AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY. ELARA S. NOVIKOVA

SHORT (50 words)
Elara S. Novikova, M.Sc., born 1999 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, writes fiction
built on documented Soviet history. Four novels, each with a free public
research archive. A degree in computer science from Naryn, an M.Sc. in
Symbolic Systems from California, and a doctorate in progress on how
authoritarian states manage science.

LONG
Elara S. Novikova writes from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where she was born in
1999. Her mother is Russian, a meteorologist's daughter from Kamchatka who
taught her not to argue with data. Her father is Moldovan and has kept the
card catalogue of Moldova's National Library in order for longer than she
has been alive. She grew up between a volcano coast, a reading room and the
Tian Shan, in three of the languages the Soviet Union left behind.

She took her computer science degree at the state university in Naryn, in a
department that mostly trained schoolteachers, and found the Setun ternary
computer in a Russian footnote nobody else in her cohort read. An M.Sc. in
Symbolic Systems in California followed, then the way back to Bishkek, where
she is finishing a doctorate on how authoritarian states manage science.
Machines first, then ethics, then power. The order matters.

Her four novels grow out of the same documented ground: machines that
counted in three states, sealed experiments in orbit, a signal that has
buzzed on 4625 kHz since the seventies, and the fringe biology of the
1920s. Each book ships with a research archive of timelines, dossiers and
sources, free and open to check. She writes desire without euphemism and
history without shortcuts. Women who were cut out of the official record
keep turning up at the centre of the books, and she has stopped calling
that a coincidence.

Off the page she argues philosophy, walks Bishkek at night, drafts longhand
in squared notebooks, and answers reader mail herself.

TIMELINE
1999          Born in Bishkek. Two alphabets in the house, three languages
              at the table.
Childhood     Summers on the black sand of Kamchatka, winters in the
              National Library in Chisinau.
Age 18        First novel. It stays in the drawer, which is where
              apprenticeships belong.
Naryn         B.Sc. Computer Science. Thesis on fault tolerant coding, and
              the first encounter with the Setun.
California    M.Sc. Symbolic Systems. What a machine is, and what a state
              owes the people it uses.
Bishkek       Doctorate by day, the novels by night, at a desk facing the
              mountains.

CONTACT
Elara S. Novikova
Turusbekov St, Bishkek 720001, Kyrgyzstan
contact@elaranovikova.com
https://elaranovikova.com
