Elements of medieval fantasy, steampunk, royal politics, disinformation and propaganda, and otherworldly technology collide energetically in Yaroslav Barsukov’s debut novel, a starred Best of Indie title that combines the novellas Tower of Mud and Straw and City of Spires, City of Seagulls. The author’s milieu extends well beyond mere fantastical literature, however, incorporating lessons from his dynamic life story: growing up in Cold War–era Moscow and studying at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and the Vienna University of Technology, before settling into work in game development and, eventually, fiction writing.
As Barsukov, who currently lives in Vienna, notes, writers “should draw on their lived experiences for their stories; I don’t get people using the points of view of kings and queens and generals because, frankly, what do we know about being them? Unless you’ve worn a crown, you’re a karaoke king, a cosplayer at best. When I wrote Tower of Mud and Straw, the novella that became the first half of Sleeping Worlds, the main thread in my life was my frustration at being stuck: A Russian émigré in Austria watches a lot of career doors stay closed, however politely. Shea Ashcroft, the novel’s protagonist, and his foil, Aidan, are the yin and yang of that frustration.”
Lord Shea Ashcroft is a royal minister who refuses to use a diabolical weapon on protestors against Queen Daelyn, who’s undertaken a vast project to build an unprecedentedly tall tower in Owenbeg, an area of contention between Daelyn’s regime and the nation of Duma, creators of the military vehicles called skyrafts:
The thin band at the horizon was the kingdom of Duma, with its perhaps less advanced but plentiful skyrafts; and his imagination painted a different sky, crimson, ships raining down in fireballs, the bolts from the tower’s ballistae hissing across the clouds. No wonder Daelyn had invested so much in the construction—it was her legacy, the most radical defensive structure ever attempted by man.
To maintain the dizzying pace of the tower’s construction, Brielle, the chief engineer, enlists the help of the Drakiri, a mysterious minority group who employ “tulips,” nearly incomprehensible pieces of technology that can negate the effects of gravity. The tulips are remarkable, to be sure, but also highly dangerous to those who don’t fully understand their power: “If not wielded properly, a tulip can cause a drastic implosion, destructively pulling everything in range inward.”
The concept of the tulips is highly inventive, and Barsukov points to a key element of fantasy and sci-fi literature that allows him to incorporate the concept smoothly into the narrative without getting overly technical or dry. “I find that fantasy provides the author with more opportunities for lyricism than any other genre,” he says. “In poetry, you’re allowed to write something like, ‘I woke up, and a flower bloomed from my chest’—[and] everybody would understand it’s a metaphor. In either sci-fi or mainstream [fiction], you’d have to explain yourself. Hey, my character drank too much, or went bonkers, or is having a bad trip. And once you spell out the metaphor, it loses its potency; but in fantasy, flowers can and will bloom from people. Following this logic, ‘tulips’ are, at the same time, mechanical devices that prevent the Owenbeg Tower from collapsing and a metaphorical garden, the symbol of the dream the main character’s sister once had. The purple, neon-soaked imagery reflects that.”
Other narrative strands, which jump back and forth across space and time, follow Ashcroft’s relationship with a Drakiri woman, a series of flashbacks to the death of his sister (an event that carries important echoes later in the story), the possibility of Duma’s construction of a frightful, vaguely supernational “Mimic Tower,” and countless incidents of royal intrigue and political infighting. By the end, notes Kirkus Reviews, “Cold War–like animosity between the two kingdoms takes on literally cosmos-bending proportions.”
Throughout the tower’s development, Barsukov’s poetic sketches consistently bring readers into the story’s magical realm. Describing the structure, he writes:
Entering it was entering a city—or rather, many cities. A spiral staircase, wide as a market square, snaked around the inner wall, leaving a vast nothingness in the middle, an abyss that sang with wind and made his head spin. This was a world painted by a lover of chiaroscuro, an addict to strong contrasts: shadows lay in pools of ink, and there were blinding patches of daylight—portals in the tower’s side the size of a house, ground-to-air ballistae’s windows into the wild, one for every two or three of the staircase’s whirls.
Comparisons to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and Ted Chiang are inevitable, but Barsukov points to a host of other influences, including “Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene…[Roger] Zelazny, Peter Watts. 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.”
Barsukov isn’t just interested in literary heroes, however. Indicative of his wide-ranging approach to inspiration, he cites an iconic musician as a significant influence. “Outside of the world of literature,” he says, “it’s got to be Robert Fripp, a David Bowie collaborator and the irreplaceable leader of the prog-rock mastodon King Crimson. In 2014, I attended a…course of his in Caorle, Italy. A dozen other students and I were effectively sequestered in a monastery… It was glorious, mysterious, metaphysical. It was in Caorle that I learned about [Russian philosopher George Ivanovich] Gurdjieff and the ‘waking sleep,’ a purported hypnotic state Gurdjieff believed we spend our lives in. I believe in the ‘waking sleep,’ too, but rather than seeing it as a disadvantage, I tap into the dream.”
It’s clear that Barsukov’s background in physics and technology shaped the story’s mechanics, and his catholic interests even encompass a completely different medium. When asked about the concept of a video game version of the novel, he’s enthusiastic, but he “wouldn’t want it to be an action RPG. I think something in the vein of Myst and Riven would work well: image-driven, atmosphere-heavy, with a focus on puzzles rather than grinding and level-maxing. Architecture, overlapping with memory.”
The power of memory is one of the primary themes of the novel. As Barsukov says, “The parallel-reality Mimic Tower is taken directly from my nightmares as a kid: I still remember vivid, almost comiclike dreams full of little black figures incinerated against a crimson sky. As for the Owenbeg Tower, it’s based on the six buildings in Vienna that would probably remain of our civilization instead of the pyramids. They’re flak towers, anti-aircraft bastions Hitler had built to protect the city against Allied planes… After the war, the city tried blowing the towers up; a couple of neighboring buildings cracked, a few windows shattered, a butcher somewhere woke up to a coronary. The towers stood.”
Though the author doesn’t believe in the possibility of a sequel to this specific novel, he is excited about his next work: “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 and the Other Light; it’s about a mammoth railway bridge leading to a different world…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.”
Eric Liebetrau is a freelance writer and editor based in Charleston, South Carolina. He is a former longtime managing and nonfiction editor of Kirkus Reviews, and his work has appeared in a variety of national publications.
