When Gravity Fails (1987)

In the Budayeen, personality modules and skill chips let people purchase ways of acting, while Marîd Audran tries to preserve his own independence. Effinger makes bodily modification part of a neighbourhood economy of favours, sex work, policing and organised crime. Choose this first Audran novel for technology that changes daily bargaining rather than merely decorating a skyline. It is an outsider’s imagined Middle Eastern setting, with dated assumptions, drugs and graphic violence worth approaching critically.