Stamping Butterflies

Alternative Worlds

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Stamping Butterflies
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Bantam, Sep 2006, $12.00
ISBN: 0553383775

In Paris, a vagrant reads in a paper he picks up that the President of the United States Gene Newman will soon visit Marrakech; he decides on the spot to assassinate the American leader. Shockingly the tramp almost succeeds, but is detained by American anti-terrorist agents, who incarcerate Prisoner Zero on a tiny Mediterranean Sea rock. Needing to know who he is working for and who trained him. The espionage crowd assumes Prisoner Zero is the best with his vagabond outfit seeming so real yet a cover. However, the constant torturous interrogation produces nothing from Prisoner Zero. Meanwhile as the tramp ignores and annoys the spies and other VIPs visiting him, he speaks telepathically with the “Darkness” until Zero using bodily droppings writes a ground breaking series of mathematical equations on the application of zero-point energy.

Back in 1969 in Marrakech, street urchin Moz is infected by an intelligence embellishing parasite that finds a place inside his brain. The Moroccan police direct Miz to befriend rock-star and mathematician Jake Razor as they assume the outsider is a spy; the lad succeeds becoming a pal of Jake.

Finally five millenniums into the future a sole survivor of a Chinese spaceship is saved by an alien. This leads to an interstellar Chinese Empire whose fifty-third ruler Emperor Zaq dreams of Prisoner Zero and the “Darkness” that he calls the “Library”.

This is a complex cerebral science fiction that grips the appreciative audience wondering where Jon Grimwood is taking us. The story line rotates perspective between the three subplots before tying together it into a fascinating Moebius Ring that is further twisted and cut into a Paradromic Ring. Fans preferring a linear tale need to pass the convoluted entertaining STAMPING BUTTERFLIES.
 

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