eedy, exotic, gritty and corrupt, El Iskandryia, the decadent free port of a 21st-century Ottoman Empire, doesn't exist. But author Jon Courtenay Grimwood could draw you a detailed map. In fact, he did, combining old and new maps and firsthand knowledge of our world's Alexandria, Egypt, to create the perfect noir setting for Ashraf (Raf) Bey, hero of Grimwood's Arabesk Trilogy.
With his 8,000-line guarantee and an inner fox who serves as conscience and familiar, Raf bridges the gap between science fiction and mystery. But none of the mysteries he solves in Pashazade, Effendi or Felaheen compares with the mysteries swirling around Raf himself. Reinventing himself even as he searches for his inner truths, Raf epitomizes the issues of identity and the fragility of history that fascinate Grimwood, whose personal history covers almost as much ground as that of his characters. Born in Malta to British parents, Grimwood's early travels took him from Southeast Asia to Norway—and served as a warm-up for the kind of intensive, on-site research he conducts for his fiction.
Grimwood published his first novel, neoAddix, in 1997. It became the first of four volumes in the Claire Fabio series, which culminated in redRobe, a play on Stanley Weyman's Victorian novel about a conflicted assassin, Under the Red Robe. Pashazade, published in Britain in 2001, made the short list for the Arthur C. Clarke Award the following year. Felaheen, the final book in the Arabesk Trilogy, won a British Science Fiction Association Award in 2003. But the books did not see general release in the U.S. until last fall. In an e-mail interview following the U.S. release of Felaheen in late December, Grimwood talked about the series and his most recent projects.
Additional information on Jon Courtenay Grimwood and his novels can be found at his Web site.
Who or what provided the initial inspiration for the character who became Ashraf Bey?
Grimwood: Walking through a suburb of North London, I passed the door to a cafe and got a sudden image of a large fox drinking cappuccino and eating cake while talking to a man who wore dark glasses. Obviously enough, there was no fox inside, but I sat in the cafe with my own coffee for long enough to work out who the strange man was, why he was talking to a fox and to discover that the fox didn't really exist. ... At least, not in a physical form.
Most of my books begin with a single image, and much of what I do, and the reason I always write three drafts, is that most of my writing processes involves picking out the points that matter and making sense of an inner world I only see in the first instance from outside.
How did your experiences living abroad and in boarding school figure into the mix?
Grimwood: I have been told that my characters have childhoods that see them on the edge of power but without it themselves, made resilient by isolation and caught between at least two and possibly three cultures. It hadn't occurred to me until I was told this, but on reflection, this seems to be a fair description of my own early life and definitely defines Raf, who only really begins to grow up when he arrives in El Iskandryia at the start of Pashazade.
Most people I know—and to be fair, they're probably mainly journalists, writers and suchlike—have no strong sense of belonging to any one place. I think this is an inevitable result of early 21st-century Western culture which has homogenized not just whole towns, but whole countries and continents.
Boarding school makes one quite tough from an early age. I went when I was 7, got out when I was 18 and spent my holidays in a variety of different countries, mostly being looked after by people who weren't my parents. From a Maltese nanny I learnt Catholicism and Malti, a form of Western Arabic. I learned bits of Islam from an amah in Jahore, visited Hindu temples and Buddhist shrines, opium dens and street markets. As most children do, I learnt to move easily between the various worlds I inhabited, until getting on and off planes, using bits of half a dozen different languages and eating with fingers, chopsticks or a knife and fork, as required, seemed entirely natural.
Do you think your experiences living in many cultures played a role in your interest in speculative fiction?
Grimwood: I think being exposed to a number of different societies made me mistrust any culture which claims to have all the answers. And this shaped how I look at the world. I'm not sure that my childhood steered me towards speculative fiction as such, but equally I'm not sure I believe in reality, identity or truth as absolute concepts, so I could well be wrong.
How did you settle on Egypt and Tunis as the stages for Raf's story? Did current events or trends in Middle Eastern politics play a role?
Grimwood: Alexandria has always been caught between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It once had a French-speaking middle class, Jewish merchants, Greek shippers, old Ottoman families, brothels, a lively gay scene, casinos and sumptuous villas used by exiled European aristocrats. It still has layers of history on top of layers of history and has been home to poets and novelists and painters. So it seemed the ideal place for a slightly raffish Ottoman free port (imagine a cross between a 1950s Tangier and a Middle-Eastern Singapore). Tunis got chosen because it's a city I love and was once home to the Barbary pirates.
I wrote Pashazade before George W. Bush was made president for the first time, so the Middle East was a very different place. That said, the potential for conflict between Islam and Christianity has been obvious since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. With the Ashraf Bey novels I wanted to write; first, good crime novels; second, alternate futures; and third, novels that looked at the relationship between the West and Middle East and North Africa.
This desire came out of two photographs I own. They come from the early years of the 1900s, and both show middle-class families, with mother and father, children, nannies and servants. ... On first sight, both photographs are nearly identical. The same poses, the same neat clothes and serious smiles. Only one shows an English family from London, while the other shows an Ottoman Turkish family from Istanbul. Different languages, cultures and religions, but identical in aspirations and the face they present to the world. I wanted to find out what had happened to make all this change. The answer turned out to be the First World War, which destroyed a dozen European kingdoms, introduced communism to Russia and confirmed Japan as the Far East's fastest growing power.
