re:mote voices

Title: Stamping Butterflies
Author: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Publisher: Gollancz

When Prisoner Zero takes a pot shot at America's latest president, the first to visit Africa in a long time, he becomes public enemy number one. Despite being a lone nutter, with a crappy rifle, firing from a distance that offers no chance of success, he is accused of being the representative of a new wave of terrorism - beaten, vilified and sentenced quicker than you can say homeland security. It looks likely that he will put to death, regardless of his refusal to cooperate and supply information on his accomplices.

Chuang Tzu is the Emperor of the 2023 worlds. The direct link for humanity to the library, which supplies all. Named after the man who dreamt that he was a butterfly, and then woke to wonder whether he was a man or a butterfly dreaming. The 2023 worlds represent a post-scarcity reality, a post-human utopia. However with nothing to strive for the discovery has been made that things can become quite boring. So the Chuang Tzu becomes the star of his own interplanetary reality show, where all the residents of the 2023 worlds can watch his every move.

The current Chuang Tzu is the 53rd reincarnation and the most reluctant, dreaming of an assassin's attempt to kill a previous leader, and sure that this means that an assassin is on the way to kill him. The novel alternates between 3 threads, America's progress in dealing with Prisoner Zero, the life of a teenage boy in Marrakech in 1977 and how he met Prisoner Zero, and the far future and the dreams and realities of the Chuang Tzu.

This is the 8th science fiction novel by writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and something of a departure from his previous work. Here there is none of the alternate history that has shaped Grimwood's futures. Though the theme is still there, perhaps being more central as the novel develops - what actions of the present will shape the future, if those actions had gone differently how would that change things?

Grimwood's novels often have a certain level of violence, which is largely absent from Stamping Butterflies. Even if there is an attempted assassination early in the novel. Stamping Butterflies shows another progression in Grimwood's work, away from the quick and hard to the more plot driven. In some ways dealing with some of the more relevant current topics of contemporary science fiction. Particularly ideas of post-singularity and some of the paradoxes that come with that, while remaining grounded in the grit of planet Earth. To a degree Stamping Butterflies recalls Grimwood's first series of books - dwelling in Paris and Amsterdam - then the Arabesk, with the material set in Marrakech. The kind of cultural detail that gives his work that human and palpable sense, while contrasting it with the post-stross aspects.

As a departure and with less of the visceral and ragged that has characterised Grimwood's work to date, Stamping Butterflies starts slowly. Something that alternating story threads always emphasize, though at least with 3 you start to pick up a momentum after about the first 50 of the 400 or so pages.

Stamping Butterflies is undoubtedly Jon Courtenay Grimwood's most ambitious work to date, extending from his back catalogue into more difficult territory.