The Exile Kiss
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From a Nebula Award winner: A "phenomenal," action-packed tale of crime, corruption, and cybernetics (Locus).
Set in a divided near future, The Exile Kiss is author George Alec Effinger's third book about the high-tech Arab ghetto called the Budayeen. It is a world filled with mind- or mood-altering drugs for any purpose; brains enhanced by electronic hardware, with plug-in memory additions and new personalities; and bodies shaped to perfection by surgery.
Marid Audran, having risen from the rank of street hustler, is now an enforcer for Friedlander Bey, one of the most feared men in the Budayeen. But betrayal and exile send Marid and Bey out into the lifeless Arabian desert. Can they survive on their own? Will they make it back into hostile territory? Will they find their revenge?
With this culmination of the sequence of Marid books, readers will quickly understand why this series is considered one of the great works of modern SF and a defining example of the cyber-punk genre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is the third in a series about Marid Audran, a street hustler turned crime honcho in an Arabian city in a well-thought-out future world. The previous books, When Gravity Fails and A Fire in the Sun , featured skillful writing and engaging tales. This latest effort is short on both. The story sees Audran and his boss, Friedlander Bey--one of the two most powerful men in the city--set up by Bey's rival, Shaykh Reda Abu Adilp. 171 , and exiled on false charges to the desert. But the exile and their journey across the desert with the Bani Salim tribe who rescue them p. 79 , while seemingly the main plot, wind up being merely the prelude. The bulk of the book concerns Audran's quasi-criminal dealings in the city (where the law is mostly what Bey says it is) both before and after the exile. Audran is a likable and interesting narrator, but the ending occurs much too quickly and there's far less advancement of character in this novel than in the prior two. Those who haven't read the preceding volumes will have no idea what's going on here, but anyone who has read them will be undoubtedly be disappointed by this sequel.
