Book Post: A Question Of Trilogy

It was never meant to be. Olives - A Violent Romance was originally written with a mild idea of an 'interlinear' to follow - a retelling of the story from another point of view, possibly Lynch's. There's a lot to retell on the Lynch side of things, we have the possibilities of balancing Paul's jaded view of the man who is blackmailing him, as well as Lynch's negotiations with the Israelis and the Jordanian authorities as he tries to keep his young victim alive long enough to fulfil his destiny. And then there's Paul's future - Olives originally started with Lynch sitting in the wreckage of Paul's house before the young journalist moves to Beirut (where Lynch arranges a job for him working on a newspaper) to wait for Aisha.

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller isn't linked to Olives in any way, except its events commence with the eventual fate of young Stokes and, of course, it features Lynch. But that's where it stops. The events retold in Beirut might be contiguous to Olives, but there's no link. And so with Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy: the book's events take place a year after those of Beirut but are otherwise in no way linked. Some of the same characters pop up. Others don't make it through. I have a nasty habit of killing those I love the most.

Three very different books set in the same rough timeline do not a trilogy make. I intended to write a romance, a thriller and a tragedy but most certainly not a trilogy. It's a little appreciated fact, for instance, that all of the Bond books are written in a contiguous timeline. I realised this when I bought them all last year and read 'em one after another. It made me appreciate quite what a grim, sexist old soak Ian Fleming was - I discovered, for instance, in every single Bond book the female protagonist is referred to as a "Stupid bitch" except one, narrated in the first person by the female protagonist - she does not neglect to call herself, however, a "stupid bitch." I'm not a fan of unsuccessful writers (me) slagging off successful ones (Fleming) but I also found I disliked his writing in general. Mind you, re-reading Alistair MacLean had me in a blind impotent fury.

However, protest as much as I like, people keep referring to the three books as a trilogy. Even early reviews of Shemlan refer to it as 'the third of McNabb's trilogy of Middle East thrillers'. Clearly I'm out of step and might as well just go with the flow. It's either that or write a fourth Lynch book just to prove everyone wrong and I'm not about to do that.

In the meantime, on the offchance you haven't got around to doing it, here's the link to buy Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy in print or as an ebook. If you want to start reading the trilogy with Olives - A Violent Romance, that's linked here. And then Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is to be found over here. See? Three clicks and you're away!

No, no, it's fine. My pleasure. It's nothing, really.

A Helping Hand

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I need your help. And no, I'm not asking you to drop a review of 'Beirut' on Amazon.com (although if you could that would be nice). It's much more important than that.

For various reasons, I ended up cleaning up one of Spot On's old laptops (Thanks, Spot On!) and sending it to Sri Lanka, where pal Deepika is sponsoring a young man from a poor village near Anandharapura through his medical degree. This small gesture has turned out to be transformational for him, allowing him to finally get access to a resource we take for granted and which he desperately needed. He's sharing it with four other students right now.

Although that's better than nothing, clearly there is a need for more machines. And each machine could end up playing a small role in saving people's lives. We could use at least five more laptops.

So I wondered - if you're UAE based and want to clean up and get rid of that old PC and let me know, I'll come and pick it up from you and take care of getting over to these guys. Clearly, the machine needs to be functional, but it doesn't need to be the hoochiest, coochiest laptop on the block. A couple of generations on from the illustration would be nice...

It's a small enough gesture for the likes of us, yet it's a huge deal to these young men.

So can you help? @alexandermcnabb, leave a note on the comment form on www.alexandermcnabb.com or dump a comment here.

And do please share this post!

Thanks.

UPDATE You can take machines to The Archive in Safa Park and leave 'em there to be collected. Ta!

Book Review: Neuromancer - William Gibson

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I came to this particular party almost thirty years late. But oh, my, what a party it was!

I romped, giggling, through this book. I read it standing up, I read it waiting in the car, I read it when I should have been editing my own work. I devoured it with glee. It's so very well done, you see.

I gave up reading sci-fi decades ago. I can't remember what did it in the end, I think it might have been Frank Herbert's 'Yet another Dune book that milks that last drop from something that used to be better', but sci-fi became 'just not quite my thing.'

I'm going back now.

William Gibson's book invented 'cyberpunk' and gave us the setting for films like The Matrix, Blade Runner and The Fifth Element. Cyber-thief Case has had his ability to 'jack in' to the matrix burned out of his cortex by his vengeful employers and is on a fast track to drink, drug and crime fuelled suicide when he's rescued by a mysterious chap called Armitage.

