Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Jon Courtenay Grimwood is a British science fiction author.

He was born in Valletta, Malta, grew up in Britain, Southeast Asia and Norway in the 1960s and 1970s. He studied at Kingston College, then worked in publishing and as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers including The Guardian. He now lives in London and Winchester and is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, with a son, Jamie, from a previous marriage.

Much of his early work can be described as shocking post-cyberpunk. He won a British Science Fiction Association award for Felaheen in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award for Pashazade, the year before. He has also shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His fourth book is loosely based on Stanley Weyman's Victorian novel Under the Red Robe (ISBN 5-552-05128-9).

Grimwood's work tends to be of a quasi-alternate history genre that could be dubbed "alternate future"; whilst set in an alternate universe, they are still set in the future. In the first four novels, set in the 22nd century, the point of divergence is the Franco–Prussian War of 1870, where Grimwood posits a reality where Napoléon III's France defeats Otto von Bismarck's Prussia, causing the German Empire never to form and the Second French Empire never to collapse. In the Arabesk trilogy, the point of divergence is in 1915, with Woodrow Wilson brokering an earlier peace so that World War I barely expanded outside of the Balkans; the books are set in a liberal Islamic Ottoman North Africa in the 21st century, mainly centering around El Iskandryia (Alexandria). By contrast, there is little in Stamping Butterflies to suggest that it's not set in our reality.

Grimwood's style has two main features. Firstly, his central characters often have a somewhat unusual form of (often artificial) inner monologue; the lead character of the Arabesk trilogy has an internal AI generally referred to as "the fox" or Tiriganaq, which acts as a pseudo-conscience to some extent, in addition to giving him often flawed and self-evident advice; another character talks to his ever-present military commander; and most notably, in redRobe, the lead character (an assassin) talks to his sentient gun. In Stamping Butterflies, as well as some of the protagonists having a mental link (across several centuries), one character has conversations with an alien AI known as "the Library".

Secondly, he frequently alternates the main narrative with either a continuous story or a series of discontinuous flashbacks, often to the childhood of a central character. He uses this to explain events in the past in such a way that their connection to the plot only becomes evident later in the book, at around the point its effects are felt in the main storyline.