Rushdie's first attempt at fiction was a novel on Indian themes (called ‘The Book of the Pir ’), which remains unpublished; though some of the abandoned material may have found its way later into Midnight's Children. Grimus represents a radically different departure. It was conceived as a contender for the Science Fiction Prize offered annually by Victor Gollancz, who published the novel; but it is hardly surprising that it was not selected as a specially successful example of the genre. Although it does have the authentic intellectual excitement associated with such fiction, and is constructed with great ingenuity, there are too many other things going on, too many other interests being served, for it to have the distinctive science-fiction polish. As we have already noted, the transgression of genre categories has remained a consistent feature of Rushdie's fiction, and this is due both to the eclectic traditions from which he has drawn and the desire – traceable to the novel's origins – to make something new in the world. Like his admired Fielding, Rushdie thinks of the novel (still) as a ‘new province of writing’, and we will better understand his experimentation, the rules broken, the risks taken, and the demands made on the reader, if we share a sense of the urgency with which he persuades the novel to ‘forge … the uncreated conscience’ of the reader, as Joyce had proposed to do in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – one of the modern novels to which Rushdie most frequently alludes.

Grimus is a novel about knowledge and power; about mortality and immortality; about static forms and metamorphic engines; above all, it is about the use and abuse of the human imagination. As such it engages immediately with Rushdie's major themes, perhaps prematurely and therefore in a way that cannot yet do them justice: but it has nevertheless the virtues of a young writer's confidence, daring, and uninhibited experimentation. The narrative that carries the theme echoes one of the primal fictions: the arrival of a lone man on an island, his perilous adventures among its inhabitants, his moral crisis and apotheosis.