Jets drop shouldered over a working neighborhood where towels come up gray and infants startle at midnight landings. When Praxis peacewrights Yara and Lio arrive, they don’t bring speeches. They bring a wall the whole block can read. On it, air stops lying: ultrafine particles, black carbon, thrust-reverser events, APU draws, runway choices—posted live where a deli owner, a school nurse, and a teen on a BMX can watch the numbers move.
What begins as an ‘airport operations’ issue turns out to be a citywide pattern of sold calm: Quiet Hours that aren’t quiet, Flood Windows that push factory runoff into south-block bathrooms, Night Cool that chills a trailer court to damp, Glow Lanes that blind cyclists, warehouse music that smears into bedrooms, studio ‘privacy masking’ that hisses through a senior park, and a cargo bay whose evaporative coolers breathe bleach. Each time, Praxis answers with instruments any neighbor can verify: public rings on gate power, curfews tied to wind and data, torque and tide chairs, dew and light caps, broadband forklift alarms, shore power for reefers, pink-noise bans, chemical interlocks, and hoods on the beams that cross apartment windows at dawn.
The novel’s engine is procedural wonder—tactile fixes, posted caps, and the courage to insist that rules be visible and ordinary. Antagonists come polished and polite; they leave refunds on walls and signatures under schedules they can’t quietly wriggle past. Between a rec-hall forum and a clinic mirror, a place learns to breathe again: bread bakes, windows stop rattling, birds return to the basin instead of the roofline, and a grandmother opens her kitchen without coughing.
Under Air is solarpunk for readers who want honest tools, civic mystery over spectacle, and the pleasure of watching a city debug itself in public. Standalone-friendly within Praxis of the Lumen Age, it’s engineering as drama, community as protagonist, and justice you can measure—numbers big enough for a child to read; changes sturdy enough to keep when the crew packs up
Genre: Science Fiction
What begins as an ‘airport operations’ issue turns out to be a citywide pattern of sold calm: Quiet Hours that aren’t quiet, Flood Windows that push factory runoff into south-block bathrooms, Night Cool that chills a trailer court to damp, Glow Lanes that blind cyclists, warehouse music that smears into bedrooms, studio ‘privacy masking’ that hisses through a senior park, and a cargo bay whose evaporative coolers breathe bleach. Each time, Praxis answers with instruments any neighbor can verify: public rings on gate power, curfews tied to wind and data, torque and tide chairs, dew and light caps, broadband forklift alarms, shore power for reefers, pink-noise bans, chemical interlocks, and hoods on the beams that cross apartment windows at dawn.
The novel’s engine is procedural wonder—tactile fixes, posted caps, and the courage to insist that rules be visible and ordinary. Antagonists come polished and polite; they leave refunds on walls and signatures under schedules they can’t quietly wriggle past. Between a rec-hall forum and a clinic mirror, a place learns to breathe again: bread bakes, windows stop rattling, birds return to the basin instead of the roofline, and a grandmother opens her kitchen without coughing.
Under Air is solarpunk for readers who want honest tools, civic mystery over spectacle, and the pleasure of watching a city debug itself in public. Standalone-friendly within Praxis of the Lumen Age, it’s engineering as drama, community as protagonist, and justice you can measure—numbers big enough for a child to read; changes sturdy enough to keep when the crew packs up
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for Avery North's Under Air