Rasputin's Bastards

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rasputin’s Bastards was a long haul in the writing, and many people had a hand in encouraging and guiding it along. The members of the Cecil Street Irregulars writing workshop past and present helped me chart the course of the manuscript as it developed. In particular, Peter Watts helped me bring the deep sea to life around Petroska Station and all those squid. Karl Schroeder provided me with basic training for the writing of this kind of gonzo Cold War tale, with our collaboration on our first novel, The Claus Effect. He and the rest of the crew at the Cecil workshop helped me know when to ground the book, and when to let it take flight.

Sandra Kasturi, Brett Savory, Erik Mohr, Sam Beiko and the rest of the team at ChiZine Publications took that last task to the final stage. During the editing process, we took to calling the book Fat Bastard — it is, as I write this, the longest book that ChiZine has acquired. Taming the Fat Bastard was a task that took patience, elbow grease and no small amount of mutual faith. I think it’s paid off. Erik Mohr’s cover art is, as always, a work of art. And as we edited, the help, love and support of Madeline Ashby proved invaluable.

There was no small amount of research involved in putting Rasputin’s Bastards together, but readers will not be rewarded tracing the location of City 512 or the Emissary Hotel or New Pokrovskoye. Need it be said that I made it all up?

The aesthetic of the novel and its characters is another matter. For that, the Russian side of my family proved foundational. My grandmother came to Canada with her sisters shortly after the Russian Revolution, and they formed an expat community in Canada founded on family, and a deep nostalgia for a magical pre-revolutionary Russia that may or may not have ever existed. It didn’t really matter; that Russia lived on in revisionist memories and dreams of my grandmother, who I think took comfort from them as she engaged in the formidable task of surviving as a single mother with no formal education in 1930s Toronto. She was able to convey that nostalgia, through story and song and acrylic paintings that she made later in life, of wide fields of impossible green surrounding golden onion-domed churches lit by a brilliant, pre-Soviet sun. When I thought of the dream-walkers, or at least the mechanics of the dream-walkers’ Metaphor, I thought of her.