Conference noted::sf

1242.0. "Effinger's When Gravity Fails" by MTWAIN::KLAES (No Guts, No Galaxy) Tue Aug 23 1994 17:29

Article: 659
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
From: chess@watson.ibm.com (David M. Chess) 
Subject: Review of Effinger's "When Gravity Fails"
Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch)
Organization: IBM Watson Research
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 06:05:52 GMT
 
Note : Some minor spoilers about whether or not the good guy triumphs,
       but not about who dunit.
 
Our hero, a hard-boiled private investigator in the wrong part of
town, gets involved in a complex web of deceit, solves some grisly
murders by refusing to give up, reveals that deep down he has a
heart of gold, and ends up being kicked in the face by life once
again.  Along the way, he describes his hangovers in great detail,
goes to bed with a couple of women, gets beaten up a couple of times,
and spends a lot of time in bars.  The local police cooperate with
him only with the greatest reluctance, and he solves their problems
for them.
 
Sure!  Sam Spade, Travis McGee, The Continental Op!  Lew Archer,
Raymond Chandler!  Any of the dozens of beat-up paperbacks back
on the back shelves, with daring-for-the-day cover illos of leggy
blondes and busty brunettes.  Chicago, New York, LA!  Right?
 
Close, but not quite.  Our hero's name is Marid Audran, and his
turf is the Budayeen, the bad part of a town somewhere east of
Algeria.  His girl, like most of the other female characters in
the book, started life as a man.  His favorite bar is a "moddy
and daddy", where the customers are likely to be enhanced by
personality modules and brain add-ons plugged into sockets in
their heads.  The year is something like 2200.  The book is
George Alec Effinger's "When Gravity Fails", and it's lots of fun.
 
Effinger isn't shy about the debt he owes to the hard-boiled-dick
tradition; the leading epigraph is a quote from Raymond Chandler's
"The Simple Art of Murder", a book I can certainly believe Effinger
has read.  "When Gravity Fails" is defintely cyberpunk, because
there are those head-sockets, and lots of fancy designer drugs, and
the part of the world we see is rather dystopian.  All the major
nations have collapsed and Balkanized.  And all like that.  There's
no sign of cyberspace or the Net, though, which is nice; it may
just be that Marid and his set are too poor to afford access.
 
But at heart the book is a good PI yarn that happens to be set in
a cyberpunk world.  It would be possible, I think, to replace the
hero's drug binges with mere boozing, the Bad Guy's bootleg moddys
with mere psychosis, and Marid's own psychoenhancement with a
bottle of experimental booster-pills, and get a tale that would
be perfectly at home between "The Deadly Blonde" and "Too Pretty
To Kill".  This is not to complain, though; the cyberpunk setting
is well-done and interesting, and I wouldn't trade it for the
back streets of Chicago in the '50s.  Effinger writes (mostly)
clean lucid prose, and his characters and tech are believable and
interesting.
 
There are a few stylistic oopses (we get "like a victorious army
swooping down upon a conquered city" twice in three pages; how did
the editors miss that?), a few unexplained oddnesses (even given
that sex-change operations are routine and cheap enough that folks
on the wrong side of the tracks can get them at will, why are nearly
*all* of the female characters former men?), and some too-explicit
philosophizing and self-examination ("...some of the true tenderness
that I wasn't quick enough to hide made me touch Chiri's scarred
cheek and pat her hand.").  At the start of the book, 100 kiam a day
is Marid's usual fee; on page 121, it's surprising.
 
While Effinger's treatment of Islam and Muslim characters (of
various levels of piety) is generally good, he does lapse seriously
into stereotype at least once:  When the Big Boss of the Budayeen
exclaims "By the sacred beard of the Prophet, I will have my
vengeance!", Marid should at least have thought to himself that the
old boy was overdoing it.  But this is apparently the way old 
quasi-pious Muslims of 2200 are expected to talk when upset; 
I'm not sure, George!
 
Recommendation: Definitely a read, for both SF fans and Raymond
Chandler fans.  There are two more books about Marid ("A Fire in the
Sun" and "The Exile Kiss"), and although I generally detest series,
I plan to give them a try.
 
%A Effinger, George Alec
%T When Gravity Fails
%I Bantam Books; Spectra
%C New York
%D January 1988 (hardcover December 1986)
%G ISBN 0-553-25555-X
%P 276pp
%O paperback, US$5.99
 
--
David M. Chess                    |     Diagnostics (n.) -- People who
High Integrity Computing Lab      |       aren't sure whether two gods
IBM Watson Research               |         exist.
 

re: .0

Just a nit--when the reviewer says:

>Sure!  Sam Spade, Travis McGee, The Continental Op!  Lew Archer,
>Raymond Chandler! 
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I assume he meant Philip Marlowe, since all the other names are fictional
chracters and Chandler was a real live author.

On the Effinger series: i've only read the first two books and i thought
they were very good (which the reviewer describes more eloquently than i
could).  I think the large number of transsexual characters was a function
of the milieu that Marid inhabited, and you met more of the male-to-female
ones because Marid seemed to pretty much straight in his inclinations (hmm,
actually that sounds a little paradoxical seeing it written out!  but you
get the idea i hope).
							- paul