When Gravity Fails

Item: When Gravity Fails
Rating: 3
Author: Mark Cheverton

★★★★★

✒️ George Alec Effinger (1987)
🛸 Cyberpunk, Noir
🖌️ Jim Burns
✨ 3/5

Marîd Audran is a street-smart grifter living in a future Middle Eastern ghetto. When his latest client is murdered, he becomes a reluctant detective delving into the seedy underbelly of the Budayeen to hunt down a serial killer.

Effinger swaps the typical East Asian cyberpunk setting for an Arab city populated by Muslims, moving to the rhythms of Islamic life. The texture of Middle Eastern life emerges from well-observed details such as characters haggling and the social impacts of fasting. He handles critique sensitively through non-practising Muslims, who can credibly comment on their culture from an insider’s rather than a Western perspective.

Many in the Budayeen spend little time as themselves, instead living as a parade of famous or fictional masks by using cortical plugins that grant access to personalities and knowledge. However, the opportunity is missed to explore identity as commodity in any depth, instead using the technology mechanically for the serial killer’s MO and Marîd’s denouement.

It’s also a future where gender-swapping is a common surgical procedure. While progressive for the time, it’s hard to ignore the fact that almost all characters are either male, or men who have transitioned to female and work as prostitutes. What could have been meaningful social commentary is instead treated as exotic set dressing.

The weak exploration of social issues exposes the narrative’s sluggish pacing as it bridges between sparse but well-executed action scenes. Marîd is a typical noir protagonist, rarely doing any investigating as he bounces between bars, cafés, and bed. Unfortunately, as the mystery is mostly resolved by events rather than his own agency, there’s little opportunity for the satisfaction of reader deduction.

For its time, I’m sure the Arab worldbuilding, trans characters, and the gritty noir set this apart. For me, there’s too little speculative inquiry and too much focus on drugs, murder, and prostitution. Unless the Middle Eastern setting is of particular interest, there’s little noteworthy here that isn’t done better in later cyberpunk works.