INTERVIEW: Jon Courtenay Grimwood

GRIMWOOD’S FAIRYTALES

Writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood chats to Matt Chapman about his novel, Stamping Butterflies...

What can readers expect from your time-traveling novel?
It’s set in three separate but inter-linked time lines, beginning with a punk guitarist in 1977 in Marrakech, jumping a few years from now to an American prison and skipping another 50 centuries to the far side of the galaxy. Basically, I’ve used quantum mechanics as an excuse to play with zero-point energy, the shape of time and whether the future can influence the past. Which, of course, it can, given that time is shaped like a blue marble (when it’s not shaped like an ice-cream cone).

Has writing a book about an assassin trying to kill the US president attracted a lot of attention?
No, I began writing Stamping Butterflies three years ago when the world was slightly less paranoid than it is now and being harrased at airports by shaven-headed goons who want to blow up your luggage to keep democracy safe was still a thing of the future. It didn’t actually occur to me that anyone could mistake fiction for fact, but that was before the whole knit-your-own-weapons-of-mass-destruction-in-45-minutes debacle... Also, my president is an upstanding, honest and intelligent man who wants to make the world a safer place (did I mention the elements of fantasy?).

What first drew you to science fiction?
The fact you get to mess with reality and no one can say you can’t do that. Also, and this matters for me, in sci-fi we can steal anything we want from any other kind of fiction and make it ours. Crime novels have to squeeze their plots into certain boxes, as do thrillers and all the other genres. We can take a crime novel and turn it into sci-fi, mix it with bits of thriller and then handle all the description as if we’re writing literary fiction.

You grew up in England, the Far East, Norway and Malta. Has that given you an international perspective?
In as much as I don’t really feel at home anywhere and I’m happiest in airports, I guess it has. My childhood gave me a belief that the most interesting things in life happen where different cultures meet and scratch together. There are a couple of other points as well. As a child I saw staggering poverty – from the privileged position of someone not part of it, obviously – and I think that knowledge stays with you. Not just the look of poverty, but the smell and a kind of oily feeling of helplessness. Also, I saw a number of dead bodies and that enhanced my feeling that life is fairly transitory.

Who or what do you include among your influences?
I would not want to suggest in any way that I consider myself in the same league, but my main influence is Bulgakov, who wrote The Master and Margarita, one of the great 20th Century Russian novels. It’s about many things, from the horror of life under Stalin to ways of writing fiction, and features Pontius Pilate, assorted Soviet writers and a large black cat smoking cigars.

Is it difficult to put a new spin on time travel with so many other variations of the concept out there?
Most of the ideas available to fiction have been done to death already, time travel included. In the end I think that’s why character is so important.

Find books written by Jon Courtenay Grimwood at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com