George Alec Effinger’s “When Gravity Fails”

I wondered if the world ever got tired of its jokes; no, that was too much to hope for.  The jokes would go on and on, getting worse and worse. Right now I was certain that if age and experience couldn’t stop the jokes, there was nothing about death that would make them stop, either.

There’s a fairly good review of this book at IROSF, which was what prompted me to read it.  I have to say, the people who’ve described this series as the “best cyberpunk ever” aren’t really exaggerating.  Like most people, I went through the cyberpunk phase in college, and its good practitioners create stories that are intricately detailed and whip along as fast as your pulse, but they also feel kind of…plastic.  They’re set in worlds whose descent from the present day can be easily traced, but yet they’re so different that everything has to be explained.  But in “When Gravity Fails”, the storytelling just feels so much more organic; there are big technological and social changes, but when Effinger describes them, it feels like a natural part of the narrative rather than an attempt to amaze the reader by filling up the page with futuristic slang and buzzwords.  There’s a difference between telling and showing, and most of the time, Effinger manages to do the latter.

The basic plot: in the Budayeen, the Tenderloin-like district of a twenty-third-century Arab city, Marid Audran makes a living doing jobs for a price.  Unlike most of the inhabitants, Marid hasn’t modified his body or had his brain wired–officially because he takes pride in the fact that everything he does is accomplished without artificial help, secretly because he’s afraid that modding would make him no longer himself.  When four people around him are murdered in unusual and shockingly violent ways and a fifth disappears under suspicious circumstances, Marid is summoned by Friedlander Bey, who controls most of the activity in the Budayeen.  Bey is convinced the murders are aimed at him and believes Marid is the best person for the job of finding the killer.  Only after Marid accepts his money does Bey announce that to make sure Marid can equal the killer’s skill, he will be expected to submit to one of the most extensive wiring jobs ever.

Again, I think what makes the book work so well is that it focuses on relationships and emotions.  You can completely understand the itch that compells Marid to dig for info even before Friedlander Bey hires him and the way he spends his last few days with his brain in bed, on massive amounts of drugs, feeling sorry for himself.   Marid is a compelling narrator who’s more honest than a lot of people about his shortcomings.  No matter how often he fantasizes about running off to the dreary but safe life of a peasant goatherder, his sense of responsibility ends up pushing him forward on his path toward the killer.  Even the sex scenes are oddly non-graphic and focused on feelings:

She tried to reach down to touch me, but I wouldn’t let go of her wrists.  I held her immobile, and I felt a strong, almost cruel sense of control, yet it was expressed in the most caring and tender way.  It sounds like a contradiction; if you don’t feel the same thing sometimes, I can’t explain it to you.  Yasmin was giving herself to me wordlessly, completely; at the same time I was taking her, and she wanted me to take her.

This was one that I couldn’t stop until I’d completely finished it.  It’s a fascinating world but manages to be as much detective story as s.f.  But frankly you’re got to be able to deal with the tension that comes out of despair in order to read it.  Marid is likable but every time he finds a glimmer of hope, the world somehow manages to smack him down lower than he was before.

All the peace of the last few days disappeared, and it happend with disturbing suddenness. … We’re not built for pleasure.  We’re built for agony and for seeing things too clearly, which is often a terrible agony in itself.