Throwback Thursday: Wild Nights at the Budayeen in When Gravity Fails

All of the plotty bits—the copycat serial murders with a cyberpunk gloss, the hustlers, the crime bosses and corrupt cops—take a backseat to the splendor that is the Budayeen, a sprawling district populated by bars and a black market where the rule of law is hedonism, in all its many forms. It’s a place where sex changes are so easy and effective that a preference for assigned-female women is considered a kink. Where all the bars have a dedicated drug supply. Where people have cybernetic “moddies” that can give them new personalities, or “daddies” that allow them to speak other languages or pick up new skills. It’s a world as alive as any of its residents.
The best exemplifier of the general state of things in the Budayeen is Bill, a cab driver who pops up twice to give Audran a ride. Bill is out of his mind, we learn, because he got one of his lungs replaced with a gland that keeps him on a steady drip of a military-strength, brain-destroying hallucinogen with the delightful name of RPM. Bill freely chose to get an implant that is guaranteed to burn out his brain one cell at a time. When asked why, he shrugs and says, “Well, they were only gonna die anyway, weren’t they?”

It sounds crazy, because it is, to put yourself on a perpetual bad trip you can’t ride out. But there’s context: Bill lives in the Budayeen, and everyone in the Budayeen is so jaded they will do literally anything to make their lives more interesting.
Everyone in this book is doing it. Marîd pops handfuls of pills and only feels right when he’s at risk. His friend Saied has had a “man of action” personality implant since he was thirteen years old, and the three mob enforcers who call themselves the Black Widow Sisters has altered their appearances to look like characters out of some kind of comic book. It says something that, before the plot even gets in gear, the worst degenerate in the Budayeen was a man who disemboweled over 100 people as human sacrifices, and confessed to worse.  That three men beat and stab a fourth over thirty bucks and no one really cares about the victim as much as they do his business ties.

In the end, that’s what scares me: the body modifications, the virtual reality, the violence, the drugs, even the twisted political games… It’s all stuff that happens because people who have realized they can do anything have chosen to do this. George Alec Effinger shows us a world in which life-altering tech is part of the everyday, and is only being used to further speed our descent. It’s a cynical worldview, but there’s a lot of truth in self-destruction, and it’s honestly a plausible sketch of human nature. Whatever else is happening, humans can always be counted on to chase a high. Even if it kills us. That’s kind of what we do. And that’s the Budayeen.
When Gravity Fails is followed by two sequels, A Fire in the Sun and The Exile Kiss.