Is Felaheen the end of the road for Raf and the other characters in the series?
Grimwood: No, definitely not. There are nine Raf books in total (3x3), with a five-year gap in novel terms between each series of three. The next three books kick off in Istanbul, with Hani, aged about 16, as the main character, Prince Murad as her would-be lover and Raf trying to keep both under control and out of harm's way. It begins with a murder in the Topkapi palace. All I've got to do is find time to write the thing.
Many of your characters receive prosthetic or genetic enhancements. Do you see this as prediction or as a metaphor?
Grimwood: Metaphor, and sometimes an over-obvious one. For example, Fixx in reMix has his legs cut out from under him, literally, when Lady Claire Fabio has him arrested for the statutory rape of LizAlec (and then has to give his legs back when LizAlec goes missing and Claire Fabio suddenly needs Fixx's help).
The fox in the three Raf novels may or may not exist. The fox and Raf have different opinions on this, with the fox being the one to doubt its own existence. Philip Pullman has said, and I'm paraphrasing wildly, that life really begins when you realize as a child that you were born into/given to the wrong family by accident. ... This idea of uniqueness, of being alone, is easier to demonstrate if a character is given attributes that make him or her obviously different to other people. It's an outward manifestation of a core feeling.
To take the question one step further, how do you view the role of science fiction, as predictive (or cautionary) or as metaphor?
Grimwood: Neither. I think science fiction is a way of writing about now, mostly by writing about some other time altogether, and I pushed that by making my futures spin off from a slightly different past.
Mostly I do this because it helps me to look at where we are from where we might have been, and because we have a tendency to believe that where we stand now is inevitable, as if one particular side was always going to win that war or a stock market collapse. History is much more fragile than this. At least, it seems that way to me.
Everything we do as novelists reflects the world in which we live. If I had to choose, I'd say it's metaphor rather than predictive, because science fiction has such a lousy record of prediction. Sure, I can name a dozen things it got right, but for every one of those there are a dozen that it got wrong. I've done some "blue skies thinking" (hideous, indulgent phrase) for big companies, and I often wonder how much worth that stuff really has. You don't need to be an SF writer or an avid fan of New Scientist to know that climate change is probably the worst danger currently facing the world and the one least likely to be resolved.
Your first four novels are known as the Claire Fabio series, even though she's not always the central character. What makes her the linchpin to the series?
Grimwood: neoAddix came out of a mental image I had of a French police officer standing at the top of stone steps in Paris, with two police cars behind her. The woman was steeling herself to go down to the river's edge to examine a body. Somehow the police officer became Claire Fabio, imperial prosecutor, and the two cars became hovercraft, and I realized I was writing a science-fiction novel and not the crime novel I'd first imagined. Because she provided the defining image I've referred to them as the Claire Fabio sequence.
What were the points where the histories of Claire Fabio's and Ashraf Bey's worlds diverged from our own?
Grimwood: The four books in the Claire Fabio sequence split off from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which in my novels is won by the French, meaning the German empire is never born and the third Napoleonic empire never falls. Although, since redRobe features a Mexico that is still an empire under the descendants of Maximillian (who was executed in 1867), and it was his execution that helped weaken Napoleon III, that might be the real turning point.
The Ashraf Bey novels split off in 1915, with a peace between London and Berlin, brokered by the U.S. (which very nearly happened). This meant the dozens of little European kingdoms never collapsed, communism did not take over the whole of the Russian empire, and the second World War never happened.
How do those worlds relate to each other?
Grimwood: They don't, not really. The Claire Fabio novels are in a post-cyberpunky 22nd-century Napoleonic empire, while the Ashraf Bey books occupy a mid-21st-century Ottoman empire, with few similarities to the Fabio world.
What, if any, is the connection with the worlds of your most recent novels, Stamping Butterflies and 9tail Fox?
Grimwood: Stamping Butterflies is a novel about the birth of punk, the outsourcing of torture and an empire on the other edge of the galaxy. It takes place a few years from now, in this timeline in the 1970s and 50 centuries hence, and moves between Marrakesh, Washington, Paris and an analogue of the Chinese empire. The birth of punk rock is as it happened in our world, the present sections are only very slightly diverged, and the future is our future. Most novels deal with how the past created the future. I wanted to write a novel in which the future changes the past.
9tail Fox takes place in San Francisco and New York and is very definitely this world, though I've played with the SFPD structure slightly. It's had the most reviews of any of my novels (including two in The London Times), and what is noticeable is that all the mainstream reviews have treated it as literary fiction/a crime novel. Albeit one where the main character is dead and investigating his own death!
Are there any plans to release these novels outside the U.K.?
Grimwood: Stamping Butterflies has been bought by Bantam and will be published this fall. My agent's had offers for 9tail Fox, and we're looking at those at the moment. I'd like to do a deal linking 9tail Fox and End of the World Blues, which is the book that follows it.
