e owe this immensely sad book, which George Alec Effinger almost certainly did not sanction in the months leading up to his premature death, to science fiction itself, to the SF subculture which took on its mature shape after 1945 or so, when the first SF fan presses were founded in order to publish what should have been published already. The literatures of the fantastic in America—under this rubric we can include Arkham House, founded in 1939 to publish old H.P. Lovecraft stories—are perhaps unique in this proactive memorial focus, this retrospect of faithful readers.
Out in the "real" world, most authors are forgotten before they die, and are never reborn, for there is no safety net. But for more than half a century, in the world of the fantastic (Ashtree and NESFA are currently the most active memorial houses), it is hard to be forgotten, oblivion is difficult to manage. Trade publishers may let good writers slip away (more often now than ever before, now that most trade publishers have become suit slums), but there is almost always somebody in the subculture who is eager to remember, for SF has a Janus gaze: the future we hope to enlist; the past, where the futures we are most comfortable with continue to reside.
The problem with Budayeen Nights, which is a memorial volume created out of that subculture's care for its own, is that George Alec Effinger had already published most of what he'd managed to write, even most of the stuff he'd written when he was too sick to write well; so this collection of stories with a Middle Eastern ambiance, now published as an assertion of love and loyalty and proper credit to a dead man much read in his prime, fails to assert anything new to argue his just fame.
Touring a New Orleans that never was
It is, indeed, a very strange volume. Barbara Hambly, who provides a foreword and fairly length story notes (and seems to have selected the stories, too), was briefly married to Effinger at the end of the century; by 2000 they were divorced. That the two were married is certainly no secret, but it is not the sort of fact that every potential reader of Budayeen Nights will necessarily be aware of or remember, so Hambly's seeming disinclination to state explicitly that she had been intimate with Effinger does strike an odd note. The only reference to their union comes in a passage about his last years in New Orleans, where he had spent most of his adult life, and to which "he returned after the final disaster of his last marriage in Los Angeles." Which is all she writes.
What we are to make of this anonymity is not exactly clear. Those of us who know of the marriage must wonder why Barbara Hambly has disappeared herself from Effinger's last years—though she does make it clear that she had access to his papers after his death—makes us wonder if there was indeed something unsayable terrible about the man as drugs and alcohol and constant pain continued to erode him. Those who do not know of the marriage will also register a sense of strangeness: a sense that something is somehow not being said, for reasons which may or may not be relevant to any fair appreciation of the shivery little collection Hambly has so remotely presented.
So we are not really helped quite enough in our task—which readers like myself, who never met Effinger in person, must undertake as a matter of faith—of getting a memorial fix on one of the makers of modern SF, through the pages of a memorial volume he did not himself prepare (nor would have in his pomp). Hambly does usefully make one thing clear about the odd melange of stories here given us under the misleading promise that they all occur in and about one named place; she reminds us that the Budayeen of the title, "a walled quarter" inside some Middle Eastern city which is not itself ever named, represented for Effinger a kind of dream New Orleans.
This much is helpful. Whenever physical features are described—most often in the early "The City on the Sand" (1973), which is set in a decadent urban enclave in Africa that Effinger clearly had no name for yet—they can traced directly back to the French Quarter. Just as with J.G. Ballard's Vermilion City, or M. John Harrison's Viriconium, or Edward Bryant's Cinnabar, the stigmata of some real city glares through the Casablanca at the End of Time scrim, like the light of day through a painted flat. Like its models, this unnamed quarter of an unnamed city is too willed, too arbitrary, ultimately too supine, for much in the way of action of occur there. It is perhaps fitting, therefore, that the protagonist of "The City on the Sands"—a failed poet and drunk named Ernst Weinraub who clearly stands in for Effinger himself—does nothing for a lot of pages but attitudinize (we are not privy to what he does in an offstage session with a whore, but we are not led to expect much). It is a bad story, desperately in need of a good edit, until the final pages, where Weinraub ascends briefly into a state of anguish. If the remaining "Budayeen" stories had kept to this venue, with protagonists of Weinraub's puffy passivity, nothing (I think) could have persuaded the estimable Golden Gryphon Press to release a collection of them.
Painful memories are better than none
But that is where the help really does end. The stories, read chronologically, do drastically improve for a while. "King of the Cyber Rifles" (1987), though it is not set in the Budayeen and does not mention the Budayeen, is a sharp sad take on the interaction of high technology and primitive warfare. The famous "Schrödinger's Kitten" (1988), which won both a Hugo and a Nebula, is probably the best story Effinger ever wrote. "Slow, Slow Burn" (1988), whose protagonist has the same name (though not the same selfhood) as one of the Budayeen cast, which is set far from the Middle East and does not mention the Budayeen, cagily and poignantly examines, through the story of a video porn star, Effinger's clear (though occasionally muffled) love for women. So we have gotten past the objurgations of Weinraub in quicksand, though we have not really gotten very far into the Budayeen.
But finally, we meet Marid Audran at last. Audran is the protagonist of the Budayeen trilogy—When Gravity Fails (1987), A Fire in the Sun (1989) and The Exile Kiss (1991)—which taken as one extended narrative is Effinger's finest creative accomplishment. The Budayeen that Audran inhabits only superficially resembles Weinraub's unnamed dreamwork arena stuck alone in its extremely blank Africa; the Budayeen is now an Arab quarter in a city caught into the cauldron of the Middle East, smelly, complex, very real, a venue for stories to be told in. Audran himself—a vain cack-handed slow-learner street Arab who does, painfully, begin to learn how to cope—is a creature with legs, and Effinger would have certainly expanded upon his complex life along the interface between Third World and a VR-modulated Western hegemon, except that his ulcerated innards finally began to incapacitate him for good.
Again, though, we are confronted with melancholy and strangeness. I don't know if Effinger wrote anything genuinely worth publishing after 1991 or so, but it is sadly the case that the post-trilogy stories published here—"The World As We Know It" (1992), "Marid and the Trail of Blood" (1995), the first two chapters, previously unpublished, of an uncompleted fourth Budayeen novel, and a very late story fragment which goes nowhere—are seriously bad. They bespeak a mind at the end of its tether. (Effinger had, after all, lived most of his life in the nightmare shadow cast by the American health care industry on those it declines to cover.) It is no service to his memory to see here, in a volume which should remind us of joys past, this detritus of a life ruined, the life of a creator who, in a less savage world, might still be making.
In the end, all the same, we need to remind ourselves that even painful memories are better than none, that we keep ourselves alive by remembering what we have already seen. Budayeen Nights shares in that survival.
