Budayeen Nights: Stories

Introduction to The World as We Know It

George wrote this one for an anthology of future crime stories, attempting to devise a kind of crime that wouldn’t even have been thought of in earlier days and ages. He had the idea for Consensual Realities long before; the Futurecrime anthology just gave him a way to play with it, to link it to something.

When he wrote The Exile Kiss, George planned out two more Budayeen novels to complete the character arcs of Marîd, Friedlander Bey, Indihar, and the complex network of friendships, rivalries, and enmities in which they exist. Though the narrator of this story never says it, he is, of course, Marîd Audran — Marîd after the end of the unwritten, untitled fifth book, when he is an outcast hiding from Friedlander Bey’s victorious enemies.

An older, tireder, and less cocky Marîd, simultaneously looked down upon and looked up to by the newcomer punks of a crime scene that is as far beyond Marîd’s own street-punk days as the science fiction of the nineties was beyond that of the seventies, when George first burst upon the scene in the forefront of the so-called New Wave.

The Grand Master as Has-Been.

But still able — marginally — to hold his own.

— Barbara Hambly