Steven Brust
Steven Karl Zoltán Brust (born November 23, 1955) is an American fantasy and science fiction author of Hungarian descent. He is best known for his novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos.
The Taltos series is set on another world in an empire mostly inhabited by the somewhat elf-like Dragaerans; Vlad Taltos is one of the human minority and practices the human art of witchcraft ("táltos" is Hungarian for a kind of supernatural person in folklore), but is a citizen of the empire because his socially climbing father paid a lot of money to be adopted into one of the Dragaeran Great Houses. The only Great House that performs such transactions is, not coincidentally, also the one that maintains a criminal organization, which Vlad joins. Despite being a human and a criminal, Vlad has a number of high-ranking Dragaeran friends, and often gets caught up in important events. Brust has written nine novels in the series, which is proposed to run to nineteen novels - one named for each of the Great Houses, one named for Vlad himself, and a final novel which Brust has said will be titled The Last Contract.
The first three novels resemble private-eye detective stories, perhaps the closest being Robert B. Parker's Spenser series. The later novels are more varied than the first three. Though they read like fantasy, there are hints at science-fictional explanations for some things.
Brust has also written another series set in Dragaera, but centuries before Vlad's time. It is partly a homage to Alexandre Dumas's novels about the Three Musketeers, and is to be five volumes long, following the pattern of Dumas's series. The books are presented as historical novels by a Dragaeran roughly contemporary with Vlad. As Dragaerans live for thousands of years, many characters appear in both series.
An unusual feature of Brust's novels is that the same character, usually a cute brown-eyed girl of about nine, appears in all of them. In the Dragaeran books her name is Devera, the daughter of another character, and she seems to be able to appear anywhere in time and space. In the other books she has "walk-on" roles, and sometimes it's not obvious where she shows up.
Bibliography
(partial - book-length works only)
Dragaera
- with Vlad Taltos
- the Khaavren romances
- stand-alone
- Brokedown Palace (1986)
Other
- To Reign in Hell (1984)
- The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (1987)
- Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (1990)
- The Gypsy (1992) with Megan Lindholm
- Agyar (1993)
- Freedom and Necessity (1997) with Emma Bull
External links
- The Dream Café - Steven Brust's own homepage
- Damien Sullivan's Steven Brust Fan Page
- Dragaera - a site authorized by Brust, with his weblog, a mailing list, resources, and links to many fan pages
- SciFan bibliography