Can you tell us anything about your current projects?
Grimwood: I've just returned from Japan, where I finished the edit for End of the World Blues, which is a crime novel about a bored half-English/half-American bar owner called Kit who meets a Japanese street kid and discovers she's really from the end of the world. It involves murder, arson, the Yakusa and a far-future family who make the Medicis look like amateurs. (Kit's life gets still messier when the mother of his first serious girlfriend turns up in Tokyo and demands he find her daughter, who has gone missing.)
In addition to off-world settings, your novels explore a diverse cross-section of earthly geography—from China to a reimagined Venice in the Pacific to Northern Africa to San Francisco. What methods do you use to achieve a sense of realism in your fictional locales?
Grimwood: Some writers can do it from guide books and films, but I can't. I actually have to go to the places and see them for myself. I usually go at least twice, although I ended up visiting Marrakesh and Tokyo three times each, because they were quite hard to grasp. (To an extent it's about not being able to read street signs or advertisements. I feel the same way in Moscow.)
I go to a city and then I get lost and spend most of a day trying to get back to where I started. This seems to work better than planning an itinerary or deciding in advance which places to visit. Part of understanding a city involves knowing its noises and smells and traffic and private places. I try to eat in local bars, at least look at the local papers and listen to the local music. A day spent in the cafe watching people walk past can tell you more than a dozen guide books. Two images that really stick with me from Tokyo are an old woman bowing to the closed and locked outer gates of the Imperial Palace and a young man, halfway across a deserted street, turning back and waiting because the lights had turned red when he was on a pedestrian crossing.
What sort of adjustments do you make to real-world geography to make it fit your worlds' alternate histories?
Grimwood: With the Ashraf Bey novels I bought a modern map of Alexandria and an historical map and changed most of the streets back to their old names and then reintroduced some of the old buildings and made changes to public squares and gardens to reflect changes in history. It took about three months of planning to set everything up. (I also drew the houses and created floor plans.)
Which comes first for you, plot or character?
Grimwood: Character is more important to me as a writer, but I suspect plot is more important to most readers. I write each novel three times, and during the first draft I tend to know what is going on but not why. As for characters, I know who they are and what they do in the book, but not necessarily their back histories and how they relate to each other.
Second draft gives me background and reasons and often unravels things that weren't clear to me when I finished the first draft. (I got to the end of the first run through of Pashazade and realized that although I knew who'd been killed and where, when and how, I had no idea who had committed the murder.)
The third draft is a line edit to tie plotlines together, check that the dialogue can actually be spoken and add final details. I usually discover that I need an extra chapter somewhere at this point, or a character changes sex, or I discover that I need an entirely new character altogether, as just happened with End of the World Blues.
You've often been compared to William Gibson—and seem to court this comparison by giving his last name to a character who turns into a god. How do you view the apparent connection?
Grimwood: My first novel got compared to Gibson because it was cyberpunk. What actually happened was that one of the glossy mags in the U.K. described it as "William Gibson meets Tarantino ..." and my publisher promptly slammed that on the cover of the next book. The link was pretty spurious.
The use of Gibson's surname for one of my characters in the first book was complete indulgence. I adore his work, which gets more elegant and layered with each novel, and I also have a soft spot for the early novels. Sometime in the 1980s I sat in a cafe on the south coast of England with my marriage coming apart around me and read Mona Lisa Overdrive. Reading it, strangely enough, was one of the things that kept me sane.
As somebody who's both a journalist and a reviewer of science fiction, how does it feel to be on the other side of the questions?
Grimwood: I've been a publisher, a journalist, a reviewer and a novelist, and bits of each seem to overlap. I enjoy interviewing people and have interviewed everyone from security experts to pop stars in my time. Bizarrely enough, I quite like being interviewed, as it's a good way to focus the mind.
Where do you find the creative energy to write both fiction and nonfiction? Do you divide the year between them, or do you pursue both simultaneously?
Grimwood: I give over one week each month to writing my Guardian review column. I'm lucky in that I get to choose the books I review and know that I want a certain mix of literary and mainstream, fantasy and SF, and juggle books to get this. Around publication time I usually get asked to write articles for the national newspapers or some of the magazines, and I have to fit these in as well. But mostly I just do books, and this takes up most of my life, waking and sleeping, weekdays and weekends!
Writing novels and getting published is a privilege. I have no doubts at all that being able to do what I want, when I want, makes me incredibly lucky.
In 2005, your wife, Sam Baker, saw publication of her first novel, Fashion Victim. How hard is it to juggle two writing careers in one household?
Grimwood: Sam's day job is as editor-in-chief of U.K. Cosmopolitan. So she's usually at work, and when she's not in the office she's probably at one of the fashion shows in New York or Milan. Added to which, we have a house in Winchester and an apartment behind Oxford Street in London. So it's not so much two writers juggling egos and self-doubt in one household, as Sam living in London during the week and trying to write her crime novels in any spare seconds of the day, while I live in Winchester and come and go to whichever city is the setting for my next book. We meet up at weekends and try to see each other once in the week if we're both in the country. It wouldn't work for everyone, but it works for us.
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