When Gravity Fails (The Budayeen Cycle #1)

By: George Alec Effinger

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Synopsis: In a futuristic Middle East, plug-ins can turn anyone into a killer in this &“wry and black and savage&” Nebula and Hugo award finalist (George R. R. Martin). Set in a high-tech near future featuring an ascendant Muslim world and divided Western superpowers, this cult classic takes us into a world with mind- or mood-altering drugs for any purpose, brains enhanced by electronic hardware with plug-in memory additions and modules offering the wearer new personalities, and bodies shaped to perfection by surgery. Marid Audran, an unmodified and fairly honest street hustler, lives in a decadent Arab ghetto, the Budayeen, and holds on tight to his cherished independence. Then, against his best instincts, he becomes involved in a series of inexplicable murders. Some seem like routine assassinations, carried out with an old-fashioned handgun by a man wearing a plug-in James Bond persona; others, involving whores, feature prolonged torture and horrible mutilations. Soon the problem comes to the attention of Budayeen godfather Friedlander Bey—who makes Audran an offer he can&’t refuse. Nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards, the highest honors in the genre, When Gravity Fails, which introduced the cyberpunk Budayeen Cycle, is a pioneering work the Denver Post called &“superior science fiction&” and Harlan Ellison described as &“crazy as a spider on ice skates . . . plain old terrific.&”