[2] Ryman initially wrote a short story for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction entitled "Have Not Have", which was included in the April 2001 edition[4] (later reprinted in the June 2014 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine[5]).

Air is the story of a town's fashion expert Chung Mae, a smart but illiterate peasant woman in a small village in the fictional country of Karzistan (loosely based on the country of Kazakhstan), and her suddenly leading role in reaction to dramatic, worldwide experiments with a new information technology called Air.

Air is information exchange, not unlike the Internet, that occurs in everyone's brain and is intended to connect the world.

Afterwards, Mae struggles to prepare her people for what is to come while learning all about the world outside her home.

K. J. Killheffer praised Ryman's "humane insight and sympathy" and "incisive meditations on the process of social and cultural change," concluding that the novel is "not merely powerful, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving, but indispensable.