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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ChiZine Publications
• Release date: Jun 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781926851662

David Nickle

David Nickle is an award-winning Toronto-based author and journalist. He has written several novels and numerous short stories. Nickle’s most recent book is Volk: A Novel of Radiant Abomination (2017).

Reviews for Rasputin's Bastards

[fiverivers_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There is no disputing David Nickle's ability as a strong story-teller with an aggressive style. If you're looking for subtle and lyrical, Rasputin's Bastard's is not it. If you're looking for a Clancy-ish SF, you've found your writer.Set in the confusion of post-Cold War Era, Nickle's story unfolds around a large cast of characters, all working toward the same end, to either prevent, or create, world domination not through force of arms, but through aggression of a far more insidious and devastating means, that of mind control. In the utopia of the villains of this story, humans would exist as vehicles for the consciousness of their overlords. In the utopia of the heroes, those with the ability to dream-walk others would simply be able to exist in harmony, without fear of persecution or harm.The story itself, although not particularly new, is a good one, and Nickle tells it in a style very much mirroring the implacable reasoning of the Cold War mentality. And this is where we get into personal taste in this review, something I'm always loathe to do, but usually succumb, because so much of the interpretation of art is subjective. Although I understand Nickle's artistic paradigm, to mirror tone and word choice to the atmosphere one attempts to create in a story, in this case I think he fell just a tad short of what could have been a brilliant novel. The voice, or the tone if you will, is so married to the impersonal insouciance of the Cold War, that much of environmental detail, of the minutia that draws in a reader and invests them emotionally, was missing. In the end the reader, like the super-beings that inhabit this story, wander through a metaphor which is described, but never realized. It is a dream, and therefore without substance. And therefore without emotional impact. And so without reader investment.The cast of characters in the novel is enormous, and while it's perfectly acceptable to have a huge cast (I am often guilty of this myself), of necessity for we plebian brains who are reading, many of those characters could have been relegated to walk-on roles only. I believe that part of my problem with being unable to connect to the narrative is that I'd entered a convention and couldn't get to know anyone. Is Rasputin's Bastard's worth the investment of your time to read? Absolutely. But will it be one that leaves you transported and translated? Not likely. Still and all, a good novel to embrace on one of summer's dog days, or winter's solitudes.

[rrainer-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was certainly well-structured, well-written and well-paced, and for fans of thrillers and cold war espionage with added speculative elements it will probably be just their thing, but it kept me at a distance and I never really connected with the characters. Good book, just not to my taste.

[kraaivrouw · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I only recently discovered David Nickle through his short story in Best Horror of the Year (Vol. 4), edited by Ellen Datlow. The short story is called "Looker" and I'll have a lot more to say about it when I review the anthology, but at this point let me say that it was both beautifully written, utterly creepy, and made my skin crawl.Rasputin's Bastards is something altogether different - an epic Cold War novel featuring former KGB agents - the remnants of a former Soviet program to develop psychic superwarriors that worked very well. The problem, of course, with psychic superwarriors is that they tend to act on their own volition - meaning they obey their masters when convenient and when inconvenient - not so much.Once again Nickles writes beautifully. This is a novel full of complexities. No one really knows who anyone else is (and neither do you). The fluidity of the characters' ability to be within other bodies and other lives might have made this unreadable, but it's wonderful - fascinating, engrossing, and yes - it made my skin crawl.While I suppose that Nickles might be considered a horror writer (after all, that story I talked about earlier was in a horror anthology), it seems more accurate to call him a writer of speculative fiction. He's got a wonderful mastery of "what if" and effortlessly juggles more objects at one time than most writers that I have read. Fittingly, his story works a lot like a matryoshka doll (a Russian nesting doll) with an infinite number of smaller dolls to be discovered within - each alike, but also different.Rasputin's Bastards is a fever dream of a novel. It's something you must jump into and allow it to take along through the tides and currents. And sense? Don't depend too much on that. Rather depend on your senses, and on Mr. Nickles' ability to take you along on a journey you won't soon forget. Highly recommended.