Piskorski, Krzysztof
Entry updated 15 September 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1982- ) Polish author of Fantastika – in particular, of Fantasy, New Weird, Steampunk, and Alternate History – and game designer. He has twice won the Polish premier fantastika award, the Janusz A Zajdel Award for best novel. He has also been involved in developing Role Playing Game and Board Games.
As a prose writer, he debuted with the urban fantasy story "Krach operacji 'Niebiańskie zastępy'" ["Failure of Operation 'Heavenly Host'"] (March 2004 Magazyn Fantastyczny), about temptations angels face on Earth (which can be seen as fitting into the broadly understood Polish Klerykal Fiction subgenre). Two more short stories saw print that year, in Science Fiction and Fantastyka.
His first novels form the Opowieść Piasków ["Tale of Sands"] trilogy: Wygnaniec ["Exile"] (2005), Najemnik ["Mercenary"] (2006), and Prorok ["Prophet"] (2007), an epic Fantasy saga deeply inspired by Middle Eastern and Islamic culture. Piskorski's in-depth portrayal of Islamic-inspired customs – from laws and prayers to clothing and medicine – was the first in Polish fantasy.
While finishing that trilogy, Piskorski released the collection Poczet dziwów miejskich ["Gazette of Urban Curiosities"] (coll 2007), a standalone humorous Urban fantasy/New Weird tale set in contemporary Wrocław. This work featured some content bordering on sf territory, such as possessed Machines or time-travelling Soviet agents (see Time Travel), blending Polish political Satire with Slavic folklore, and urban legend. This early foray outside epic fantasy showed Piskorski's range in merging modern settings with folklore, presaging his later genre hybrids.
Piskorski next turned to Alternate History and Steampunk. Zadra ["Splinter"] (2008, 2009 2vols), first book in his Świat Etheru ["Ether World"] series is considered a cornerstone of Polish Steampunk. It posits a Jonbar Point of divergence during the Napoleonic Wars: in Piskorski's ether-powered nineteenth century, scientists discover a new form of energy ("ether" or vacuum energy) around 1810 that radically alters Technology and geopolitics. The story is set in 1819, after ether has "pushed Europe into a new era" of industrial marvels. In this world, the skies swarm with aerial trains running on ether tracks, analytical engines are being designed (see Computers), and experimental technology enables the opening of unstable portals to Parallel Worlds. Piskorski uses this techno-magical innovation to extend the Napoleonic conflict: the French Empire (and its client Duchy of Warsaw) now wage colonial wars across not just Earth but newly discovered planes accessible via ether gates, while undead and exotic Monsters infiltrate the Earth from the extra-dimensional colonies.
Expanding on steampunk themes, Piskorski's Krawędź czasu ["The Edge of Time"] (2011) combines sf, urban fantasy, and mystical Horror, delivering a fast-paced mystery-thriller. Beginning in a quasi-contemporary City, it follows Maksym, a man who finds a hidden district existing in a different Dimension with a radically different flow of time. There, Mad Scientists and Jewish Kabbalah occultists collaborate to animate a sentient genius Golem, a de facto steampunk-themed AI. This alchemical marriage of technology and theology allows Piskorski to explore profound questions: the ethical limits of creation, the responsibility of a creator towards their creation, and the tangled causality of time. The novel's structure itself is a Möbius strip of Time Paradoxes – underscoring the theme that every action echoes through time. The book asks "what gives us the right to create and decide the fate of a creation?" and examines how creators can become trapped by their own designs.
Piskorski entered the Polish premier league of Fantastika writers with his Janusz A Zajdel Award-winning Cienioryt ["Shadow-Engraving"] (2013), a swashbuckling fantasy novel merging the spirit of Alexandre Dumas-style musketeer tales with Latin-American Magic Realism. It is set in the seventeenth-century-esque port city of Serivia, where every shadow is a gateway to a perilous parallel dimension. Thematically, Cienioryt explores the idea of duality – light and shadow, reality and the parallel world – and how one's "shadow" (literally and metaphorically) can be weaponized or manipulated. The work is also notable for its narrative tricks.
