Alternate Realities - Fiction

Stamping Butterflies

Name: Stamping Butterflies
Author: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
ISBN: 9780553383775

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

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Overview

From acclaimed author Jon Courtenay Grimwood comes an exotic new novel that defies expectation at every turn. A mystery, a thriller, and a cutting-edge sci-fi adventure all in one, Stamping Butterflies bends time, genre, and consciousness itself to tell the spellbinding story of two worlds, three lives, one future–and the question upon which everything depends: who is dreaming whom....

From Marrakech to China’s Forbidden City, from a doomed starship carrying a cryogenically preserved crew to an island prison camp, the fate of the world is being played out in the minds of two dreamers. One, a would-be assassin obsessed with enigmatic equations, has set out to kill the U.S. President. The other is a young Chinese emperor ruling thousands of years in the future. Each believes he is dreaming the other. One must change the future; one must change the past. And time is running out for both.

Caught in the maelstrom is a motley cast of characters, each an unwitting key to the ultimate fate of both worlds: Moz, a resourceful young Marrakech street punk, and his half-German girlfriend, Malika; Jake Razor, a self-exiled rock star; and psychiatrist Katie Petrov, who finds herself racing against a looming death sentence to pry free the secret of her condemned patient–a secret with the power to restore hope to the future...or stamp it out forever.

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

Grimwood stumbles in this ambitious SF stand-alone, which falls short of the high mark set by his Arabesk trilogy (Pashazade, etc.), hard-boiled mysteries set in a near-future where the Ottoman Empire still exists. Grimwood alternates between the present-day efforts of an assassin to kill the U.S. president and a more cryptic future story line set aboard a Chinese spaceship. While the two plots eventually converge in a way most time-travel fans will have anticipated, the whole proves to be less than the sum of its parts. The action can become confusing and the language overblown. As usual, though, the author displays much cunning and wit as he grapples seriously with political themes. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

About the Author, Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Jon Courtenay Grimwood lives in England. The third book in his acclaimed "Arabesk" series, Felaheen, won the 2003 British Science Fiction Association Award, appeared on Locus Magazine's 2003 Recommended Reading List, and appeared on SFSite's Best of 2003 list.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

In Marrakech, a derelict tramp who may or may not be a long-dead rock star hears the darkness tell him to assassinate the U.S. President. Far away, in time and space, a boy emperor in a re-creation of China's Forbidden City holds information from a vast library of knowledge that could change the world forever. In a not-too-distant future, a psychiatrist desperately seeks to uncover a vital secret from a condemned prisoner that could save the world from self-destruction. Grimwood's (Pashazade) latest novel continues his efforts to create a new method of storytelling, complex and detailed yet free-spirited and fluid. The author's s eye for significance and impressionistic detail makes him a master at inference and subtlety. Worth more than a single careful reading, this book belongs in most sf collections and is highly recommended. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Alternate-realities puzzler that first appeared in the U.K. in 2004, from the author of Pashazade (2005). Grimwood's dense, enigmatic, almost quantum-entangled tale opens in Paris, where a tramp in a tweed coat reads that U.S. President Gene Newman intends to visit Marrakech, and resolves to assassinate him. The attempt fails-not by much-and the tramp, captured by U.S. anti-terrorist forces, becomes Prisoner Zero, the sole inmate in a prison on a desert flyspeck in the Mediterranean Sea. Various bigwigs arrive to interrogate him, but Prisoner Zero-he talks in his mind to something he calls the "darkness"-smears his cage with feces, upon which he inscribes astonishing and revolutionary mathematical equations dealing with zero-point energy. Meanwhile, in alternating, almost obsessively detailed chapters, young mixed-race boy Moz, who becomes infected with a brain-enhancing parasite, and his friend Malika struggle to survive in the pitiless streets of 1969 Marrakech, where Moz becomes friendly with rock-star and mathematician Jake Razor, upon whom he is instructed to spy by the Moroccan police. In a third strand 5,000 years into the future, a wrecked Chinese starship's last survivor is revivified by an alien intelligence out by a Dyson sphere; the upshot is a new Chinese empire spanning 2023 worlds and hundreds of billions of people. Its 53rd emperor, Zaq, loathes his circumstances-he dreams of Prisoner Zero and believes that all the people that inhabit his vast palace-eunuchs, functionaries, concubines, generals-are mere projections of the Library, and he suspects that his sponsor, the "darkness," also known as the Library, made a fundamental error when it encountered his remote ancestor.Brilliantly imaginative, moving with the crystalline precision of a Swiss watch, Grimwood's demanding accomplishment should be avoided by those who think the author should do all the work.