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Budayeen Nights
by George Alec Effinger
(Golden Gryphon Press, $24.95, 235 pages, hardcover; published in
September 2003.)
In the late 1980s, cyberpunk--the science-fiction subgenre du jour--had
taken the  world
by storm, and William Gibson, John Shirley, and Bruce Sterling were
its buzz authors. Not to diminish those writers' impressive accomplishments,
but the 1980s cyberpunk book that, for me, blew everything else away
was George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, a hardboiled noir
adventure set in the Budayeen, a district of vice and corruption in
the midst of an unnamed Muslim, Middle Eastern city.
The novel made Effinger's name after a decade and a half of toil in
the science-fiction trenches. Two excellent sequels followed. Both delved
deeper into Effinger's sensually realized future, never satisfied with
retracing the steps of the previous volumes. Two additional novels were
planned, but Effinger's health prevented him from continuing, and the
author eventually died in 2002 with the series left incomplete.
However, Effinger had written several stories in the same setting as
When Gravity Fails, and all of these, including a few previously
unpublished ones, are gathered together in Budayeen Nights.
The Budayeen is a vividly imagined setting where devout Islam, cyberpunk
technology, class politics, transgendered sexuality, and organized crime
mingle tensely. There's not a bad story in this book, although the best
selections are those that feature the protagonist of the novels, the
street-punk-turned-underworld-detective Marîd Audran.
As Effinger's ex-wife, author Barbara Hambly, reveals in the various
story introductions, the flavour of the Budayeen was largely inspired
by Effinger's beloved New Orleans--a love that is palpable in Effinger's
every sentence--and Audran himself is an alter ego of Effinger. Nevertheless,
the author is merciless with Audran, with his failings, his vulnerabilities,
and his limitations.
Budayeen Nights is a seductive mosaic, empathically beautiful,
painfully tender, excitingly imaginative, and deeply personal.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 23 August 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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