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Product Description

Cosmopolitan, COSMOPOLITAN
"Forget The Matrix, this is far more sophisticated and sexy. Mind-bendingly good."

ALIEN ON LINE
'Incredibly cool, incredibly stylish, distinctly nasty in places... another dose of classic Grimwood.'

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Customer Reviews

7 Reviews

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(0)
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

total page-turner, 30 Sep 2005

By A Customer

This review is from: Stamping Butterflies (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)

The characters in this book will blow your mind. Take Moz - a street kid in 1970's Marrakech, in love with a half-German girl called Malika. Then there's Jake is a punk guitarist, hiding in a run down house in the old part of the city. In the present, the US president just escaped an assassination attempt by a would-be assassin known as Prisoner Zero (who Prisoner Zero is, exactly, is one of the book's many questions). Either way, Prisoner Zero had been condemned to death by the Pentagon but the President wants him kept alive.

And while all this is going on, on the other side of the galaxy and thousands of years in the future, a boy who behaves very like Moz is ruler of a vast collection of worlds, helped by an alien intelligence, who took another boy's dreams and childhood stories (one being about a butterfly), and thinking the stories were real helped create the thousands of worlds over which a succession of boys now rule. (Confused yet? You better concentrate.)

There are three time-lines so that can get tricky but the little signs at the top of each chapter tell you where you are and the description is so beautifully written it will whisk you away. Stamping Butterflies is about everything. It's about the US prisoners held in Iraq. It's about regret and love and punk. It's about why people lie. But mostly it's just a good story, alternatively funny and sad and gruesome.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Uninvolving, 4 Feb 2007

By	C. Jack "colinjack" (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stamping Butterflies (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)

One of the things I liked about the book is that it has several plot lines each set in its own time frame and location. The progression in each thread of the story was quite smooth and the ideas in each were interesting. However it did seem strange that a large part of the book is set in the past or in our time frame.

This is a piddling problem compared to the major issue which is that the book had two major flaws. The first is that there is little depth to the story and the second is that the characters are equally shallow. This is partly because there are quite a few plot lines and so plenty of characters but its also because the author wants to keep you on your toes so he gives very little away abou the reasons things are happening. The end result was that I didn't really have any connection to the characters and I didn't really care what happened in any of the plotlines.

I should perhaps give the book 4 stars, it did have good ideas after all. However I just plain didn't enjoy it so 3 stars seems more accurate.

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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

A fantastic read, 6 Mar 2006

By	"zenotia" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stamping Butterflies (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)

When you reach the end of this book you will want to start at the beginning again - it's that good. Absorbing and challenging, I wish there were more books like it - it's the first book I have read by this author but I intend to read all his others. Everyone knows about the emporer who dreamed he was a butterfly, but the author has taken this starting point and weaved cutting edge science with detailed socio-cultural backgrounds and timelines that move backwards and forwards, the end product is a wonderful story.

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