Armitage fixes the damage, but he's got a purpose for Case who embarks on a race against time as Armitage complements his repair job with sacs of time-release neurotoxin placed in Case's veins. Do the job fast or get fried is the message. Case and murderous sexbomb Molly (Who calls a murderous sexbomb 'Molly' for pity's sakes? Only a lunatic or a genius, I figured) embark on a rampage through spaceports and Case gets down and dirty inside the cyber-world of the 3D realised network that is the Matrix. And oh my, it's fun stuff.

That I could be so blown away by this book today only had me wondering what this did to readers back in 1984. And that Gibson only trips up twice with his future technologies, as far as I could see, is little short of miraculous. In one scene, Case is fencing a valuable contraband of three megabytes of RAM. Well, I remember in 1984 three meg of RAM was like ten Yottabytes now. It was a huge amount. We were creating pioneering samplers using an Apple IIe with, wait for it, 64k of memory. My car key's probably got 3 meg in it.

In another technoflub, Case uses a payphone. Cute. But that just added to the fun for me, a little like playing a vintage synth that still sounds better than today's smartest sampler. This book is truly a classic and I'm very glad indeed I picked it up in a 'don't know what to put on the Kindle next' random moment.

If you hadn't got the message by now, let me just add I can't recommend it highly enough.

Five Stars.

Here's the Kindle book at Amazon.co.uk.

Salmon Fishing In The Emirates

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So it's official. A company is to develop an on-shore salmon farm in Western Abu Dhabi, chilling sea water and using 'recirculating aquaculture' techniques to farm the fish in tanks cooled to 13 celsius. Reuters reports on the story here.

The 500,000 square metre farm is to be developed in two phases at a cost of a tad over $27 million and will produce 4,000 tonnes of fish a year in its final phase.

They're looking at a UAE market of around 1,000 tonnes of salmon a year, currently airfreighted here from Norway and Ireland at a cost of something like $4-5 per kilo. Other gulf countries will take up the rest of the crop.

The company behind the scheme, Abu Dhabi fish farming and production company 'Asmak', isn't kidding. It already has major farming operations in the Gulf, with farms in Saudi Arabia and the UAE currently producing over 2,000 tonnes of fish a year - and a processing, distribution and 'value-added products' business.

There are major concerns about the health risks associated with consuming farmed salmon, particularly given the diet farmed fish are fed and the way it introduces toxins into the fish which we, in turn, consume. The furore really kicked off ten years ago with a scary study by Albany University which recommended eating very little farmed salmon indeed to avoid increased risk of cancer. There has been huge debate recently in Norway following advice issued to pregnant mothers to avoid eating farmed salmon - which brings the Norwegians in line with UK health advice, incidentally.

I give you this link to the story in the Shetland News. I love the Shetland News strapline "Great is the truth and it shall prevail".

Some of the media round here could do with a touch of that...

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what Asmak intends to feed its fishies. Shame none of the local media covering the story asked... but then they just hacked the Reuters piece into make-up.

Anyone Fancy A Change? Etisalat Doesn't!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The UAE's 'incumbent' telco, Etisalat, has managed to neatly underline quite how fearful it is of mobile number portability by trying to block its competitor's 'change' campaign.

Mobile number portability - the ability to change operator without changing your number - should arguably have come to the UAE much sooner: it's a key element of any sensible competitive market and regulatory regime. It was first talked about back in 2009, in fact. Du has always said it wasn't the one dragging heels around here and that makes perfect sense - incumbents always face the challenge of 'churn', the process whereby harried and fed up customers migrate to competitors, so the longer they can delay MNP and preserve that barrier to entry, the better.

Worse, many, many people in the UAE already carry two devices - one Du and one Etisalat. It's one reason behind the country's remarkably high mobile penetration. But it also gives subscribers a taste of the service offered by the competitor.

So Du, on the news that MNP would finally be brought in, started a natty little campaign offering to provide information to people who text CHANGE to 3553. Etisalat responded by blocking that number. Regulator TRA promptly fined Etisalat (sum, of course, undisclosed) which then grudgingly unblocked the number. The National reports on the whole farago with glee - as does Kipp.

Great service, great value, consumer choice. These are all good things, no? Values for any company to aspire to! It's just that, well, someone doesn't really seem to be entering into the spirit of things around here, do they?

Given the choice, keeping your number, would you change?

