Acclaimed UK author Jon Courtenay Grimwood stops by the basement to talk about his previous works, changing styles and what's coming next.

Your novels straddle several genres, fantasy, alternate history, science fiction, hard-boiled crime thriller…how would you describe your work?

As a JCG novel… And I really try to write within one genre, but it always goes out of the window, although I’m getting better at only meshing two or three genres at one time. Thing is, I really like working across genres. It’s truer to life.

What is it about science fiction that attracts you?

As a writer, the fact you get to mess with reality, you can make up facts, no one can bang the table and say, but it’s not real. As a reader, ditto…

I’ve noticed quite a difference from your early novels to your current work. Was it a conscious decision to switch things up?

The first four novels were post-cyberpunk. The first, neoAddix was dreadful, Lucifer’s Dragon was better, reMix worked reasonably well, and I really like redRobe. In effect, I was learning to write in public and got it right after the first two.

The three Ashraf Bey mysteries are different. Each one is a stand-alone crime novel, set in an alternate Ottoman empire, and there’s a strong SF strand that doesn’t get revealed until the end… The slowing of the pace, the emphasis on character and the simpler narrative structure are entirely conscious.

Stamping Butterflies, 9tail Fox and End of the World Blues (which has just been shortlisted for the BSFA and Clarke awards) grew out of what I learned from the Raf books. They’re still mysteries, with a strong SF element, but they’re set in our world, more or less.

Out of all of the characters you’ve created who is your favorite?

Impossible to say… Really impossible… I’m currently writing a six-hundred year old hero who lives in Mexico City, and I love him. But also I’m really fond of Raf, and Jake Razor, and Bobby Zha, and also Kit from End of the World Blues, because that’s a fantastically personal book and I really like Tokyo. All my characters are my favourites as a write them, because they’re inside my head and I’m inside theirs.

I’ve read that you visit the locations featured in your novels as well as actually cook the meals that your characters eat; do you feel that you need this level of authenticity?

Yes… there’s a famous story about a UK novelist who had a characters walk along a river that ran round a city. Only, she based her description on a map, and her river turned out to be a road.

Unless you visit a city you don’t know what it smells like, what the air tastes like, what sounds you hear at night and what the streets feel like underfoot. You learn a lot about a culture from its cooking. Whether people eat on the run or sit down, eat alone or with their families, cook elaborate meals or eat take out…

I also buy music in a city and listen to what’s current. And I watch the television and go to see films, even if I don’t understand the language. I know all fiction is a lie, but we have a duty to get right what we can. And then we can make up the stuff that matters, like the back story and the characters’ emotions.

I’d like to talk to you about some of your books and characters specifically starting with redRobe. It’s a sad world where the only safe place for refugees is on a man-made refuge in orbit run by a pacifist AI. Do you think the powers that be would prefer to just shoot refugees into space?

Writing redRobe came out of what was happening in the Balkans, with its ethnic cleansing and camps and refugees. The situation is going to get worse because global warming is going to hit poor countries first. When the sea rises and floods become common place people are going to move.

I wanted a solution that gave people a new start. And yes, I did want to make a point about the powers that be wanting to sweep the problem out of sight. That said, I think we have to go into space. The only question is when we face up to the fact.

Axl Borja is an interesting character. An emotionally damaged assassin working for the Vatican, where did he come from?

Ah… years ago a man called Stanley J Weyman wrote a Victorian novel called Under the Red Robe about a disgraced duellist at the time of Cardinal Richeleau, who ruled France in the early 1600s. I read it as a child and retold it set in the future as redRobe. It began as a straight updating and quickly turned into something else. One of the things that survived was the link between Axl and the Cardinal.

Axl against the Immortals is a nastily fun short story. Any chance of going back to check in with Axl in the future?

I’d love to, but I also want to go back to Raf and the Ashraf Bey mysteries. Interestingly, redRobe has just sold in Japan. So we’ll see how it goes there. redRobe was also the only film on which I’ve had a serious bite from a film company. Although it fell apart on the costings. (That was back in the day when CGI was still relatively expensive.)

Moving on to what is your most well known work, the Arabesk trilogy, were you hesitant at all in setting a series in the Middle East with the current happenings in the world?

When I started writing the Raf books we hadn’t gone to war with Iraq…! Also, the novels take place in El Iskandryia, a city on the Mediterranean famous until the 1950s for its cosmopolitan mix of Greeks, and Leventines, its Jewish quarter, and its exiles from Western Europe. The culture in Raf books is Ottoman and North African, rather than Middle Eastern, and the world is not ours.

We think of Islam as homogeneous. It isn’t. I remember sitting in a café in Tunis a couple of years ago surrounded by elegant middle class North-African women, all drinking cappucino and reading novels or their papers. For them, the headscarf was something elegant from Hermes. Another memory has a beggar in full headscarf breast-feeding her baby on a bench in Marrakech. (No one seemed remotely troubled. But then the culture in North Africa is very different to the culture in, say, Saudi Arabia.)

Ashraf Bey is another damaged character. He may or may not be royalty, he may or may not have an AI in his head that he sees as a fox. Do you think it’s easier to have a lead that is in some way different?

