Elara S. Novikova, M.Sc.

Russian on my mother’s side, Moldovan on my father’s. Two alphabets in the house, three languages at the table, and nobody ever agreeing which history was the true one.

Summers on my mother’s Pacific coast of black sand and steam; winters in my father’s library in Chișinău, where I learned that an archive is a building where the state keeps what it refuses to say out loud.

I have been writing novels since I was eighteen. The first ones will stay in the drawer, which is where apprenticeships belong. One of them has never existed as a file: typed on a borrowed machine, printed once, given away. Why there is no copy is between me and the person who has it.

I took my computer science degree at the state university in the mountains at Naryn, in a department that mostly trained schoolteachers: machines, systems, and a lot of Russian-language footnotes nobody in my cohort wanted. The thesis was on fault-tolerant coding, which is a polite way of saying I spent a year on how machines survive their own mistakes. Nobody there was preparing me for California. What those years gave me beyond the paper was the habit of reading Soviet computing history in the languages it was written in. I found the Setun in a footnote. I cared.

California was fog, seminar rooms and green library lamps. I applied to the Symbolic Systems M.S. at the campus in Palo Alto, thirty-odd miles down the peninsula from San Francisco, as a graduate applicant with a Naryn degree behind me and an outside scholarship in front of me, then spent my first quarter at my own kitchen table in Bishkek, because that year almost nobody started where they were supposed to. I got there in January and stayed for the winter quarter, which turned out to be the only one I sat in the room for: by spring the money stretched a great deal further from Bishkek than it did from Palo Alto, and I finished the way I had started, at three in the morning with a grid of faces having an afternoon I was not having. The degree sits where I wanted to be: what a machine is, and what a state owes the people it uses, turned out to belong to philosophy and logic as much as to engineering. I also learned German somewhere in the middle of it, for Kant. That got out of hand later.

Back home. By day a doctorate on how authoritarian states manage science; by night the novels, at a desk facing the mountains. First drafts go longhand into squared notebooks. On research trips I weigh the pages down with a stone from wherever I am. The stones stay on my desk.