Jon Courtenay Grimwood

12. You like to play with history. Both of your series, Ashraf Bey and Claire Fabio, have their own, alternate history lines. And in Stamping Butterflies you throw the reader in the middle of events where future is changing the past (or maybe both are changing each other). Is there something deeper behind this? Or is it just your version of playing "what if…"?

History is humanity’s memories and we’ve talked about why memories are important. For me, alternate time lines are one way at looking at where we are (as opposed to where we are not, or where we could have been.). Our personal lives are also a series of what ifs… They’re what make our memories and, quite possibly, our regrets; since not doing sometime is often as bad as doing it. And those millions of individual histories go to make up greater histories.

The shape of time has long been an obsession of mine. And one of the first arguments I had with my future wife was in a café in the early 1990s where sat and argued about whether time was shaped like an ice-cream cone, swirling outwards; or shaped like a glass marble, which we decided was probably blue. It was only years later, when looking through an illustrated brief history of time that we discovered if could be shown as both!