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SeaWitch China
''Seawitch'' is a novel written by the Scottish author Alistair MacLean. It was first published in the United Kingdom by Collins in 1977 and later in the same year by Doubleday in the United States. It was written in Mexico, where MacLean would not be taxed by US authorities. The book deviates from MacLean's usual mystery/drama formula in that it is almost all action, with no mystery and no "traitor amongst them" sub-plot. The book was a best seller. The ''New York Times'' review said MacLean "stumbles badly". Plot introduction Lord Worth, ruthless and fabulously wealthy, has made a lot of enemies in the oil business. His new offshore tension-leg platform oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, named ''Seawitch'', is one of the biggest in the world, the only one of its kind, and will put his competitors out of business. To destroy it and therefore be able to inflate the price of oil The price of oil, or the oil price, generally refers to the spot price of a barrel () of b ...
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Alistair MacLean
Alistair Stuart MacLean (; 21 April 1922 – 2 February 1987) was a Scottish novelist who wrote popular thrillers and adventure stories. Many of his novels have been adapted to film, most notably '' The Guns of Navarone'' (1957) and '' Ice Station Zebra'' (1963). In the late 1960s, encouraged by film producer Elliott Kastner, MacLean began to write original screenplays, concurrently with an accompanying novel. The most successful was the first of these, the 1968 film ''Where Eagles Dare'', which was also a bestselling novel. MacLean also published two novels under the pseudonym Ian Stuart. His books are estimated to have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time. According to one obituary, MacLean "never lost his love for the sea, his talent for portraying good Brits against bad Germans, or his penchant for high melodrama. Critics deplored his cardboard characters and vapid females, but readers loved his combination of hot ma ...
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Thriller Novel
Thriller is a genre of fiction with numerous, often overlapping, subgenres, including crime, horror, and detective fiction. Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving their audiences heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety. This genre is well suited to film and television. A thriller generally keeps its audience on the "edge of their seats" as the plot builds towards a climax. The cover-up of important information is a common element. Literary devices such as red herrings, plot twists, unreliable narrators, and cliffhangers are used extensively. A thriller is often a villain-driven plot, whereby they present obstacles that the protagonist or hero must overcome. Roots of the genre date back hundreds of years, but it began to develop as a distinct style in the 1800s and early 1900s with novels like ''The Count of Monte Cristo'' (1848) and ''The Thirty-Nine Steps'' (1915). The films of Alfred Hitchcock are ...
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William Collins, Sons
William Collins, Sons & Co., often referred to as Collins, was a Scotland, Scottish printing and publishing company founded by a Presbyterianism, Presbyterian schoolmaster, William Collins (publisher), William Collins, in Glasgow in 1819, in partnership with Charles Chalmers, the younger brother of Thomas Chalmers, the minister of St George's Tron Church, Tron Church in Glasgow. Collins merged with Harper & Row in 1990, forming a new publisher named HarperCollins. History 19th century The firm published its first dictionary, ''Greek and English Lexicon'', in 1824. The company had to overcome many early obstacles, and Charles Chalmers left the business in 1825. The first series of Collins Illustrated Dictionaries appeared in 1840, including the ''Sixpenny Pocket Pronouncing Dictionary'', which sold approximately 1 million copies. By 1841 Collins was established as a printer of Bibles. In 1846, Collins retired and his son William Collins (Lord Provost), Sir William Collins took ov ...
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Doubleday (publisher)
Doubleday is an American publishing company. It was founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897. By 1947, it was the largest book publisher in the United States. It published the work of mostly U.S. authors under a number of imprints and distributed them through its own stores. In 2009, Doubleday merged with Alfred A. Knopf, Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which, as of 2018, is part of Penguin Random House. History 19th century The firm was founded as Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897 by Frank Nelson Doubleday in partnership with Samuel Sidney McClure. McClure had founded the first U.S. newspaper syndicate in 1884 (McClure Syndicate) and the monthly ''McClure's Magazine'' in 1893. One of their first bestsellers was ''The Day's Work'' by Rudyard Kipling, a short story collection that Macmillan published in Britain late in 1898. Other authors published by the company in its early years include W. Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad. T ...
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The Golden Gate (MacLean Novel)
''The Golden Gate'' is a novel written by the Scottish author Alistair MacLean. It was first released in the United Kingdom by Collins in 1976 and later in the same year by Doubleday in the United States. Plot A team of criminals led by mastermind Peter Branson kidnaps the President of the United States and his two guests from the Middle East, a prince and a king, on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, in a masterfully conceived and clockwork-timed operation. Branson and his men block off both ends of the bridge, wire it with explosives, and demand half a billion dollars and a full pardon for themselves. Any rescue attempts will result in the detonation of the explosives, which will kill the President (and his guests) and destroy the Golden Gate Bridge. However, Branson is an egomaniac, and he cannot resist attention from the media. So he invites the press to stay on the bridge and cover the story. Aware that the FBI will have placed agents among them, he takes the precaution ...
