When Gravity Fails
Ratings35
Average rating3.7
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.”
Picked this one from a bookclub friend's TBR and it was a good one! A mix of those film noir movies and [a:Mickey Spillane 50948 Mickey Spillane https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1318950096p2/50948.jpg] type of ‘no nonsense', first-person, who dunnits, with a dash of [b:Altered Carbon 40792913 Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1) Richard K. Morgan https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531415180l/40792913.SY75.jpg 2095852]'s uncertainty as to who you're actually meeting.I don't usually like the who dunnits as some are really easy to figure out and I'm not fond of murders as the base for a story. This did have some of gruesome but it definitely did not give things away too soon.
Had i read this book in the 80s or 90s, i would have loved it, as it provides exactly what i had expected then from a noir cyberpunk. Unfortunately, today it feels seriously dated - not only in its technology, but also in its form and storyline. Also, it's supposedly set in an Arab world, but the characters think American, behave American and speak American - nothing actually feels Middle Eastern at all, but rather Chicago.