When Gravity Fails

Front Cover
Macmillan, 2005 - 284 pages

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 Fails was 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.

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Contents

Section 1
11
Section 2
21
Section 3
31
Section 4
44
Section 5
55
Section 6
72
Section 7
98
Section 8
110
Section 12
162
Section 13
176
Section 14
189
Section 15
208
Section 16
228
Section 17
240
Section 18
256
Section 19
269

Section 9
122
Section 10
134
Section 11
149
Section 20
276
Section 21
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

A winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, George Alec Effinger is the author of What Entropy Means to Me, Schrodinger's Kitten, and the Marîd Audran sequence that begins with When Gravity Fails. He died in 2002.

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