The Budayeen Cycle
I couldn’t find individual checkouts of these book, but found the entire cycle available as one Ebook from one of my Libby stores. A fire in the Sun is the sequel to When Gravity Fails, and The Exile Kiss is the unfortunate conclusion of the series. Unfortunate, because by that time, George Alec Effinger was already very sick and probably had to finish writing it before his hospitalization.
In any case, both books brings you back to the Budayeen and its colorful characters. A fire in the sun shows you the new Marid, now thoroughly working for the Godfather of the Budayeen, and being his “fixer”. He still has his vices, and he still thoroughly thinks of himself as a Budayeen boy at heart, but his patron has different ideas for him and tries to divorce Marid from that world as best he can, and only as politely as a godfather can. This book also introduces Marid’s family members (his mother), and its as colorful as it gets. There’s also more mystery at work, someone’s been killing folks, and apparently body parts are being harvested.
Marid is sent to the cops to oversee the investigation and gets partnered up with one of the few good cops remaining on the force. The rest of the book is fairly procedural and you kind of wonder how its going to end and get everything tied up. Lots of other interesting ideas are brought in, and once again, I think the setting and world building are the strong points of the book. There are a few surprises but nothing that really changes much of anything. Unlike the first book, the changes are fairly cosmetic in this case, and he’s still a pawn of the GodFather.
The third book, however, is when things goes off the rails, a bit. Marid and the Godfather is kidnapped and the first half of the book have them being sent to a desert to wonder and survive. You get a bit of the desert culture through this, but this part of the book seems fairly pointless to how they got there.
Revenge becomes the theme of the rest of the book, and that makes it far less interesting than either of the first two books. The book also kind of hints at another book in the saga, but alas, the author succumbed to his illness by then.
Still, I don’t regret reading the entire trilogy and felt that I learned a bit of Middle Eastern theology, practices, and ideas through this series. Highly recommended still if you’re interested in an ascendant Middle East vs the “Western triumphs” style of science ficition.