their experience, wiping away the past at the precise moment when, as in the manner of floods, it will provide a fertile ground for future growth. And indeed the flood does come--first in memory as Mrs. Tung subsumes Mae, second physically when on New Year's day the warm winds collapse the heavy winter snows, and finally when the second coming sublimes the human species into air.