My characters tend to come into my head fairly fully formed. It wasn’t until I read a critical review that I realised the ex-sniper on the run in Tokyo from End of the World Blues had traits in common with Prisoner Zero from Stamping Butterflies, or that Raf in many ways shared my own childhood. I’m not sure my lead characters are different. Because I’m not entirely convinced I know what is normal. But all are in need of redemption, and all find it to some extent.

I found that despite all of the alternate history and science fiction elements that the Arabesk series is about a young man coming of age and finding his place by coming to terms with who and what he is. Was this your intent all along?

Yes, the Ashraf Bey novels are about a man realising he has to grow up and take responsibility for a small girl who may or may not be his cousin. This, plus his love affair with Zara, was always the dominant theme. It’s also about learning to understand the culture of others. In rejecting his arranged marriage, Raf thinks he is doing Zara a favour. In fact, he’s disgracing her.

Of course, who and what he is are complicated for Raf than for most people. But that’s just a heightening of the feeling we all have when young that we’re the first people to rebel, the first people to discover sex, the first people to protest about whatever it is we need to protest about.

You plan on returning to Raf and his niece Hani. When do you expect to start writing those stories and what if anything can you tell us about the direction they might go?

My publisher in the UK is combining the first three Ashraf Bey novels into one volume and issuing it as a huge hardback! I’d love to write more Raf books, but I’ve had to put that idea on hold as I’m currently writing the first of a three-volume crime series set in heaven, hell and Mexico City.

It features Joan of Arc and Giles de Rays, sometimes known as Bluebeard, and means I’ve been spending time in Mexico and New York, because it also takes place there. It’s an updating of Paradise Lost, with crime reports, angels and a love affair across time.

Do you have a title in mind for the book your currently writing and when do you think it might see print?

The book is called Thrones and Powers, and I'll finish writing it this summer, so probably the summer afterwards...

9TailFox is another genre bender. This is likely the least science fiction of your novels. Do you plan to write any other novels that are more mystical/magical?

Writing 9tail was a reaction to writing Stamping Butterflies. Writing SB was incredibly complicated. There are nine narrative strands over three time lines, and it basically ties the birth of punk to a far future Chinese empire, by way of a Parisian tramp who wants to shoot the president of the United States. Since the president he wants to shoot is the best president the country has had in years no one quite understands this.

9tail Fox is the story of Bobby Zha, a sergeant with the SFPD. It’s a crime novel, tied to a Dr-Moreau backstory that sees bodies being dumped in the Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate bridge. (And yes, I had great fun going to San Francisco and researching the city.)

A few people have questioned whether or not it’s SF. But, so far as I’m concerned, a novel with at least two of the characters walking around with brain transplants counts as SF to me. Of course, it does have a magical element. But I grew up in the Far East and so did Bobby’s grandfather. So I’ve used bits of that.

Stamping Butterflies has a pretty stark look at the way the US holds non-Americans. Do you like adding in some political commentary to your work? Is there ever any fear that you might turn some people off?

Whether or not we travel by plane, what we eat, who we sleep with, where we live and the jobs we do… Maybe it’s because I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It just seems obvious that politics threads through everything we do. Even novels that carefully avoid politics are political. What’s more political than avoiding politics?

I don’t think there are many people left who feel Guantanamo Bay is a useful solution to the problems facing us. And I remember being attacked in a blog for being anti-American, and being really shocked. I’ve been visiting the US since the mid-1980s, I was married in New York. The America I grew up respecting was that of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the Marshall Plan of the post-War years. Events I was taught about in school. It’s still there, I know that from friends in the US. They say they’re just waiting for it to come out of hiding.

Moving on to End of the World Blues, Lady Neku’s world is a wonder. Floating palaces holding up a barrier that protects a largely dead world below with royalty living in a feudal existence. Where did the idea for the floating rope world come from?

It’s a play on ukiyo-e, the wood-block prints from Japan that are known as ‘pictures of the floating world’. I wanted to make it literal, to have a world bound round with ropes, and I also wanted to play on the idea of nawa shinbari or kinbaku, which is Japanese rope bondage, a ancient form that goes back centuries.

Hayato Kato, who I met .. when one of my short stories was about by a Japanese magazine, helped me come up with nawa-no-ukiyo - floating rope world - which caught the right combination of history and artistic subversion. The plan was to make Lady Neku’s rope world link to Kit’s wife, Yoshi’s, need to be bound (Yoshi is co-owner of their biker bar in Tokyo).

Are there any plans for you to make a bigger push in the US market? Your novels really are unlike anything else on the market.

The reviews have been great. All the right papers, New York Times, Washington Post, Locus, New York Review of Science Fiction, Scifi.com, and others. A shortlisting for the John W Campbell Memorial Award…

Things are picking up and one of the Raf books reprinted recently. End of the World Blues is to be published by Bantam Spectra this year (I’ve just seen the cover rough, it looks fantastic). Nightshade Books are publishing 9tail Fox in the US, also this year. We’ll see what happens. In the past, the fact my novels are unlike anything else in the US market has scared booksellers slightly. Now it seems to be turning into an advantage.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Jon!

Jon Courtenay Grimwood can be found online at his website http://j-cg.co.uk/ or at his myspace page http://www.myspace.com/joncg .