George Alec Effinger's science-fiction whodunit "When Gravity Fails" (1987), transports us to the year 2172, dropping us into the Budayeen, a walled in, rough-and-tumble tourist trap near the forbidding Sahara Desert, featuring bars, clubs, street thieves, prostitutes, and predators, all rather casually policed, with a well-populated cemetery.
In this future world, medical procedures and pharmacology exist for physical re-engineering and sexual transformation. Men can readily become women and vice versa. Direct modifications of the human brain are now commonplace through surgical implants that permit those suitably "wired" to become anyone or anything commercially available in "moddies". By "chipping in" a small circuit board, one can become any character from literature or history from James Bond to Genghis Khan, with true identity submerged. "Daddies" are also on hand - temporary data transfer chips that lend instant knowledge of any language, skill, or corpus of facts, however esoteric, for as long as the chip is in place.
To navigate this world with integrity intact, one must be "the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world." Our narrator, Marid Audran, is such a man. He is an easy-going hustler from the Mahgreb, an impoverished region of Algeria. He has found a home in the Budayeen, pulling himself up by his bootstraps from nothing to next-to-nothing. He has an uneasy relationship with the police, welcome acceptance by nightclub proprietors, a trio of friends, and the love of Yasmin, born a boy, now a voluptuous club dancer with the knockout looks that only surgery could provide.
A Muslim by birth, Marid is well versed in his creed, but knows how to take it or leave it. He refuses to have his brain wired, preferring to find pleasure and solace in pharmaceutical products. As he puts it:
"Drugs are your friends, treat them with respect. You wouldn't throw your friends in the garbage. You wouldn't flush your friends down the toilet. If that's the way you treat your friends or your drugs, you don't deserve to have either. Give them to me."
Even the Budayeen is subject to influences agitating the world beyond its walls. Marid accepts an assignment from a foreign diplomat to locate a missing person. His client is murdered before his eyes. Soon others in his social circle fall victim to grisly homicides. He is recruited by Friedlander Bey, the Budayeen's wealthy godfather, whose interests are threatened by the murders, to track down the killer. To prepare Marid for his dangerous mission, Friedlander Bey intimidates Marid into the brain wiring he has always avoided, adding an extra implant and a rack of special "daddies" that sharpen Marid's senses and suppress fear, anger, hunger, thirst, and lust. His investigation confronts mystery and mayhem with street smarts and hard-boiled banter.
In the book's prefatory page, Effinger (1947 - 2002) acknowledges his debt to Raymond Chandler and his source for the title in a quote from Bob Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". In two sequels, "A Fire in the Sun" (1989) and "The Exile Kiss" (1991), he returns to the Budayeen with Marid, Friedlander Bey, and others of the original characters, including Bill, the transplanted American taxi driver, who has had one of his lungs removed and replaced with a sac that drips a continuous psychotropic fluid into his bloodstream - a deliciously sardonic invention, considering that the author suffered from childhood ailments that rendered him unable to pilot an automobile.
Effinger's employment of courteous Arabic verbal genuflections and Muslim pieties add spice, and flavor his trilogy with cultural insight.
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Konstantin
Very poor quality print
Reviewed in the Netherlands on November 17, 2020
Konstantin
Reviewed in the Netherlands on November 17, 2020
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Justin
Great storytelling and atmosphere, likeable protagonist.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 24, 2015
Kindle Customer
Stunning and street smart Muslim sci fi thriller!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 10, 2018