Who Moved My Shiny?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"Oi! You! Where do you think you're going?"
"I'm moving in to my new place. I've got a Shiny, I have!"
"Not without a moving in/moving out form you haven't! Where is it?"
"I haven't got 'it' whatever 'it' is!"
"Well then, you can't move in, can you? If you haven't got a moving in/moving out form, duly completed and submitted five days before you move, you can't move. It's quite clear."
"What's quite clear? Nobody told me about this!"
"It's in black and white, in the regulations. Duly available to any member of the public who presents himself to the regulation archive and requests a copy."
"Where's the regulation archive?"
"We don't know. We lost it. We'd have put it in The Archive, but we're turning that into a shopping mall. Anyway, that's beside the point. No moving in/moving out form, no move."
"But this is mine. I bought it. Freehold."
"Usufruct."
"I'm sorry?"
"Usufruct. Not freehold. That's in the regulations, too. Which gives us the right to insist on you completing a moving in/moving out form before you move in. And tell you what colour you can paint your Shiny and all the other stuff we get up to when we conjure up daft new schemes and ideas."
"In the advert, it didn't say 'Dare to dream, live to love, enjoy a scintillating lifestyle in paradisical sunshine by the way it's usufruct so you can't even move in without filling in some arbitrary form to pander to some odious jobsworth who couldn't even organise a shawarma stand."
"Okay, that's it, mate. You can't say shawarma to me like that. I'm only doing my job and I won't have random strangers throwing obscenities at me. I'm calling the law, I am."
"What about this lorry and all my stuff?"
"Take 'em back. You'll not need 'em for a while anyway once the law get hold of you. Your feet aren't going to touch the floor. 'Hello, police? I'd like to lodge a complaint against someone who just said 'shawarma' to me. I know, I know. I am indeed grievously insulted. Right away. Thank you, officer.' Right, mate, I'll give you shawarma, so'n I will."
"Have you seriously just called the police and complained I said 'shawarma' to you?"
"You can pick up a copy of the moving in/moving out form on your way down to the nick or you can fill in the online form and print that out to submit an application for the moving in/moving out form at the same office. You can suit yourself, I've had enough of standing around being insulted by the likes of you. Good day to you."

In case the above doesn't make much sense this link to the moving/in moving out form story might help and this one to the shawarma insult story may shed further light in the gloom. 

Expo 2020: Dubai's 'Social Bid'

(Photo credit: @cpe)

This is the week Dubai goes Expo 2020 bonkers and if you thought the noise level was already high, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Five cities originally launched bids to host Expo 2020 - the latest in a long string of 'World Fairs' that started with the original World's Fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park. The bids are evaluated by the body governing Expo, the BIE (Bureau of International Expositions) and voted on by the 167 member states. This vote, as anyone in Dubai except the most dedicated of ostriches will know, takes place Wednesday 27th November and will pick a winner from Dubai, Sao Paolo, Yekaterinburg and Izmir. Thailand's bid, the city of Ayutthaya, was withdrawn earlier this year.

Dubai has been pretty hardcore with its bid. The city's made no secret of the fact it wants this and intends to get it - and a remarkable package of infrastructure and a relentless tide of promotional activity have been flung into the fray. The stakes are high - expo sites typically span hundreds of acres and the events attract tens of millions of visitors. Has Dubai got what it takes?

If social media is anything to go by, yes it has. Because its competition doesn't seem to have got the hang of the whole 'inclusion' concept.

Let's take Turkey's Izmir. The city has a website with all the right buttons, as well as quite an annoying interstitial that promotes its Facebook page. With over 73,000 likes, there's precious little sign of engagement but a high octane broadcast of 'support our bid' type messages rather than any attempt to foster or encourage a debate around the Izmir bid's theme of improving healthcare. Izmir's YouTube Channel is also on broadcast with a lot of 'talking heads' garnering typical views in the low tens and a couple of slick ads with higher views. Again, it's all about mememe.  It's hardly any better over on Twitter, where a tad over 6,000 followers receive broadcasts on supporting the bid. The Izmir Twitter profile does suggest you might like to sign the 'Health For All Manifesto', which on cursory inspection appears to reason that if you support Izmir's bid, it would be good for global health. Hosted on WeSignIt, the manifesto has attracted 522 signatures.

It's hardly compelling, is it?

