Budayeen Nights: Stories

Introduction to King of the Cyber Rifles

A number of people asked George why he never mentioned anything that was going on in the rest of the world during When Gravity Fails. This would be a little like having Jane Austen mention the Napoleonic Wars during Pride and Prejudice — which she never does — or Raymond Chandler take a break during The Big Sleep to discuss the conquest of Poland by Nazi Germany.

The Budayeen is the only world its inhabitants care about.

Even as personality-transfer technology was assimilated by prostitutes and pomographers, so it has been incorporated into modem warfare. Like the denizens of the Budayeen, the hero of this tale doesn’t know much of what’s going on in the rest of the world, and doesn’t care. All he knows is where he is, and what he has to do for the rest of the day. With the amount of lies — propaganda and electronic — going around, it’s all he CAN know, and sometimes not even that.

The story is almost surrealist, hut has a horrifyingly genuine feel. Its hero doesn’t really know why he’s there or how his technology works, any more than the folks in the far-off Budayeen do. They’re quite clearly in the same world, and haven’t the faintest idea of each other’s existence.

Like the heroes of many of George’s stories, the soldier Jân Muhammad is agonizingly isolated, a reflection, I think, of George’s own perception of himself. For a man as gregarious as George was, and as good at dealing with all kinds of people, he was in fact half-afraid of people, seeking solitude while simultaneously dreading it.

And, like the heroes of so many of George’s stories, Jân Muhammad is simply trying to do his job in the best way that he knows how, taking what pride he can in the miniscule, mindless, and insignificant tasks he’s been given.

And getting absolutely no thanks from anybody.

— Barbara Hambly