ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nebula Award, SCKA Award finalist. Member of SFWA. Left one erstwhile empire only to settle in another. Speaks German by day, Russian by night. Writes in English.

Thank you—it’s GREAT to be here!

I was born in Cold War-era Moscow and spent the first half of my life, twenty-one years to be precise, in Russia (same as Nabokov, hehe). What followed was nineteen years in emigration in the beautiful city of Vienna. I speak Russian, English, and German fluently. One could say I exist between worlds—I’ve got both the West and the East in my bloodstream now. I’ve experienced great kindness on both sides, but unfortunately, I also know a lot about nationalism, propaganda, and being a stranger in a room full of friends.

Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Le Guin, Zelazny … Peter Watts, definitely. What I love about both Zelazny and Watts is their courage in dealing with language. They never pull their punches, they go as beautiful with their prose as is humanly possible. No sentence is filler. Such an approach sometimes makes writers the targets of ridicule: see, for example, The Digital Antiquarian’s article on Zelazny in which he calls the latter’s beautiful passages “occasional stabs at free-verse poetry that misfire horribly.” This is where courage comes into play.

The entire process. Sitting down at my laptop and cracking open a bottle of rum is always the highlight of my day :)

I'll let you in on a secret: I’m a terribly slow writer (although my agent believes otherwise …. Damn, I hope Ed’s not reading this!). Partly because I’m not a native speaker—no matter how good your command of the language is, you’ll never be as fast as someone born in an English-speaking country. But it’s also true that I never press a single key on the keyboard until I know exactly what I’m going to write. The scene needs to be clear in my mind, I need to know how it starts, how it ends, what metaphors I’ll be using, whether it’s hot or cold, sunny or dark, whether there’s a light breeze.

I have to hear that click—it’s hard to describe, it’s like a jigsaw piece sliding into place. I firmly believe my stories have really happened somewhere over the hills and far away, and that feeling of the click is the best proof I have that I'm not entirely crazy. I just have to stay as faithful as possible to the source material, so to speak.

First of all, thank you so much for your kind words! After Tower of Mud and Straw had gotten shortlisted for the Nebula, I was hoping for a Big Five deal. Of course I did. Everybody hopes for a Big Five deal .... And in my case, it didn’t happen. We spent a year and three months on submission, a friggin’ agonizing amount of time: things have ground almost to a halt in the post-Covid publishing world. What used to take a month now takes six. Still, we received heaps of personal rejections offering praise for just about everything, from the prose to the characters to the subtleties of the politics depicted—but in the end, yeah, “we’re currently focusing on more commercial stories.”

Basically, too weird / too unlike anything else on the market right now. What sells best are books that can be immediately plugged into yesterday's marketing machine—that’s why they ask you for the comp titles that have become bestsellers in the last three years, right?

My agent & I got lucky in late 2023, when Caezik SF & Fantasy, an imprint of Arc Manor, made us an offer. I like them. They have this refreshing “I dig it, so I know I can sell it” attitude. They’re up-and-coming, they publish Harry Turtledove, they’ll be reissuing Herbert and Anderson’s Tales of Dune and Alan Dean Foster’s Madrenga this fall. I found kindred spirits in them.

My dear Nebula-nominated and Kirkus-starred Tower was always supposed to be part one of a larger work. I know a lot of people love saying such things in retrospect (probably crossing their fingers behind their backs), but here’s an excerpt from the outline I sent to B. Morris Allen, Tower’s editor and publisher, in December 2019: “Should a sequel be written, the hero would flee to [spoilers redacted] to escape prosecution for [spoilers redacted].”

Sadly, we never got to that sequel! Shortly after we’d received the Nebula nod, Morris folded his book-publishing operation. I never quite understood why: we could’ve been great together, we could’ve kept going. We were kindred spirits, too—he’s a beautiful writer in his own right. This year, he also pulled the plug on his magazine Metaphorosis. Such is our life; beauty has but a day and maybe a night. There’s still a part of me that wonders what could’ve been had we not parted ways …

So there will be no continuation: instead, in November, I’m releasing Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, which contains the entire story from beginning to end.

A lot of people have asked me if they should re-read Tower before delving into the novel, and the answer is no, you absolutely must NOT do that. Sleeping Worlds consists of two parts, an expanded version of Tower being the first one. 30% longer than the original novella, it’s a proper Director’s Cut! The second half continues and concludes the story.

Tower of Mud and Straw is out of print now, with used copies going for 100 bucks and more on Ebay and Amazon. So for those who’ve never read the novella, now’s your chance; and for those who’ve read and loved it, you can relive Shea and Brielle’s story—plus find out how it ends. Sleeping Worlds is perfect for the new readers, and it’s perfect for the returning ones.

To quote one of the early reviewers, “If you thought that the novella was too open-ended and didn’t answer your many questions about this very unique world, here you’re finally getting all your answers.” On a personal note, Łukasz, you once said you “wouldn’t mind learning more about Drakiri and their technology or getting more insight into cultural differences," and I just wanted to say boy does the novel deliver in that department! You’re in for a big surprise, too :)

Shea Ashcroft, the main character, is a conflicted minister of internal affairs—or former minister, as he keeps reminding people—who’s been stripped of his office and sent into an effective exile because of his refusal to gas a crowd of protesters.

