Frequently asked questions.

The history is real. I don't invent the machines, the programs, or the public record; I build fiction on top of them. The people, the machines and the events behind each novel actually existed, and you can dig through the record yourself in the research archive. What I add is the inner life the records left out. The site itself was redesigned and republished in 2024; older posts keep their original dates from the earlier archive.

Because it is full of stories the West never got to read, and because the human beings inside those stories were left out of the official record. I keep finding people who did something extraordinary and then disappeared into a footnote. I want to give them back a heartbeat.

Because desire is part of every life, and the archives are silent about it on purpose. The facts tell you what people built and when. Fiction is how I ask what they wanted, feared and risked. The two together feel more honest to me than either one alone.

For the same reason I write the way I write. I spent years reading files about women who built computers and flew missions; the state kept their diplomas and cropped out their bodies. My whole work is putting the body back into the record, and I will not cut it out of my own. The coat is for the weather, the lace is on purpose, and nobody frames me but me. If that is not for you, the research archives are fully dressed.

You have read this far, so let us both be honest. The century I write about labelled a lot of things perverse: genetics, jazz, cybernetics, women with opinions. I am comfortable in that company. What I actually do is write desire with the same precision the engineers gave their logbooks, and some readers find the precision harder to forgive than the desire. So: no. I am a historian with the lights on. The truly kinky stuff in my life is ferrite-core memory.

Not at all. Each novel stands completely on its own as a story. The history is there if you want to fall down the rabbit hole afterwards, but you can also just read for the characters and never open the archive.

Any order you like. Each book is self-contained. They quietly share one universe, so the same people, machines and places sometimes cross over. You can see how the four connect on the map.

Because the writing did not happen in those nine months. I have been finishing novels for the drawer since I was eighteen; the drawer simply never had a door to the world until I taught myself self-publishing. Ivanov's Ghost waited years as a manuscript. The Buzzer was finished long before it had an ISBN, and Secret Dawn is a novella you can read in an evening. Release dates are logistics, not writing speed: 2025 and 2026 are the years the drawer emptied, not the years everything was written. The only book that was genuinely finished close to its launch is Ternary Dreams, and its reading list had been growing since I first walked the dry Aral seabed.

Three of the four novels, Ivanov's Ghost, Secret Dawn and UVB-76, contain explicit adult content and are meant for readers of 18 and older. Ternary Dreams is the exception: it is a historical thriller without explicit content, so if you want the history without the heat, start there. Either way, the research side of the project has none of it and is open to everyone.

Obsessively, and for months before I write a line. I read memoirs, declassified files, technical papers and photographs, then I lay everything out on a timeline until the gaps start to tell a story. A lot of what I gather ends up public in the research archive.

I love hearing from readers. You can find my address and email down in the contact section, and I answer everything myself.

Ivanov's Ghost, Secret Dawn and UVB-76 (the latter two in English and German) are out now as eBooks on Thalia, Amazon, Apple Books, Google Books and Google Play; Ivanov's Ghost is also available as a paperback (Amazon and ePubli). Ternary Dreams is now out too, and audiobooks are on the way. Current prices are always on the book pages, which link straight to every shop, so start on any novel's page.

Most of them are in English. UVB-76 is the exception: it is only available in German. For reasons, I could not publish it in English.

Honestly, these books are not for everyone. Readers call them intense, brutal and unsettling as often as they call them unforgettable, and three of the four deal frankly with desire, power and consent. If that is not what you are looking for, start with Ternary Dreams, a historical thriller without explicit content. If you want to see how people react before you decide, the reader reactions on each book's page are unfiltered.

The historical figures in the archives are real and documented, with dates and detail. The main characters who carry each story are invented. Where I place a fictional person next to a real one, the research archive makes clear which is which.

Yes. Each novel has a companion chat where you can step into the book and talk to its characters; you will find it on the individual book pages. The one labelled with my own name is different: that is not me but an assistant I set up, and it will tell you so itself.

Staged is the wrong word for most of it. I take the photographs myself and I take them seriously. The camera is a Nikon D5 a retired press photographer sold me, usually with a fast fifty on the front of it, and since this summer there is an iPhone 17 Pro Max for everything that has to happen in the next four seconds. Some frames are set up the way any author's portrait is set up: tripod, cable release, a bench chosen for the light, several attempts nobody will ever see. Others are grabbed one-handed in bad weather. Afterwards they get what any press kit gets, cropped and graded and straightened. The field clips on the About page are short edited sketches rather than untouched footage. I would rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Twice, and both are on the record. For editorial work on the books: research triage, a second opinion on a stubborn paragraph, structural checks before a manuscript goes out. It sits where an editor, a translator and a shelf of reference works sit; the writing, the choices, the voice and the final line are mine. And on the chat page, where the thing answering is not me. It is an assistant built out of nine years of my mail, my message threads, my notebooks and my diary, plus the four novels and the whole research archive. It says so before it says anything else, and it will not hand back the private material it was made from. I wrote about why. I would rather set both out plainly than perform a purity test neither of us would pass under a microscope.

Yes. I am always somewhere inside the next one. The fastest way to hear about a new release is to reach out through the contact section.

Gladly. Get in touch through the contact section and tell me what you need. There is a short press kit for each book with logline, summary and background.

Completely free. The archives are open to everyone, the history is documented and cross-checked, and you are welcome to quote it. That is the whole point: the history behind the fiction should be checkable.

Yes. The calendar has readings, travel, publication dates and the ordinary days in between, and you can subscribe to it in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or anything else that reads an .ics feed. There are separate feeds if you only want the travel or only the readings. Times are shown in my local time, which is usually Bishkek and occasionally not.