Yekaterinburg is arguably Dubai's toughest competitor. It's Russia's fourth largest city and has a complex and diverse history, including being the site of the murder of the Romanovs. The vanilla template website doesn't really sparkle and isn't even particularly informative. Facebook offers 1,459 likes and again is more of a tourist board broadcast than any attempt to foster engagement around the bid's theme of The Global Mind. There is, for some odd reason, a picture of a squirrel. With under 500 followers, the city's Twitter account is just posting the same images as Facebook. YouTube hasn't really sparked inspiration, not even the slickly produced 'Global Mind Adventure'. There's certainly no sign of community involvement - or any invitation to involvement.

As far as I can tell, Sao Paolo's website is down or dead and its Facebook page, with a tad over 4,000 likes, hasn't seen a post since June. YouTube hasn't been fed a new video in five months, either. And its 162 Twitter followers have also lacked companionship since June. If you just saw Sao Paolo's online presence, you'd be forgiven for thinking they've given up and gone home for a Feijoada.

And so on to The City That Gave The World Modhesh. How's Dubai shaping up in the online stakes - and, more importantly, is there any sign that the city actually wants to talk about its theme rather than just nag people to support its bid?

Over 58,000 followers on Twitter and 721,000 likes on Facebook appear to be saying something. Yes, we know it's not all about the numbers, but there's a question of scale here. Uniquely, Dubai's using Instagram, with over 9,000 followers. There's participation, community and engagement going on over at the Twitter account, including a couple of cheeky tweets from 'Our Dave'. Facebook's similarly lively, with community events, stunts (the inevitable Guinness book of records stunt) and widespread public participation very much in evidence. The Dubai bid's theme is 'Connecting Minds, Creating the Future', with sustainability, mobility and opportunity as sub-themes. The website features a number of thinkers talking about these themes. YouTube hasn't seen an upload in a while, but the content there again goes beyond tourist board images and 'back our bid' calls.

In fact, of all four bids, it has to be said that Dubai Expo 2020 online has the strongest sense of community and broad public participation of any of 'em. It's by far the most active and popular campaign on social platforms by a huge margin. It could do more and be a great deal slicker, without doubt. There is a huge opportunity to build further on what has already been established. But what's there is streets ahead of its rivals.

From its online presence alone, Dubai's the only Expo 2020 bidder that has clear evidence of coming together as a community in support of the city's bid - and a genuine interest in fostering discussion, debate and thought around its theme.

I must have mislaid my cynicism pills. Where did I put those blasted things?

Book Post: The Spies Of Shemlan

The frontispiece of my prized copy of Arabia Felix. 

Note TE Lawrence was, at the time he wrote his 

foreword for Thomas' book, going under the name TE Shaw.

Conceived with the genuine intention of building bridges between the British officer and governing class and the people of the Arab World, the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) was founded by noted Arabist Bertram Thomas - the author of Arabia Felix, a friend of TE Lawrence's and very much a member of the 'Middle East gang' of prominent arabists connected with, among other things, Military Intelligence (the MI in MI5 and MI6). Storrs, Lawrence, Wingate, Thomas, Stark, Bell - these names trip off the tongue, but they were a highly influential little bunch of interconnected people swimming in a pond of finite size.

It's this connection with intelligence that's so hard to shake, right from the very conception of MECAS. While it may have had lofty aims, there was a whiff of sulphur connected to figures such as Thomas and his contemporary, Harry St John Bridger Philby - father of the notorious 'Kim' Philby, a man who has been connected with MECAS although it appears the connection was tenuous at best. Philby lived in Beirut for a time working for The Economist (and spying) and was said to have socialised with MECAS students. He never did study at the school.

But George Blake did. And Blake was one of the most notorious spies of the Cold War.

It was Blake who was to give the Centre a high profile student to justify Kamal Jumblatt’s assertion that MECAS was ‘A school for spies’. Blake, born George Behar in 1922, is still alive, living in exile in Moscow. He is said to have betrayed over 400 British spies in his remarkable career as a Soviet double agent - a career that ended with his in camera trial and subsequent 42-year prison sentence. The sentence was notably long, the judge finding him guilty on three separate counts of spying and handing out three maximum sentences. Newspapers at the time claimed the sentence represented a year for every British spy killed as a result of Blake's many betrayals but, fun though it sounds, it appears the claim was editorial embellishment.

A highly resourceful man who had enjoyed a remarkable career with the Dutch resistance in the war, Blake conspired to escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in October 1966 and fled to Moscow via East Germany.

But as far as the Lebanese were concerned, it just went to prove what they’d always suspected. Up there in Shemlan, was The British Spy School. And people on the mountain still call it that – even though the Centre has long been closed and its building converted to house an orphanage. The legend lives on.