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Goodbye California (novel)
''Goodbye California'' is a novel by Scottish author Alistair MacLean, first published in 1977. Plot introduction Set in the United States, an Islamic terrorist kidnaps nuclear scientists and steals radioactive material from a California nuclear power plant. When Detective Sergeant Ryder's wife is kidnapped along with nuclear scientists from the California power station where they all work, he sets out to find her. Facing resistance from within his own police department, he leaves his job and begins taking the law into his own hands. His son Jeff, a highway patrolman, and a few other trusted friends attempt to stop the terrorists from detonating home-built atomic bombs along California's fault lines, which would unleash massive earthquakes killing millions of people and destroying California's major cities. Background The inspiration for the plot appears to be acknowledged by Maclean himself in his preface to the 1977 edition of the book where he describes his first experienc ...
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Novel
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term ''romance''. Such romances should not be con ...
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Scottish People
Scottish people or Scots (; ) are an ethnic group and nation native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the Scotland in the Early Middle Ages, early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland (or ''Kingdom of Alba, Alba'') in the 9th century. In the following two centuries, Celtic-speaking Hen Ogledd, Cumbrians of Kingdom of Strathclyde, Strathclyde and Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons, Angles of Northumbria became part of Scotland. In the Scotland in the High Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, during the 12th-century Davidian Revolution, small numbers of Normans, Norman nobles migrated to the Lowlands. In the 13th century, the Norse-Gaels of the Kingdom of the Isles, Western Isles became part of Scotland, followed by the Norsemen, Norse of the Northern Isles in the 15th century. In modern usage, "Scottish people" or "Scots" refers to anyone whose linguistic, cultural, family ancestral or genetic origin ...
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1977 In Literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1977. Events *February 20 – An episode of '' Doctor on the Go'', co-written by Douglas Adams and Graham Chapman, marks the beginning of Adams' career as a writer for BBC radio. *March 4 – Andrés Caicedo commits suicide by overdose, aged 25, about a month after the publication of his novel '' ¡Que viva la música!'' ("Let Music Live!", translated as ''Liveforever'') in his home town of Cali, Colombia. *April 27 – Héctor Germán Oesterheld, Argentine comic book writer born 1919), is kidnapped by the military authorities; he is believed to have died in detention a few months later. *July 11 – The English magazine '' Gay News'' is found guilty of blasphemous libel for publishing a homoerotic poem, " The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name" by James Kirkup, in a case ('' Whitehouse v Lemon'') at the Old Bailey in London, on behalf of Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers and Listeners Associ ...
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Tension-leg Platform
__NOTOC__ A tension-leg platform (TLP) or extended tension leg platform (ETLP) is a vertically geotechnical engineering#Floating-moored structures, moored floating structure normally used for the offshore production of crude oil, oil or natural gas, gas, and is particularly suited for water depths greater than 300 metres (about 1000 ft) and less than 1500 metres (about 4900 ft). Use of tension-leg platforms has also been proposed for offshore wind power, offshore wind turbines. The platform is permanently moored by means of tethers or tendons grouped at each of the structure's corners. A group of tethers is called a tension leg. A feature of the design of the tethers is that they have relatively high Axis of rotation, axial stiffness (low Elasticity (physics), elasticity), such that virtually all vertical motion of the platform is eliminated. This allows the platform to have the production wellheads on deck (connected directly to the subsea wells by rigid risers), instea ...
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Gulf Of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico () is an oceanic basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, mostly surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States; on the southwest and south by the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo; and on the southeast by Cuba. The coastal areas along the Southern U.S. states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, which border the Gulf on the north, are occasionally referred to as the "Third Coast" of the United States (in addition to its Atlantic and Pacific coasts), but more often as "the Gulf Coast". The Gulf of Mexico took shape about 300 million years ago (mya) as a result of plate tectonics. The Gulf of Mexico basin is roughly oval and is about wide. Its floor consists of sedimentary rocks and recent sediments. It is connected to part of the Atlantic Ocean through the Straits of Florida between the ...
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Price Of Oil
The price of oil, or the oil price, generally refers to the spot price of a barrel () of benchmark crude oil—a reference price for buyers and sellers of crude oil such as West Texas Intermediate (WTI), Brent Crude, Dubai Crude, OPEC Reference Basket, Tapis crude, Bonny Light, Urals oil, Isthmus, and Western Canadian Select (WCS). Oil prices are determined by global supply and demand, rather than any country's domestic production level. Through the years The global price of crude oil was relatively consistent in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. This changed in the 1970s, with a significant increase in the price of oil globally. There have been a number of structural drivers of global oil prices historically, including oil supply, demand, and storage shocks, and shocks to global economic growth affecting oil prices. Notable events driving significant price fluctuations include the 1973 OPEC oil embargo targeting nations that had supported I ...
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