What the archive will not say

People sometimes ask whether my books share a single subject. On the surface they do not. A station in orbit, a hospital in Moldova, a radio signal out of Siberia: three different weathers, three different silences. Underneath, though, I keep returning to the same absences. Women whose work was folded into a collective credit, or whose suffering was noted only as a line in someone else’s report, or who were simply never written down at all.

I do not mean that fiction repairs the archive. It cannot. What it can do is press against the places where the official record goes smooth and quiet. Ivanov’s Ghost, out since last autumn, chased the bodies and the nights the paperwork refused to hold. Two more finished manuscripts are queued behind it, both landing this spring: Secret Dawn Among the Stars, circling the labor that never made the commemorative footage, and Der Buzzer UVB-76, chasing the listeners who stayed up with a machine that would not explain itself. Different publication dates, the same question underneath - less what happened than who was standing just outside the frame when it did.

The method is stubborn and a little unfashionable. You read until the footnotes stop. You sit with the gap. Then you invent only what the gap seems to demand, never more, and you let the invention carry the weight of what could not be footnoted. I am not interested in correcting history so much as in refusing to look away from the places it went blank. That refusal is the throughline. The rest is furniture and weather and the particular sound a corridor makes at night.

I expect I will keep writing versions of this problem for a long time. The record is full of elegant omissions. Someone has to keep a light on in the hallway they left dark.