Book description
When Gravity Fails, the first Marid novel, is set in a high-tech
near-future featuring a divided USA and USSR, 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 (James Bond, celebrities); bodies shaped to perfection
by surgery. Marid Audran, an unmodified and fairly honest
street-survivor, lives in a decadent Arab ghetto, the Budayeen, and,
against his best instincts, 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. The problem comes to the attention of Budayeen godfather
Friedlander Bey, who makes Audran an offer he can't refuse. Audran
submits to electronic brain enhancement in order to track down and deal
with the killer or killers. George Alec Effinger was born in
Cleveland, Ohio, in 1947. He attended Yale University, where an organic
chemistry course disabused him of the notion of becoming a doctor. He
had the opportunity to meet many of his SF idols thanks to his first
wife, who was Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm's babysitter. With their
encouragement, he began writing science fiction in 1970. He published at
least 20 novels and 6 collections of short fiction including WHEN
GRAVITY FAILS and THE EXILE KISS. As well, he also wrote and published
two crime novels, FELICIA and SHADOW MONEY. With his Budayeen novels,
Effinger helped to found the Cyberpunk genre. He was a Hugo and Nebula
award winner and a favorite amongst fellow SF writers.
