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Available in English & German · ISBN eBook (EN) 978-3-8194-5985-6 · German edition “Geheimes Morgenrot unter den Sternen” ISBN 978-3-6956-1657-2 · adults only, 18+
The publisher's blurb
Secret Dawn Among the Stars intertwines passion, secrecy and the sublimity of
space exploration into a story about how the most intimate human connections can
illuminate the darkest corridors of the future. It imagines a hidden chapter in
humanity's cosmic narrative, one that dares to suppose that love itself might lead us
beyond the horizons of Earth.
Anastasia Sokolova, a thirty-four-year-old molecular biologist in the grey Leningrad
autumn of 1985, has traded a professorship for the metal-and-disinfectant corridors of
the Cosmonaut Training Centre. An envelope appears on her locked-room desk; an office
with no name on the door recruits her into a project that exists in no document, the
Soviet Union's secret study of intimacy, desire and reproduction in weightlessness,
aboard a station where most of the crew must never learn what they are part of.
"The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the
cradle forever.", Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1911, the motto of the Soviet space programme
The real history behind it
The novel is fiction, its secret experiment, its "Taynyi Rozovyi Rassvet" (secret rose
dawn), and its heroine are invented. But it is built on a real and largely under-told
history: the Soviet crewed space programme and the science of the body in orbit. This
companion site documents that history, and only that history.
The space stations are real, Salyut, the armed military Almaz stations flown under the
Salyut cover name, and Mir, launched in 1986 and continuously crewed from 1989. The space medicine is real:
the Institute of Biomedical Problems, the effects of microgravity on bone, muscle and
the vestibular system, the Bion biosatellites, the Oazis and Svet greenhouses, the
psychology of isolation studied in SFINCSS and Mars-500. Human reproduction in space was
never actually studied, it remains speculative, which is precisely the documented
silence the novel dramatises. The women are real too: Tereshkova, Savitskaya, Kondakova,
and the 1962 female group that was trained and then quietly set aside.
Imagine …
The nameless officeImagine being summoned by an agency that will
not name itself, to work on a project that exists in no file, where noncompliance carries
consequences that are all the heavier for never being specified.
The armed stationImagine that one of the "Salyut" stations the
Soviet public was shown was in fact a military reconnaissance fortress carrying a cannon, the only weapon ever fired in orbit, its true purpose classified for decades.
A year among the starsImagine spending more than a year sealed in
a station the size of a few railway carriages, your heart, sleep and bones telemetered to
the ground, to prove a human could survive the journey to Mars. Cosmonauts really did this.
The women set asideImagine being one of five women trained in
secret to fly, watching a single comrade launch for the front pages while the rest of you
are kept, as one of them wrote, "as spares", and then quietly grounded for a generation.
Fact and fiction
Where this site states a fact, a date, a spacecraft, a mission, a name, it is drawn
from the public record of the Soviet and Russian space programme and cross-checked. Where
the history is uncertain or the sources conflict (the cause of Gagarin's crash, the true
toll of the Nedelin disaster, the myth of the "lost cosmonauts"), it says so. The novel's
classified intimacy experiment is invented; the world it moves through is not.
The invented heroine fills the gap the record leaves: the women who flew, wound the
sensors and were quietly set aside while history kept the men's names. This website is the
research she stands on, every date checked against the archives.
"The experiment is invented. The programme it hides inside was real."
Explore the world of the novel
About the author
Elara S. Novikova is an author and scientist from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, of Russian and
Moldovan heritage, with degrees in computer science and philosophy. Her novels join her
scientific background to the exploration of desire, power and identity. Secret Dawn
Among the Stars is written in English.
The book is out now; retailer links are at the top of this page. Press and reviewers:
the press kit above has everything quotable.
Reader reactions
Test readers, critics, personal discussions. Unfiltered.
Illustrative, in-universe reactions, not verified press quotes.
Karin L. – Hamburg”Sex in zero gravity, written by someone who clearly did the physics first. The choreography problem is real and the book knows it. I laughed, then I blushed, then I took notes.”Triple-F Feedback
Dr. Femi A. – London”The epigenetics is speculative but not stupid, which for fiction is rare. The observer changing the observed is the whole novel in one sentence and she knows it.”Personal Feedback
Grace T. – Houston”I work adjacent to human spaceflight. The surveillance details aboard the station are uncomfortably plausible. The rest of it I cannot comment on without HR present.”Personal Feedback After a Reading Session
Pavel R. – Prague”Anastasia is the best character she has written. A scientist who spies on her own lover and files the report anyway. I hated her for forty pages and then I understood her, which is worse.”Beta Reader Notes
Lena O. – Novosibirsk”My grandfather was at Baikonur in the sixties. He never talked. Now I keep looking at his photos and wondering. Thanks for the insomnia, I suppose.”Email to the author
Marcus J. – Denver”Too slow, too Russian, too much longing out of windows at the Earth. Not for me. My wife has read it three times.”Triple-F Feedback
Bermet S. – Bishkek”I have known Elara for ten years and this is the book that sounds most like her at 2am: orbits, ethics, desire, in exactly that order. She is like this at breakfast too. Pray for us.”Personal Feedback After a Reading Session
Anonymous”This is pornography with a bibliography.”Review the author has framed above her desk
Yuki N. – Osaka”Five people in a tin can and an invisible sixth passenger. The quiet secret is the best plot device I have read this year. I gasped on a train.”Personal Feedback
Stefan H. – Vienna”The book ends three times and the second ending is the true one. Cut the rest and it is a masterpiece.”Beta Reader Notes
Priya V. – Bangalore”Read it for the romance. Ended up explaining methylation to my flatmate at midnight. She has now also bought it. This is how it spreads.”Triple-F Feedback
Robert F. – Warsaw”A love story where the state reads the love letters first. Anyone from this part of the world will recognise the temperature.”Personal Feedback
Camille D. – Paris”Some passages should be illegal to write this well about people who are being watched. I felt complicit. I think that was the point.”Book club, minutes excerpt
More by Elara S. Novikova
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