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.

Studying computing in the mountains taught me two things: how machines actually think, and that half of Soviet computing history sits unread in Russian-language sources. I found the Setun in a footnote nobody in my course cared about. I cared.

California was fog, seminar rooms and green library lamps. Symbolic Systems sits exactly where I wanted to be: the questions I cared about, 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 there, 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.

A decaying Moldovan hospital, a NATO pilot, and a Soviet biomedical legacy that never died. Out now. This one is for my father's Moldova: I read hospital files from the years the state fell apart in the building where he still works, and some of those corridors I had walked as a child. Book page →

A classified 1985 space station experiment on desire in orbit, and the children it produced. My mother taught me to read the sky before anything else. This book is me asking what the state did up there while the rest of us were only looking. Book page →

The radio frequency that has never explained itself, and the woman sent to listen. I first heard the Buzzer at two in the morning in a Naryn dormitory, on a borrowed shortwave set, and never really stopped listening. Written in German, because some obsessions choose their own language. Book page →

A Kyiv historian decodes her grandmother's three-state diaries and finds Europe's first computers and a KGB seduction order inside. The women who wound and programmed those machines signed nothing and kept no files. Somebody in my family could have been one of them, and no archive would ever tell me. So I wrote her. Book page →