Bradley Beaulieu’s The Winds of Khalakovo Released This Week
Black Gate blogger Bradley Beaulieu’s first novel The Winds of Khalakovo was published by Night Shade Books on Monday. I asked him to tell us a little bit about it, and his influences:
Thanks for having me on Black Gate. It’s great to be able to talk to some of the fans of the magazine, because unlike other places where I often feel like a relative newcomer — a welcome guest, so to speak — here I feel at home. I feel like I’m among friends, like we’re all part of an extended family: those who love adventure – and epic-based fantasy. So I was excited about the chance to share the news about my debut novel, The Winds of Khalakovo, just released by Night Shade Books.
The Winds of Khalakovo is a story about Nikandr, the Prince of a Grand Duchy modeled loosely after Muscovite Russia. The Nine Duchies of Anuskaya have been beset by a decade-long blight, by a wasting disease that strikes commoner and royal alike, and by the Maharraht, a rebellious splinter group that wants nothing more than the destruction of the Grand Duchy and her people. While searching for a way to heal the islands, Prince Nikandr stumbles across a boy, a boy who has the power to break worlds, and he finds that the Maharraht are bent on using this boy to achieve their goals. But the boy also has the power to heal, and it falls to Prince Nikandr to unlock his secrets before the Maharraht can use him to lay waste to his home of Khalakovo.
Excalibur (1981)
Last week I discussed Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as an example of a true literature of ideas: a work structured not as a traditional narrative, with plot and character development as we know them, but instead built around the ideas that the work’s presenting, so that the book’s material is defined not by narrative but by the ideas at the core of its theme. As it happens, I recently stumbled across another example of this sort of thing.