Sergei Lukyanenko Books in Order

If you want the best first taste of his fantasy: Night Watch → Day Watch
If you want the full Watch saga: Night Watch → Day Watch → Twilight Watch → The Last Watch → New Watch → Sixth Watch
If you want near-future cyberpunk: Labyrinth of Reflections
If you want a standalone science fiction novel: The Genome

Sergei Lukyanenko was born in Karatau, in Kazakhstan, and grew up in a family of doctors. His father was a psychiatrist, his mother worked in addiction medicine, and medicine was the obvious road around him long before writing became the real one.

He moved to Alma-Ata for medical school, studied at the Alma-Ata State Medical Institute, trained as a psychiatrist, and later worked in Almaty. He started writing seriously while he was still a student, first for himself and friends, partly because he wanted more science fiction than he could find.

Then writing stopped being the side job.

His first published story appeared in 1988. In the early 1990s he worked at the magazine Miry in Almaty, became active in science fiction fandom, and kept producing stories and novels while the post-Soviet publishing world was changing under everybody's feet. By the mid-1990s he was writing full time.

He has spoken about the influence of Robert A. Heinlein, the Strugatsky brothers, and Vladislav Krapivin. You can see some of that in the early books, especially Knights of Forty Islands, which puts young characters under real pressure, and Labyrinth of Reflections, which takes cyberpunk ideas and turns them into something fast, uneasy, and human.

He has also described the beginning in very plain terms: he wanted something to read, there was nothing at hand, so he tried writing it himself. That practical streak still fits his fiction. Even when the ideas are big, the stories usually begin with one person trying to solve one immediate problem.

For many readers outside Russia, Night Watch is still the place to begin. It drops hidden magicians, vampires, and shapeshifters into contemporary Moscow, then refuses to make the moral lines neat. The Watch books made him a much bigger name, and the 2004 film adaptation of Night Watch, followed by a film version of Day Watch, brought that world to an even wider audience.

He likes stories where power solves one problem and creates three more.

That is true of The Genome too, a future-set novel about genetically engineered specialists that mixes space adventure with questions about free will and design. Across fantasy, cyberpunk, and space opera, Lukyanenko keeps returning to similar tensions: loyalty versus freedom, systems versus individuals, and the cost of staying decent when you have the strength to do damage.

His settings matter as much as his plots. Moscow, in the Watch books, feels lived-in and ordinary right up until it doesn't. Deeptown in Labyrinth of Reflections is exciting, grubby, and a little sad. Even when the action moves fast, there is usually a sense that his characters are being squeezed by the world around them, whether that world is magical, digital, or political.

Lukyanenko moved to Moscow at the end of 1996 and has lived there ever since. He is married to Sonya Lukyanenko, a psychologist and teacher, and they have two sons, Artemy and Daniil. His bibliography now runs across fantasy, science fiction, alternate history, and collaborations, but the core appeal stays simple: big ideas, clear stakes, and characters who rarely get the comfort of easy choices.