###
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my dear friends Rudy, Margast, Valery Zhuravlyov, VoRT and Brown-Eyed Brunette, Ingrid, Japheth, Troy, Craboid, Takeda, Volkhv, Faust, Foxy, IvanovSV, Trojeput, and others who prefer to stay incognito, for their kindest help with bringing the English version of this novel out to the world.
About the author
Yury Nikitin is the author of over 110 science fiction and fantasy novels that have sold over 12,000,000 copies in Russia and other countries.
Born in 1939 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, he experienced 32 jobs (lumberman, rafter, geologist, newspaper columnist, artist, and others) before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, written on a bet, was highly appreciated by the public and the Communist government alike, but his second one made him an outcast banned from publishing for almost a decade.
During perestroika, Nikitin founded one of the first private publishing companies in the country. Having a home library of over 5,000 science fiction books in English, most of them never translated in the Soviet Union before, he was able to select the best of those.
In 1993, he wrote The Three from the Forest, a landmark novel that gave birth to the genre of Slavic fantasy. Nikitin’s early works have converted many people to Russian Paganism, yet over time he has acquired more sympathy for Christianity, especially its Protestant branch.
In 2001, Nikitin published Richard Longarms, a medieval fantasy, under the pen name of Gaius Julius Orlovsky. In the next decade, 49 sequels followed, selling over 7,000,000 copies in total. The author’s true identity remained undisclosed all that time. Many people believed Richard Longarms was a team project as no single person could be writing that fast. Nikitin only admitted it was him writing this cycle in 2014, several months before the last instalment was out.
Nikitin is fascinated with ants, high technologies and MMORPGs (his favorite one is Majesty). His main interests, apart from those, include Transhumanism and life extending. He drinks no alcohol, practices cycling and weightlifting to keep fit, frequents the web and feels comfortable in the company of people much younger than himself.
Contact Yury Nikitin online:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ury.nikitin