In When Gravity Fails (1987), George Alec Effinger transports us to the year 2172 and drops us gently into the Budayeen, a walled quarter within a city located near the forbidding Sahara Desert. The world has long since become politically Balkanized; the old mega-countries are now fractured into republics, kingdoms, principalities, and emirates. It is an otherwise quite recognizable place. People travel in traditional conveyances, cars, ships, and planes. Communication technologies are no more advanced than the ones we use today. Economics are not necessarily manipulated by vast corporations controlled by unseen hands, but are still very much a matter of personal dealings in small markets, souks, and shops. Business is business.
Religion too is still with us. The Budayeen, its surrounding city, and all of North Africa is permeated by Islamic civilization. The Word of the Prophet is revered, the surahs of his Qu’ran are respectfully observed, and, inshallah, peace prevails.
Nevertheless, the Budayeen is a dangerous place. It is a rough-and-tumble tourist trap, featuring bars, clubs, street thieves, con artists, flagrant prostitutes, and murderous predators, all rather casually policed, with a well-populated cemetery.
The distinguishing difference in this world of tomorrow is the development of medical procedures and pharmacology with particular regard to and much encouragement of physical re-engineering and sexual transformation. Men can readily become women and vice versa, producing an indeterminate sexual gestalt and a general climate of experimentation and tolerance. 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” – or, more menacingly, black market personality modifiers. By the simple expedient of “chipping in” a small circuit board package, one can become any fictional character from literature or any actual character from history from James Bond to Genghis Khan. Under the stimulation of a “moddie”, one vividly experiences that person in thought, word, and deed for as long as one wishes, 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 safely, unaltered by surgery, 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.
Marid is an easy-going hustler from the Maghreb, an arid, desolate region of Algeria, where the common denominator is poverty. He has found a home in the Budayeen, pulling himself up by his bootstraps from nothing to next-to-nothing by virtue of his reliability and brass. He has an uneasy relationship with the police, welcome acceptance by nightclub proprietors, camaraderie with his 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. 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 throw 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.”
Politics is politics, so even the Budayeen is not impervious to influences agitating the world outside 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. A monster is on the loose. 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 cajoles and 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”. He wrote two sequels to When Gravity Fails. A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991) return Marid Audran, Friedlander Bey, the Budayeen, and many 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.
George Alec Effinger was born in Cleveland, Ohio and lived much of his life in New Orleans. His employment of courteous Arabic verbal genuflections and Muslim pieties add spice, and flavor his trilogy with cultural insight. If you relish science-fiction whodunits, inshallah, you may enjoy all three.