Marîd Audran
Created by George Alec Effinger (1947-2002)

This is a pretty good series, a cyberpunk combination of Raymond Chandler and 1001 Arabian Nights. (Actually, cyberpunk owes a lot of its feel and inner cynicism to the hardboiled private eyes of the pulps and the old film noir flicks. Just check out the openingparagraphs of William Gibson's modern sci-fi classic Neuromancer for some of the best Chandleresque prose in years.)

Anyway, it's the late 22nd century, and pill-popping street hustler and sometime"private strongarm" MARÎD AUDRAN lives in an unnamed Arab city in the Budayeen, "a polycultural...underworld so grim, stark and sleazy that, according to Spider Robinson, "it makes Blade Runner's Los Angeles look like Sunnybrook Farm."

It's a world where folks can plug a new personality module directly into their brain when life gets boring. In the first book, 1987's When Gravity Fails, a psychopath who can't decide if he's James Bond or Jack the Ripper starts terrorizing the Budayeen and Friedlander Bey, local crimelord, decides to hire Marîd to make the streets safe for crime again. Soon enough, our hero's fierce independance, not to mention his life, are at stake. Especially when he decides to get his own brain wired, in an effort to catch the killer.

In the sequel, A Fire in the Sun, Marîd again finds himself forced to work for Bey, and by 1990's The Exile Kiss, he's risen through the ranks to become one of Bey's most trusted "enforcers."

Literate, and provocative, and Effinger gets bonus points for using both Chandler and Bob Dylan quotes in the epigraphs. Unfortunately, Effinger passed away in 2002. His widow, fellow sci-fi writer barbara Hambly, edited and wrote a foreword for Budayen Nights, a 2003 collection of various short stories and other bits and pieces, all featuring or somehow connected to Audran and Budayen.

UNDER OATH

• "A breakthrough novel...This is what cyberpunk will be when it grows up."
  (Orson Scott Card, on When Gravity Fails)

NOVELS

• When Gravity Fails (1987) ...Buy this book
• A Fire in the Sun (1990) ...Buy this book
• The Exile Kiss (1990) ...Buy this book

SHORT STORIES

• "Schrodinger's Kitten"
• "Marid Changes His Mind"
• "Slow, Slow Burn"
• "Marid and the Trail of Blood"
• "King of the Cyber Rifles"
• "The World As We Know It"
• "The City on the Sand"
• "Marid Throws a Party" (2003, Budayeen Nights; projected opening of "Word of Night," a fourth Budayeen novel)
• "The Plastic Pasha" (2003, Budayeen Nights; unfinished story)

COLLECTIONS

• Budayeen Nights (2003)...Buy this book
  Foreword by Barbara Hambly. Includes seven stories, and excerpts from incomplete works, most featuring Audran or at least Budayen.

RELATED LINKS

• Down Those Mean Skies
  An ever-expanding list of Sci-Fi P.I.'s.

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.