When Gravity Fails

In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hard way. 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 cant refuse. The two hundred-year-old godfather of the Budayeens 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 not to be ignored, When Gravity Fails was hailed as a classic by Effingers fellow SF writers on its original publication in 1987, and the sequence of Marid Audrian novels it began were the culmination of his career.

A winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, George Alec Effinger was the author of What Entropy Means to Me and Schrodinger's Kitten. He died in 2002.

"Like a dive into the eye of a storm."
--The Washington Post Book World on When Gravity Fails

"Fast, cool, clever, beautifully written, absolutely authoritative. A kind of cyberpunk Raymond Chandler book with dashes of Roger Zelazny, Ian Fleming, and Scheherezade--but altogether original."
--Robert Silverberg on When Gravity Fails

"Ingenious, layered, sophisticated, and consistently bloodcurdling, When Gravity Fails kept me awake long after I had finished reading it.
--Spider Robinson

"Great entertainment...Places Effinger in the company of writers like Gibson."
--Fantasy Review on When Gravity Fails

"Superior science fiction . . . among the best I've come across."
--The Denver Post on When Gravity Fails

"A brilliantly written, knife-edged futuristic detective story . . . destined to be the year's most intense and emotionally involving SF work."
--Houston Post on When Gravity Fails

"Wry and black and savage... there's a knife behind every smile."
-- George R. R. Martin on When Gravity Fails

"Muscular, convincing, yet continuously surprising."
--Richard A. Lupoff on When Gravity Fails

"One of the best cyberpunk novels I've read . . . Effinger's prose is terse, direct, vivid and often laced with an enchanting sense of humor . . . this is only part of the book's delightful texture . . . gives you a real sense of what it's like to be an old-fashioned gumshoe in the seedy backreaches of a futuristic arab nation."
--The Providence Sunday Journal on When Gravity Fails

"Wry, inventive, nearly hallucinatory . . . a well-written, baroque riff on the time-honored themes of Raymond Chandler."
--Publisher's Weekly on When Gravity Fails

"This is the fourth or fifth time I've been asked to give a public comment on an Effinger book; and each time I've done it; and each time I've said you people are cheating yourselves if you don't forego food and rent to pick up on Effinger's work. Now, *this* time, will you for pete's sake listen to me and buy When Gravity Fails? It's as crazy as a spider on ice skates, plain old terrific; and if you don't pay attention I'll have to get tough with you! We have your childen and your dog. Buy, read and marvel...or else."
-- Harlan Ellison on When Gravity Fails