laceblade | Air by Geoff Ryman

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Air by Geoff Ryman

At this point, I've forgotten a lot of what was discussed when my feminist science fiction book club met to discuss Geoff Ryman's Air.

I liked most of this book. Chung Mae was a compelling and competent protagonist, but still severely limited by a patriarchal society that was technologically lagging behind everybody else on the planet.

Air is like the Internet, but unstoppable and entering into your mind. It take Chung Mae's community, which barely has any telephones, by surprise. People die from shock. They are given another year to prepare. Chung Mae is illiterate, but the only person who knows how to manipulate the TV.

It won the Tiptree Award in 2005. The Award is supposed to recognize literature that pushes the boundaries of gender, but I am not seeing how that happened in this book. I would easily agree that the book is feminist, just like Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North, I am really not seeing what is happening that is gender-bendy. At book club, someone suggested that because Chung Mae's society is so patriarchal, it might be that women taking charge of the community was gender-bendy, but that's a pretty weak argument in my opinion.

Also, our book club spent the most amount of time talking about a specific thing that is spoiler, but also does not ruin the plot of the book. I'll still put it behind a cut just in case.

But in the end, Chung Mae gets pregnant in her stomach. It's revealed that she gets pregnant in this way by giving a man a blow job and then tasting her own fluids, stuff mixes in her belly, and that's where she gets pregnant!

This was shocking to all of us, especially in a book so feminist in every other respect. Still, this seemed like an old wive's tale, meant to scare little girls away from sexual activity of any kind. And yet, here it is in this book coming true.

Most people at book club laughed it off, agreeing that the author is simply massively uninformed (when Chung Mae menstruates, Ryman says that she "shoves a rag" up inside of herself, and I'm sorry, but that is not what we do with rags, sir!). And maybe that's it!

But still, the book essentially ends with Chung Mae giving birth to this stomach-baby....by literally puking it up. I am convinced that Ryman is trying to make a huge point here, but none of us got it.
ETA: Read

badgerbag's comments! She has a very thought-provoking reading that makes more sense to me!

He is going to be one of the two guests of honor at 2009's Wiscon, and I'm looking forward to having the opportunity to ask him.

Spoiler-event aside, I highly recommend this book! I loved his writing.

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So I had this thought. Someone could write a parody of Air, in which a woman gets pregnant with a cyborg baby, from having sex with a vibrator.

OMG YES.

BWAHAHHAHAA!

That was the one thing that I didn't like about the book; it just seemed so random... like, hey, there's this book starring an awesome kickass woman character. Better shove a pregnancy in there somewhere cuz she's a woman!

Were you at the WisCon when Ryman won the Tiptree? He was FREAKIN' HILARIOUS (like, being chased around the auction to avoid being made to wear a hot pink bra, & crawling under the stage to avoid it, & then putting the bra on his butt... the kind of random Tiptree auction stuff that sounds really childish & stupid when you type it up but is awesome when it is WisCon authors). I can't wait to see him back as GoH.

No, I wasn't! I have only been to the two most recent Wiscons.

It's awesome that he's hilarious, though, I'm now looking forward to him being there even more!

And yeah, we talked about that too, how pregnancy was just put in there and seemed to serve no purpose. But it's exciting to have these questions, though, so we can ask him! I haven't gone to GoH-centric panels in the past, but I think I would like to go to his (I haven't yet read anything by Klages, but our book club will definitely read something by her before Wiscon).

About the stomach pregnancy, I thought it was a jolt to reality, a shock to our (the readers') perception. The stomach pregnancy is a bit about consumption and it is also impossible. But Mae accepts it like she accepts the unreality and the shock of Internet-in-your-head. How can an author catapult us the readers into a state of culture shock when we are used to reading about all sorts of impossibilities? The stomach pregnancy tipped me over that edge into a sort of genre shock. The birth of the baby who would be helpless in Mae's world, but who would be able to navigate the world with Air, I thought was a very depressing commentary on how things can change so fast that older generations are alienated completely from their own children. More about gender stuff in a bit...

Wow! That is a very insightful reading of the text, and I like it a lot. I'm probably going to reread this a few more times and get more excited.

oh glad you like it. I thought of it as a jolt from "science fiction" to "magical realism".

there was a definite moment when mae started doing impossible things - walking through the walls - and the scenes with the talking dog (who was having great difficulty making the painful and tech-assisted or tech-forced transition between animal and sentient being)

Yes! I was never quite able to put my hand on it exactly, and I think you've nailed it. At least, it makes perfect sense to me.