The title of his final novel to date, Czterdzieści i cztery ["Forty-and-Four"] (2016) references a mystical number from Polish Romantic literature – a prophecy in one of Poland's most famous poems, Adam Mickiewicz's drama Dziady ["Forefathers' Eve"] (1823-1832), which cryptically talks about "a savior 44". In Czterdzieści i cztery Piskorski revisits the ether-powered Świat Etheru universe of Zadra, pushing it into the mid-nineteenth century. It is the year 1844, and Poland remains partitioned by its neighbours. The story follows Eliza Żmijewska, a poet and a priestess of an old Slavic deity, who arrives in blockade-sealed England to find and assassinate a Polish industrialist accused of betraying a recent uprising. Yet she and her target may be just pawns in a larger "game of two prophets" (the two being Poland's national bard-poets Mickiewicz and Słowacki, who in this world are political rivals pulling strings from the shadows). Czterdzieści i cztery balances its action with meta-historical commentary, including debates between romantic idealism and industrial modernity, and the role of wieszcz (prophet-poets) in shaping destiny. Its rich stew of Slavic myth, literary homage, and steam-age Science Fantasy drew wide acclaim: Piskorski created a Romantic steampunk epic, reimagining the year 1844 as a collision of national prophecy and Lovecraftian colonial horror. The novel won both the Zajdel Award and the Jerzy Żuławski Literary Award in 2017.
Piskorski's last short story was published earlier: "Archibald Compton i zaginione miasto Enli-La" ["Archibald Compton and the Lost City of Enli-La"] (in Wolsung Antologia anth 2015). As he himself disclosed in interviews and social media, he grew dissatisfied with the publishing environment for fantasy writers in Poland, seeing most of his literary works reach only a limited audience. At the same time, his personal bandwidth for novel-writing diminished as he took on other creative work, writing for narrative-heavy board games.
In fact, Piskorski was active as a game writer before his debut as a prose creator. In 2001 his "Krzyk Kamienia" ["Stone Scream"] adventure for the Warhammer Fantasy system received the Quentin award, a significant award of Polish Role-Playing Game fandom. His own RPG, Władcy Losu ["Lords of Fate"] (2003), explored narrative ways to alter destiny. His aforementioned last published short story (from 2015) was a tie-in to an RPG universe (the Polish steampunk Wolsung system). In the late 2010s, Piskorski became a lead story writer and world-builder for several successful Board Games from the Polish developer Awaken Realms. These include the fantasy/steampunk campaign Wargame The Edge: Dawnfall (2018-2020), the cooperative Arthurian Horror adventure Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (2019-2024) and another cooperative game, the Space Opera and space exploration-themed ISS Vanguard (2022). For the Alien-inspired space horror game Nemesis (2018) and its sequel, Nemesis: Lockdown (2021) he designed two expansions with scenarios in, unusually, a Graphic Novel/Comic-book style format. He is currently working on a new board game, «Lands of Evershade» (expected in 2026), imagined as a fantasy-themed hybrid RPG/board game. All of these have been published in English, and represent the only part of his work readily accessible to international readers. [PKo]
Krzysztof Piskorski
born 5 July 1982
works
series
Opowieść Piasków ["Tale of Sands"]
- Wygnaniec ["Exile"] (Warsaw, Poland: Runa, 2005) [Opowieść Piasków: pb/]
- Najemnik ["Mercenary"] (Warsaw, Poland: Runa, 2006) [Opowieść Piasków: pb/]
- Prorok ["Prophet"] (Warsaw, Poland: Runa, 2007) [Opowieść Piasków: pb/]
Świat Etheru
- Zadra ["Splinter"] volume 1 (Warsaw, Poland: Runa, 2008) [Świat Etheru: pb/]
- Zadra ["Splinter"] volume 2 (Warsaw, Poland: Runa, 2009) [Świat Etheru: pb/]
- Czterdzieści i cztery ["Forty-and-Four"] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2016) [Świat Etheru: pb/]
individual titles
- Krawędź czasu ["The Edge of Time"] (Warsaw, Poland: Runa, 2011) [pb/]
- Cienioryt ["Shadow-Engraving"] (Kraków, Poland: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2013) [pb/]
collections and stories
- Poczet dziwów miejskich ["Gazette of Urban Curiosities"] (Lublin, Poland: Fabryka Słów, 2007) [coll: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry