George Alec Effinger

George Alec Effinger (1947-2002) was an American science fiction writer raised in Cleveland, Ohio, who attended Yale before turning to writing after connecting with authors Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm through the Clarion Writers' Workshop. He is best known for the Marid Audran trilogy - When Gravity Fails (1987), A Fire in the Sun (1989), and The Exile Kiss (1991) - a cyberpunk sequence set in a future Arab quarter of a nameless Middle Eastern city, where personality modules and cybernetic implants let people change their minds and bodies at will. His novelette "Schrodinger's Kitten" won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and his debut novel, What Entropy Means to Me, was a Nebula finalist. Effinger, who dealt with significant hearing loss and chronic illness throughout his life, wrote more than forty works across novels, short fiction, and comics.