Most people at book club laughed it off, agreeing that the author is simply massively uninformed (when Chung Mae menstruates, Ryman says that she "shoves a rag" up inside of herself, and I'm sorry, but that is not what we do with rags, sir!).

I think this is a very unjust and unnecessarily harsh judgement of Ryman. Yes, he flubbed a detail about the nitty-gritty of third-world menstrual care, but it certainly wasn't a vital detail - Chung Mae started menstruating, she dealt with it, and she and the story continued on with their business. Readers (and TV & movie viewers) routinely forgive much more egregious and plot-supporting errors without criticizing writers as massively uninformed.

Okay, but using a rag isn't really third-world menstrual care. It's the same thing as package of Always that I buy at Walgreen's - you put the "rag" in your underwear, and bleed on it. Lots of people use cloth rags, too. Shoving a rag inside your vagina is quite different, not to mention unhealthy and dangerous.

I guess when we were talking about it at book club, it wasn't a "uninformed" so much as a "he didn't bother to ask a lady" sort of thing. Which is basically the same thing! But in my mind, there's a difference. Clearly, I forgave Ryman because I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. But it happens frequently enough in fiction that I think it's worth my bringing it up as a complaint.

The thing is, "massively uninformed" was the way you initially chose to phrase it. That's some pretty heavy wording for getting a 10-word sentence wrong in a 100,000 word novel.

Now, I realize that this is clearly a pretty big issue for the women of the book club, but as one of the men of the club, I gotta say that the sudden flash of hostility that I perceived in the room over this is very perplexing. I wonder, if Monette & Bear had made a similar mistake in a small detail of male sexuality in Companion to Wolves, and I responded with the same degree of heat, how would that be taken?

I would guess that I'm above average among men in understanding what's happening during menstruation and the options available to a modern western woman. I've had girlfriends who use disposable pads, reusable ones, cups, and tampons - I've picked them up at the store for them, I've read the packaging inserts and instructions because I'm curious, I remember the outbreak of toxic shock syndrome (back in the '80s???) and understand why it happened, and so on...

By the same token, I had a girlfriend who really hated having the aftereffects of our love making running down her leg after we were done, and I simply can not think of an easy way to describe what she did other than saying she'd just grab a handful of tissues and just shove the wad up between her labia - enough that she could then walk to the kitchen for a glass of water and to the bathroom to pop out her contacts, then back to the bedroom without the tissues going anywhere. So when I read Ryman's description of Chung Mae shoving a rag up herself, that's what I pictured, not a full-blown insertion right up the cervix.

This is something I've noticed before, in workshops and in conversations with readers. I've seen female readers being very aware of how male authors write women, especially when it comes to pregnancy, childbirth, and menstruation. Whether or not such criticism is fair, I don't know. But I think it's a pretty common reaction among critical female readers. I remember one incident in my college workshop where I thought my fellow workshoppers were overly critical of a young man who got one little detail slightly wrong about tampons. I suppose there were other issues at work-- issues of authority.

I think it's mostly upsetting because it jerks me way out of the story. Maybe stomach-pregnancy is magical realism like

badgerbag said, but when someone starts shoving rags up their vaginal opening, I'm more like, WTF IS GOING ON I DON'T UNDERSTAND.

Yeah, authority-- does the author know the rule and is breaking it (ie stomach pregnancy), or do they not know at all, and they are getting something wrong. And different readers have different sensitivities to this sort of thing-- for example my parents get irritated if they are watching a movie about farming and there is some major farm detail wrong. Or we science nerds who are irritated when science details are wrong!

YOU READ CRAZY BOOKS

:DDD

I read WW2 books - D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, Battle of the Bulge, etc etc - which I guess are pretty crazy in "WOW THIS SHIZ ACTUALLY HAPPENED" sort of way.

It is crazy! But that's why I love feminist science fiction, :D

Everything's crazy in its own nway, probably. I used to read stuff about the Civil War all the time, but I've probably forgotten it all by now.

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Air by Geoff Ryman

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stomach pregnancy is really hilarious

Re: stomach pregnancy is really hilarious