When Gravity Fails
In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hardway. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he’s available…for a price. For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges...
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In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hardway. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he’s available…for a price. For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can’t refuse. The 200-year-old “godfather” of the Budayeen’s underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time. Wry, savage, and unignorable, When Gravity Fails was hailed as a classic by Effinger’s fellow SF writers on its original publication in 1987, and the sequence of “Marid Audrian” novels it begins were the culmination of his career.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780765313584 (0765313588)
ASIN: 765313588
Publish date: November 1st 2005
Publisher: Orb Books
Pages no: 288
Edition language: English
Series: Marîd Audran (#1)
This book was different, in both good and bad ways. It’s a science fiction book in terms of its setting, but the story was really more of a murder mystery than anything else. It’s set in the Middle East, during the year 2172, and most of the story takes place in a ghetto area. Most of the charact...
I was pretty amazed at Effinger's clairvoyance. He was merely a little pessimistic about how long the technological and cultural changes he envisioned would take to occur.Marid, the protagonist, was born in 2172 — shortly after the collapse of both the Soviet Union and the United States. It's intere...
When Gravity Fails was pretty good, without ever quite achieving greatness. I enjoyed it, but the pieces never entirely came together and swept me away. It was, however, part of my ongoing project to read all the Hugo nominees for novels. It's going to take a while. This book is cyberpunk, with a st...
Goodreads ate my review again and I am once again very angry so I shall make the following comments in lieu of ranting:I liked this book quite a bit and I dearly hope the other two in the series are close to as good.This book makes me think more SF should be set in Muslim cultural areas because I fo...
The Audran Sequence seemed so promising with an interesting world in which many nation-states have fractured and the story is set in a city somewhere in Arabia. However, much of it fell flat for me. Part of the problem is that the series bills itself as cyberpunk noir, while it never really falls ...
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