Steven Brust

Steven Karl Zoltán Brust (born November 23, 1955) is an American fantasy and science fiction author of Hungarian descent. He was a member of the writers' group The Scribblies, which included Emma Bull, Pamela Dean, Will Shetterly, and Patricia Wrede, and also belongs to the Pre-Joycean Fellowship. He is best known for his novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos.

The Dragaeran books

The Taltos series is set on another world (possibly another planet), in an empire mostly inhabited by the Dragaerans, who are humanoid but have such differences as greatly-extended lifespans, and heights averaging about 7 feet. Referred to as "elfs" by some humans, they refer to themselves as "human". Vlad Taltos is one of the human minority (known by Dragaerans as "Easterners") and practices the human art of witchcraft ("táltos" is Hungarian for a kind of supernatural person in folklore). Though human, he is a citizen of the empire because his social-climber father paid a lot of money to be adopted into one of the 17 Dragaeran Great Houses. The only Great House that sells memberships this way 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.

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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.

Related Topics:
Detective stories - Robert B. Parker

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Brust has also written another series set in Dragaera, but centuries before Vlad's time. As Dragaerans live for thousands of years, many characters appear in both series. It is partly an homage to Alexandre Dumas's novels about the Three Musketeers, and is five volumes long, following the pattern of Dumas's series. The books are presented as historical novels written by Paarfi of Roundwood, a Dragaeran roughly contemporary with Vlad. Paarfi's old-fashioned, elaborate, and highly-verbose style is explicitly based on Dumas's, though with a dialogue style that claims to be, at times, based on Tom Stoppard's wordgames in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Related Topics:
Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers - Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

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There is a certain amount of variation in the writing style amongst the Taltos novels as well. Brust uses a different narrative approach in almost every novel in the series. Some of these approaches are more purely stylistic and, though enjoyable, have minor effects on the actual story-telling; some are profound and involve the point-of-view of characters whom the reader never expected to get to know so well.

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Further, as the writing of the Taltos novels has spanned over two decades, they have been influenced by events in Steven Brust's own life. An infatuation and (subsequent to the murder of a friend) disillusionment with the Mafia, and later the breakup of Steven Brust's marriage, have both profoundly influenced his storylines.

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Lastly, it should be noted that Brust has a decided knack for slipping absorbing mysteries into the minor details of his stories; mysteries that tend to fascinate his readers, once they notice them, and often form the kernel around which later books coalesce, even though their resolution still springs upon the reader unexpectedly when it finally comes.

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