false 132694 0765313588 9780765313584 290 43 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172013285m/132694.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/132694.When_Gravity_Fails 76471 George Alec Effinger 2136 162 5 1 false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun Sep 02 02:51:53 -0700 2007 Sun Sep 02 02:51:55 -0700 2007
This book was fantastic beyond the dreams of mere mortals in every sense. The lead character - Marid Audran - is the kind of hero one sees in Tales of the Arabian Nights: quick-witted, keen on self-preservation, sly, and a little self-deluding. The world in which he moves is very easy to accept as a future possibility, and seamlessly blends futuristic technology with ancient and current values, exposing the little hypocrisies flaunted by every member of its cast with each step.

Perhaps the most refreshing things about it are:
- the rather unpredictable ending
- the way the story is, again like one of the Arabian Nights tales, a meandering thing which somehow builds to a crescendo without giving any warning, as opposed to a rigidly-structured "Hello I Read Robert McKee's Story and now cannot think of any structure but the Three Act Drama" like so many other noverls
- that it is not Euro-centric, Westernised, or even (as with many cyberpunk novels thanks to everyone aping William Gibson) Japan-centric.
- similarly, while Audran's outsiderness is reinforced by his less than spectacular heritage in a culture that prizes good ancestry, the primary source of his deliberate Otherness is what becomes challenged.
- the hero is a long, long way from being all-powerful.

Ingenious, and quite honestly the pinnacle of my future-fic reading to date.]]>