When Gravity Fails: The Classic of Cyberpunk SF [Paperback]

In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hardway. 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 can't refuse.

The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's 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 unignorable,When Gravity Failswas hailed as a classic by Effinger's fellow SF writers on its original publication in 1987, and the sequence of Marid Audrian novels it begins were the culmination of his career.

The classic of cyberpunk SF

A winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards,George Alec Effingerwas the author ofWhat Entropy Means to MeandSchrodinger'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 Failskept 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 futuristl³*