Name: When Gravity Fails
Rating: 3.583333333333333 (12 reviews)

George Alec Effinger

Set in a decadent Arab ghetto, this tale is about a tough man who resists corruption at great cost, in spite of drugs, personality implants, and murder

When Gravity Fails

Hired by a two-hundred-year-old underground crime lord to carry out a vengeance attack, Marid Audrian is altered with sophisticated surgical implants that will enable him to counter a deadly killer whose abilities have been enhanced by the personalities of history's most notorious psychopaths. By the author of Schrodinger's Kitten. Reprint.

rumbledethumps

Realized I had read this before many years ago when I was on a cyberpunk kick. It was still good enough to read again, and worth the time to get a different angle on cyberpunk.

Juozas Salna

do not recommend. nothing to do with cyberpunk. could be set in medieval times with almost no changes to descriptions. main character is a dick ;]

Patrik Järnefelt

Lovro Oreskovic

Coleman McCormick

Martin Weitzel

Jeff James

Chiyeung lau

Kilian Rüth

Jason Becker

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.”

When Gravity Fails

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