It is a tragedy that George Alec Effinger did not live long enough to see his vision of the Budayeen made real in the United Arab Emirates.
In the Marîd Audran novels he describes a vast commercially vibrant metropolis in the Middle East around which visitors from the jaded, declining states of the West would stagger in awe.
When Effinger published the first novel in the trilogy, When Gravity Falls, in 1987 such a vision of economic and cultural ascendency of Asia and the Middle East seemed fanciful. From the perspective of 2015 it looks prescient
