Rasputin's Bastards

by David Nickle

They were the beautiful dreamers. From a hidden city deep in the Ural mountains, they walked the world as the coldest of Cold Warriors, under the command of the Kremlin and under the power of their own expansive minds. They slipped into the minds of Russia's enemies with diabolical ease, and drove their human puppets to murder, and worse. They moved as Gods. And as Gods, they might have remade the world. But like the mad holy man Rasputin, who destroyed Russia through his own powerful influence . . . in the end, the psychic spies for the Motherland were only in it for themselves.

It is the 1990s. The Cold War is long finished. In a remote Labrador fishing village, an old woman known only as Babushka foresees her ending through the harbour ice, in the giant eye of a dying kraken–and vows to have none of it. Beaten insensible and cast adrift in a life raft, ex-KGB agent Alexei Kilodovich is dragged to the deck of a ship full of criminals, and with them he will embark on a journey that will change everything he knows about himself. And from a suite in an unseen hotel in the heart of Manhattan, an old warrior named Kolyokov sets out with an open heart, to gather together the youngest members of his immense, and immensely talented, family. They are more beautiful, and more terrible, than any who came before them. They are Rasputin's bastards. And they will remake the world.

Reviews - What's Being Said About David Nickle & Rasputin's Bastards

To read David Nickle is to be reminded what the best storytellers can do, and to glory in unbridled imagination released on the page. David's achievements in Rasputin’s Bastards are innumerable. He reminds me of no one so much than maestro Dan Simmons, another writer unconstrained by the limits of genre. When it comes to narrative, David dances where others plod, and dares where others play it safe. This is all to say, David Nickle takes no prisoners, and leaves a magnificent bruise as a reminder of the encounter.
–Corey Redekop

Part Bioshock, part X-Files, part Sopranos—and 100%, uncut Nickle—Rasputin's Bastards is a glorious, sprawling, chaotic delight. I wish I'd written it; in fact, I may yet steal the domesticated giant squid.
–Peter Watts

“Rasputins Bastards is a book with such a vast canvas and sweep, handled with such command and care by Nickle, that it is a must-read for anyone who wants to know what amazing things can be done with dark historical fantasy.”
–Tony Burgess, author of People Live Still in Cashtown Corners