I wrote him right between the Moscow protests of 2019 and 2021 (the latter of which followed the detention of Alexei Navalny), and to me, he was the embodiment of everything good a government official should possess. Conscience, above all. As recent Russian history shows us, people of conscience don’t fare well in politics …. I wish we’d had someone like him in the Kremlin before the war. Perhaps we would’ve been living in a different world now.

Brielle, the chief engineer of the novella’s titular tower, gets promoted to deuteragonist / secondary main character in the novel. Same as with pretty much everything else, I sketched out her backstory back in 2019—it’s based on my family’s history, my grandmother’s story. It was a tough lot for Grandma, growing up in Siberia in a family of ten. She’d always been the brightest, the most gifted, but her father had initially denied her the chance to attend college so that she could help raise her siblings. He later reversed his decision based on a single conversation. A single conversation, defining an entire life—can you imagine this?

All of this needed to be expunged from Tower of Mud and Straw. Because Brielle’s backstory doesn’t come into play until later, I had a choice back then: cut it or leave it in, making the novella feel incomplete. Basically, a “whatever you choose, you lose” kind of situation. I opted for the former solution, and although I remain convinced to this day it was the right way to go, it certainly made Tower’s version of Brielle a flatter character.

But you’ll fall in love with her in Sleeping Worlds. Like one reviewer has eloquently put it, “I did not remember Brielle at all, and now I will never forget her.” She is a fighter, she gets her own POV chapters, and it is she who ultimately enters the horrific Mimic Tower—only teased in the novella—to discover the truth inside.

Lena (the Drakiri) and Aidan get their own POV scenes, too, in the novel’s second half.

As for the antagonists …. Can you imagine I had to remove the principal villain from Tower for the same reason I’d cut Brielle’s backstory? Because everything would’ve felt incomplete. The de-facto ruler of the rival nation of Duma, against which they’re building this mammoth anti-airship tower, he is a cross between Putin and the Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince Rudolf. He’s smart, he’s cunning, and he plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with Shea. If you know the real Rudolf’s story, there’s this little thing called the “Mayerling incident,” where the prince offed himself along with his mistress in a hunting lodge. The novel features a version of that incident that’s completely flipped on its head.

Heavy use of metaphors. As a reader, I often skim through descriptions. All those darkened halls and worn steps and rusty iron gates—none of it, for me, paints a picture. I need something to engage me, toss my imagination a bone, and that’s where metaphors come in. Describing one thing by referring to another not only forces the brain to work—as an added bonus, it provides a glimpse into the character’s inner state. If you write “molten sun dripped along the tower’s edge,” this suggests a different frame of mind than “sunlight sending golden bunnies on wild romps.” Imagery begins to paint the scene AND the narrator’s feelings.

And it’s from these metaphors that the characteristic “dreamlike” style emerges.

It goes without saying I would’ve loved to work with Kévin Barbot (https://www.artstation.com/bdrak , the artist behind the beautiful cover of Tower) on this book, but he was unavailable, and none of his existing artwork fit. I briefly toyed with the idea of acquiring the rights to this painting of his, though:

The publisher then brought in a wonderful Indian artist called Dany VS. I worked closely with Dany to ensure the same dreamlike feel would translate from the page to the cover. I think he did a marvelous job: There’s a sunset, only it’s not really a sunset; the birds’ silhouettes are all twisted, and the left side of the tower looks incomplete, a mirror, a distortion.

It’s a beautiful illustration that’s totally in tune with the novel.

My hope has always been to recapture the same audience that loved Tower of Mud and Straw: smart, unusual, interesting people. You can tell who they are by the reviews for both the novella and the upcoming novel—some are simply beautiful essays!

The book re-examines the relationship between reader and author. We’ve all heard of the unreliable narrator—but in Sleeping Worlds, we meet the unreliable reader for the first time :) The novel plays with open cards, yet as readers, we tend to interpret things, write them off as quirks on the part of the author. I'm as guilty of that as anyone.

There are things right on the first page of Tower, in plain sight, and I can’t tell you how painful it was to sit on those secrets all those years! Trust me, once you finish the book, you’ll want to go back to the beginning and re-read the entire thing.

I’m halfway through another novel; a different universe but the same undefinable mixture of genres—science fantasy / noir / just the right touch of Lovecraftian horror. The tentative title is “The Mandolin Teacher”; it's about a mammoth railway bridge leading to a different world (no, I don't suffer from gigantomania; why do you ask?), an injured musician who's forced to work as a music teacher, his quest to get his dexterity back, and his unexpected role in the larger, sinister events leading back to the death of the previous Emperor.

To the people who’d love to read it: please consider buying Sleeping Worlds! It’s not about me getting rich, it’s about having some ammunition when pitching to potential publishers. The best argument in negotiations, as in any other industry, is still the same: sales, sales, and sales …

Oh, and if you can, do support your local bookstore! Even if they do not stock Sleeping Worlds for some reason, most independent bookstores can get things really quickly, in a couple of days. My publisher has traditional distribution, so there shouldn’t be any problems with that.

I just want to say that I’M OVER THE MOON TO BE HERE! I’ve wanted to do an interview for FBC for years, and it’s an amazing thing to see your dreams come true.