Strange Horizons, August 2002

by Strange Horizons

  CM: Do you see yourself as presenting the Arabic world to the West?

  JCG: No, I wouldn't be that arrogant. What I'm trying to do with my detective, Ashraf Bey, is take a Western character into the North African world and make him understand it through the process of solving individual crimes. I didn't want him coming in and analyzing society coldly, looking at how they did this or how they did that. I want him to be part of El Iskandryia, which is why he's part Berber and part English, and grew up in New York. I wanted to put him in a situation where he is trapped between the two worlds and has to deal with it.

  CM: The reader follows the same journey as the character. You start from a Western viewpoint and gradually learn more about the Arabic world.

  JCG: Yes, as you go through the books, Raf learns more. He also has to take on more responsibility. A lot of the point of the series is that it is about someone coming to terms with taking responsibility rather than just watching.

  CM: Raf was a gangster in Seattle, and by the end of Pashazade, the first book, he's a single parent with an adopted niece.

  JCG: Yes, it is an attempt to say, “you can do all the stuff you like, but when it comes down to it and you have someone to look after, you are going to have to compromise your life to do this."

  CM: Hani is a little bit of a cliché, of course: the computer genius kid.

  JCG: She's representative of how I felt about having a child I needed to take responsibility for. But the business with the computers is based on a nephew of mine who I saw, at about the age of 3, toddle across a sitting room to a computer, clamber up onto a chair and hit F9 and Return. At that time I didn't even have a laptop, and I thought to myself, “you have got to get to grips with new technology, that child has just used the computer as if it were a fridge.” What I am trying to do with Hani is show someone who is so familiar with technology that using it is not really an issue. The other point, more importantly, is that Hani's skill with computers is a sign of dysfunction. As a child she has had no human friends at all, she's never been allowed outside the house. Her sole connection with the outside world has been a cold, emotionally sterile aunt. Everything she knows about the world has been learnt through a screen. So Hani's ability signifies the damage in her life.

  CM: So far the books have largely been about secular issues within Islamic society. Are you going to address Islam itself?

  JCG: Yes, I am. What I am trying to do at the moment with the third book, Felaheen, is to look at how the puritan thread in Islam affects government. The West prefers secular Arabic governments because they are easier to understand and don't require one to understand the theocratic background to decisions. One of the reasons why putting the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in the same box is absurd is because the first is a puritan, theocratic organization and operation, while the second fears fundamentalist Islam probably as much as any Western government and has spent a lot of time keeping fundamentalist Islam down. They may both, in their way, be corrupt and corrosive—but they are not interchangeable.

  It is quite possible that if Egypt were to have a completely free vote tomorrow it might, just, become an Islamicist state, but it has governments with a very strong interest in making sure that never happens. From the Western point of view this is good. Where it becomes a real problem is in somewhere like Algeria where the government wants to stay resolutely secular and a very large proportion of the people support the Islamicists. There has been a civil war going on in Algeria for years, in which the victims have often been women and children, but it has been largely unreported.

  The problem we have in the West is to understand why what we call “fundamentalist Islam” is increasing in popularity. Because I don't believe that Islam is necessarily hard line, any more than Christianity is necessarily fundamentalist. Fundamentalism has influence within both, but it is not the default position.

  CM: It is possible, of course, that some areas of America would vote for a fundamentalist Christian government if they were given the choice.

  JCG: Yes, and that creates a problem in European understanding of American culture. There seems to be a strong strand in America of Creationism, the idea that Darwinian theory is one faith among others. From a European point of view that's difficult for people to accept.

  CM: I have only just bought the second arabesque, Effendi, and haven't had time to read it. Perhaps you could tell me a little bit about it.

  JCG: The first third of Effendi is the last third of Pashazade seen from a different angle and through a different character's eyes, because I wanted to subvert what Raf took for granted.

  Basically Hamzah has been charged with murder and Raf has to investigate the crime. Obviously enough, this does nasty things to Raf's relationship with Zara.

  (Hamzah is a smuggler and criminal made good who is now trying to launder his money and become respectable. Zara is his daughter, the girl who Raf was going to marry in Pashazade and didn't. Zara had spent two years at college in New York and came home to find that her parents had arranged a marriage for her. She didn't want to marry Raf, so he refused to marry her, not understanding, being new to El Iskandryia and being Western himself and therefore not very clued up, exactly what this would do to the reputations of Zara and her family.)

  The back history is set during the Little Wars, which are based around North Sudan. These were fought over water and the moving of borders to take in water supplies. I've interleaved a crime novel with flashbacks about the use of children as soldiers.

  So we have the Little Wars running all the way through Effendi. And that strand is based around a child's idea that it might be possible to turn off the Nile, and if one succeeded in that there would be no water so the war in which he is fighting would have to cease. It is the idea of an eight-year-old. But that childish logic is tied into crimes being committed years later, and we see how the two stories interact and connect.

  CM: The third Ashraf Bey novel is also the food book, as I recall you telling me.