It's actually how I first found the MECAS building in Shemlan. We were looking for the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, but understanding dawned on the puzzled face of the man we asked for directions, "Oh, you mean the British spy school!" he said.

By then I knew MECAS was going to be at the very centre of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy. Which, incidentally, you can buy here either as an ebook or in print. See what I did there? Subtle, me...

Just A Thought...

Cover of Kate Bush

So I've been thinking about this blog thing for a while. I've enjoyed myself over the years (I've been feeding this little fire for over SIX years now and likely written more words for it than I have for my books!), generally amused myself greatly and anecdotally have gathered I have occasionally provided amusement (and irritation) to others.

Nothing like the amusement provoked by the wicked and scurrilous Pan Arabia Enquirer, for instance, with its gigantic, tottering piles of 400,000 page views a month, but I have managed some mild jollity among a small, selective band of discerning blog readers and a much larger troupe of disappointed searchers for more sensible things hornswoggled by Google into emerging here rather than somewhere more useful.

I never had an objective in it all, as such. For someone whose day job revolves around defining communications objectives and the like, it's been refreshing. A little like GeekFest, I suppose it has been an anti-PR activity that has come by sheer error to have some sort of reputational value, although any reputational plus has been balanced by the alarm and calumny of being quite as frank as I have on occasion been in here. What makes it special, as Kate Bush tells us, makes it dangerous.

I don't mean to alarm you, by the way. I'm not jacking it in or anything like that. But I am perhaps going to destroy any vestigial traffic by spending more time on what has become the most intense focus in my life - books. Or more accurately, narrative.

I'm going to start posting book reviews, for instance. I've wasted them over at GoodReads in the same way a TripAdvisor review is wasted - just another voice in the thousands of contributions. I'd rather have 'em here in my own archive, tell the truth. We'll see where that takes us, but if you want to submit your book for review, I wouldn't expect much sugar-coating from around here.

Oh, I'm going to go on slapping Gulf News for being drooling morons and playing with things that pass by on life's conveyor belt and make you wonder quite what it's all about. How could I not? But I'm doing more and more book stuff in my life and I think that's going to be represented here more.

Sorry if that's not good news - I know book posts and the like kill blog traffic more effectively than the Car Eating Carrion Crow of Cephalon Cinque - but it's sort of where I'm headed and I've become quite fond of my blog, so where I'm headed, I guess the blog'll come too - peeing on the lamp posts and sniffing other blog's bums...

That's all folks...

PS: I found an excuse to put a picture of Kate Bush on the blog. My life is complete...

The ExpatWoman Festive Family Fair. Oh Yeah.

UPDATE

With rain forecast for Dubai tomorrow (Saturday) and no indoor venue available, the ExpatWoman Family Fair has been rescheduled to Jan 25th (the next sensible date to hold it). So I won't be signing books and refusing to wear a Santa hat, but will provide more info nearer the rescheduled date.

UPDATE 2 
(Saturday evening)
Unbelievable. Not a drop of rain fell all day. Some fluffy clouds, a couple of darker ones, but no rain at all or even realistic chance of rain. EW took the right decision - given the forecast - for sure, but how could the forecast have been so signally wrong? Damn the weatherman!

Trips off the old tongue, don't it? This Saturday - the 23rd November - will see ExpatWoman.com hosting their annual festive shindig at Dubai's Polo & Equestrian Club, opposite Arabian Ranches. Not normally something I'd be burbling about on the blog, but there's something special in store for visitors this year.

Oh yes.

From 10.30am to 4.30pm, you have the opportunity to visit Santa's Grotto, get the kids face painted and visit various stalls selling festive femed crafts and goodies. There's a petting zoo, so little Johnny has the chance to get savagely mauled by a Chinchilla. In short, it's the usual Craggy Island deal including, we can only hope, a goat stuck in the Ferris wheel. Except, of course, it's on a Dubai scale, with nigh on a hundred stalls and a polo match thrown in.

But that's not all by any means. Because this year you can make your way over to the golden podium upon which shall rest copies of Olives - A Violent Romance and Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. These shall be signed and given over to unsuspecting members of the general public in return for Reasonable Emolument. They make, needless to say, perfect Christmas presents, ideal gifts for friends and family and fabulously combustible material for igniting the Yule log.

It wasn't my idea, honest. I was chatting with the ExpatWoman gang and they came up with the scheme in jest. Like all too many jests, it has become an horrific reality. I have made it clear: I'll sign books happily, but I'm not wearing the bloody santa hat.

See you there!