When Gravity Fails

In a future where the United States and Europe have collapsed into squabbling fragments and the Muslim world holds the balance of power, Marid Audran scrapes by as a freelance fixer in the Budayeen, a lawless quarter of an unnamed Middle Eastern city. Almost everyone around Marid uses "moddies" and "daddies," brain implants that let a person load a new personality or a packaged skill, but he prides himself on staying unmodified. When someone starts murdering people connected to him, including a client killed in his presence, the local crime boss Friedlander Bey forces Marid to accept the implants he has always refused, turning him into the wired investigator the case demands. Effinger fuses hardboiled detective fiction with cyberpunk body-tech and a richly imagined Arab-influenced future.