  JCG: A substantial amount of the third book is set in a kitchen. Where Raf is investigating the death of a pastry chef, while simultaneously trying to stop the fall from power of the Emir of Tunis, the man who may or may not be his father.

  CM: And you did an awful lot of serious research for it.

  JCG: I research each book fairly heavily. I made a trip to Tunis. And I used to work in a kitchen. If a meal is mentioned then I've cooked that meal. Gone out, bought the ingredients and actually made it. Because otherwise how can I describe how it is made or what it tastes like? Another thing I do when setting a book in a particular society is go out and buy lots of music from that culture. So I have a lot of North African dance, a lot of Sufi, and a lot of Berber music, to get a sense of it.

  I also read a fair amount of the poetry, and hunt down restaurants and bars and go and eat there and ask people for recommendations of traditional dishes. I think you get a lot of sense about a country through its food.

  One of the things I love about North African cookery is that the armies of Islam took their cookery to Spain, where there were was a richness to the ingredients not found in North Africa. So North African cookery exploded under the new Spanish influence. When Isabella of Castille threw the Moors out of Spain, their cookery went back to North Africa, but it came back with all of the additional Spanish richness. So what you have in modern North African cookery is ancient North African cookery, filtered through Andalusia, and then re-adapted to North Africa. You have an entire history of conquest, re-conquest and exile, perhaps just in one dish.

  CM: There are strong moral themes running all through your books.

  JCG: I've had reviews of redRobe that claimed Axl was too moral, that he was immoral, and that he was amoral. Somebody actually asked me once why I write morality-free characters. I don't think that any of my characters are morality free. I think they have very strong moralities, but maybe not those of the society around them. Axl has a very strong morality created by his childhood and by his relatio
nship with the Cardinal. It has a strong internal logic.

  I think the duty of a writer is to get inside the heads of every character in the book, and not just the hero. I think if you have one character with whom you sympathize and who reflects the society from which you come that is a limitation. Even your villains should be understood. They can still be evil, they can still be bad, but it is the writer's duty to make the reader understand, at some point, why they are like that.

  CM: The Cardinal, for example, thinks he is doing the best thing for the world. He thinks that the world needs him in charge of it, and that sacrifices must be made to maintain his position. That's a very easy trap for a political leader to fall into.

  JCG: He sees himself as indispensable and everyone else as naïve, and therefore he has to take all of the hard decisions for them.

  CM: I can see that people would look at Raf and say, “this guy is completely amoral, he was a gangster in Seattle, so how come he's suddenly looking after a nine-year-old kid?"

  JCG: He doesn't come to it willingly but Hani is the first person with whom Raf has a relationship where he gets nothing material back. She is his first brush with humanity. Up until then Raf has been institutionalized: in boarding school, which is a sort of prison, in the Triads and in an actual prison. The first time he stops being institutionalized is when he refuses to accept what El Iskandryia has planned for him. He refuses to marry Zara, and in doing that he steps outside himself and can start to take responsibility for his actions.

  CM: So his character evolves.

  JCG: Well morality is learned, just like identity. I believe very strongly that identity is created and learned. It is very easy for me to sit here comfortably, in a lovely hotel on a very rich island talking about morality. But the same me without water will react to need very differently, and will become someone else. There may be an intrinsic, unbreakable core that is Jon Courtenay Grimwood, but I'm not sure I even believe that. I may have some basic core beliefs, but these can be influenced and changed. Otherwise it would not be possible to create soldiers.

  CM: Where do you go from here?

  JCG: Well I have just been taken on by Mic Cheetham, and given that she agents for people like Iain Banks and China Mieville I'm hoping good things are going to happen sales-wise. I am about six weeks away from finishing Felaheen, my third book in the Arabesque series. And then I am going to do something different. I'm not quite sure what. Maybe something a bit bigger. And when I have done that, I'll probably come back to Ashraf Bey and El Iskandryia, because I have a whole series of stories I want to tell. Raf won't even be the main character in the next three. The books will be set five years in the future, so Raf and Hani will be five years older. Things will have moved on, society will be different, and there will be whole new opportunities and pressures.

  CM: When you say “something a bit bigger,” do you mean a longer book, or a broader canvas, or what? Most of what you have written to date has been very tightly focused.

  JCG: I think a bit of both. I don't want to lose the focus, but I want to spread. I want to be tightly focused in three places instead of just one. Maybe make a time slice across centuries rather than decades. Perhaps alternate universe rather than alternate world.

  CM: We are not talking space opera here.

  JCG: No, I don't think I could do that. I suspect that if I tried to write space opera I'd end up with a tightly-knit, angry society within a generation ship. I'll stick to what I'm good at.

  CM: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, thank you for talking to Strange Horizons.

  * * * *

  Cheryl Morgan's native habitat is the UK, but the species has also been found in Australia and is currently infesting California. Government officials say that there is nothing to fear, save for the possibility of the Bay Area sinking under the weight of Ms. Morgan's book collection. She is also the editor of the online science fiction and fantasy book review magazine Emerald City.

