When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger was published just three years after William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Like Gibson’s Case, Effinger’s Audran Marîd requires a wired brain to get the most out of virtual reality. Case uses a plug in his head to exercise his mad hacking skills in an abstract virtual space. Audran has his mental processing power and stamina amped up by implants. Audran can become a simulacrum of a fictional detective like Nero Wolfe. The villain, meanwhile, is dressing like James Bond and ordering his martinis shaken, not stirred. Unlike Case, Audran has the machine forced on him by the local godfather, who needs him to solve an underworld crime. The story takes place in a large middle eastern city that resembles Cairo and has a cast of characters that would be at home in a future remake of Casablanca. Effinger tells a good story. ( )

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. ( )

El Budayén, los bajos fondos de una ciudad árabe anónima, está construido al lado del cementerio, y quien se internen en sus callejones lo hace consciente del peligro que corre: ni sus habitantes ni la policía se preocupan demasiado si un tipo desconocido aparece acuchillado y tirado en una esquina.
Tal es el ambiente en el que se ha criado Marid Audran, un hombretón que nunca ha necesitado llevar armas y que es respetado en su independencia. Pero nadie podría haber imaginado la pesadilla en la que se convertiría su vida después de que un extraño muriera asesinado por alguien conectado a un módulo de James Bond...

I try to think of one thing I got out of this book, and there's nothing positive. ( )

"When Gravity Fails' is an excellent book but it's not for me.

When it came out in 1985, this deeply Noirish tale of murder amongst the demimonde of a Twenty-third Century Arab State where gender modification surgery, and plug-and-play brain implants offering anything from language skills to a new personality, are as common amongst the hustlers, pimps and sex-workers as drink and drugs, must have been well ahead of its time.

The storytelling style makes Chandler seem like a Disney version of Noir and yet it offers a surprisingly compassionate rendering of the inhabitants of the Budayeen, a walled district that is part French Quarter New Orleans and part Casablancan quartiers réservés. The people and the society are beautifully and patiently drawn. The plot is subordinate to its setting. The main focus is on how Marîd Audran sees the Budayeen and his role in it.

At the start of the novel, Audran sees himself as a man whose reputation as an 'honest hustler' has earned him enough respect in the community to keep its violence at bay. Although he thinks of himself as a loner who values independence above love and friendship, it seemed to me that he entertained a fundamentally romantic view of the Budayeen and that it is this view of the place that the rest of the novel assaults as Audran's friends and associates are murdered.

'When Gravity Fails' pulled me fully into Audran's world and made it real. This was, in the end, why I abandoned the novel a third of the way through: I just can't abide the Marîd Audran or the world he loves. He leads a hedonistic, aimless, drug-using, thrill-seeking life. He's a wannabe lone wolf with a need to be loved that he lies to himself about and a view of the world that borders on the delusional. I believed in him completely, I just didn't want to spend any more time with him.