  Visit Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Web site.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Perpetual Nonsense

  By Charles Mirho

  8/19/02

  I recently spent time in the outer office of a hypnotherapist. On the reading table were several issues of a New Age periodical called New Connexion. A front-page article entitled “Scalar Energy Device Patented—Production Starts Next Year” caught my eye. As a patent attorney I was naturally curious.

  United States Patent 6,362,718 was issued in March 2002. One of the inventors was Thomas Bearden, a well known free-energy proponent. According to the article, the Bearden patent covered what would soon become “the first commercially-available free-energy device in history.” I thought, “Uh-oh, here we go again."

  It was Sir Isaac Newton who said, “The seekers after perpetual motion are trying to get something from nothing.” Newton may not have been the nicest man, but he was no slouch when it came to physics. His words ring true today.

  The more I read of the article, the farther my eyebrows rose. By the time I finished, I think they were up around my hairline. The device is essentially an electromagnetic generator, with a twist. It extracts energy from the time domain, which is actually “compressed energy” in the same proportion as matter, the speed of light squared. The device draws from “the longitudinal electromagnetic waves that fill the ocean of space-time.” There are no moving parts. It will output 2.5 kW of electricity, indefinitely, without drawing input power. Jump start it, and it goes. Forever.

  I thought that if Einstein were in his grave (he was cremated), he would surely turn over upon hearing this.

  Things that are patented must work as described. This principle acts as a form of “honesty cop” on outrageous invention claims. This wasn't always the case, but like an often-jilted lover, the patent office has become jaded and skeptical of inventions that claim to get something for nothing. The United States patent office didn't open its door until 1790, but the first English patent on a perpetual motion (PM) machine was granted long before that—as early as 1635. Even the esteemed Leonardo da Vinci made a number of drawings of things he hoped would make energy for free. The Jesuit priest Johanes Taisnerius worked on a magnetic-based perpetual motion machine. By 1903, some have estimated that as many as 600 patents on PM devices had been granted in England alone. By the end of the Civil War, PM machines had made their way into the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Although the USPTO now enforces a strict policy of declining patents on PM devices, as late as 1973 a man named Howard R. Johnson filed and received a patent on a Permanent Magnetic Motor. Not surprisingly, the device was never commercialized with any success.

  Types of “Perpetual” Motion

  Modern PM designs usually fall into one of a few well-known categories. All claim some technique for using a small impulse of startup energy to release a large and inexhaustible supply of sustained energy. First you have your so-called “radiant-energy” machines. Radiant energy is like electricity and is gathered directly from the environment by a method called “fractionation.” Don't call it “static electricity"—this upsets its proponents greatly. Radiant energy can perform the same wonders as ordinary electricity, at less than 1% of the cost.

  Another class of device is the “mechanical heater.” In one such machine, one cylinder is rotated within another cylinder with a slight gap of clearance between them. The space between the cylinders is filled with a liquid such as water or oil, which heats up as the inner cylinder spins. Another such machine uses magnets mounted on a wheel to produce large eddy currents in a plate of aluminum, causing the aluminum to heat up rapidly. In both cases, the heat generated is said to exceed the mechanical energy applied.

  Another free-energy technique involves electrolysis, whereby water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. Standard chemistry books claim that this process requires more energy than can be recovered from the individual gases, but of course this is true only under the worst-case scenario. When water is electrified at
its molecular resonant frequency, it collapses into hydrogen and oxygen gas with very little electrical input. Also, adding chemicals that make the water conduct electricity better improves the efficiency dramatically. Even more amazing, a special metal alloy patented in 1957 can spontaneously break water into hydrogen and oxygen with no outside electrical input at all, and without causing any chemical changes in the metal itself.

  Then you have your implosion/vortex engines, which use cooling to produce suction, which in turn produces work. This is the opposite of the technique employed in combustion engines, which rely on primitive chemical explosions to get things moving. And don't forget cold fusion, made famous (or infamous) in 1989 by two chemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of Brigham Young University.

  Finally, you have your permanent magnet powered motors. Browsing a copy of the Bearden patent, it quickly became apparent that his invention fell into this category. I located the obligatory disclaimer of perpetual motion on page three (remember, the patent office has finally wised up to any devices that claim to provide free energy and will decline them out of hand). However, I discovered something else that surprised me. The thing might actually be useful, though not to provide free energy.

  The Bearden Patent

  The invention consists of one or more fixed-position permanent magnets and electromagnets (coils). An initial electrical impulse, repeatedly switched to the coils in precise timing, produces an ongoing output current. The output current persists without decay long after the initial impulse is over, and the device is self-powering. The performance ratio of the prototype is 3.4. Thus, for every watt of input power, 3.4 watts of output power are produced. At first glance it does appear to be a source of free energy.

  What is going on? Is conservation of energy no longer a respected law of the universe? The patent provides the answer. If the device is not capturing and converting energy from its environment, it must be consuming itself. More accurately, the device must be disorganizing, e.g. increasing its entropy, like a battery. This breakdown of order is harnessed and transduced into electricity.