The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia

People in power are not necessarily very scientifically savvy, but it made sense to them: 'Oh, God made it this way,' or 'You can talk a birch into being a pine - okay, I understand that. “Lysenkoism was basically a form of Lamarckism (like 'you can teach a birch to be a pine') that asserted the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Yet they were well educated, spoke several languages, and were extremely smart. They smoked incessantly in the classroom and they swore like you would not believe. The professors all went through the Gulag because they refused to accept Lysenkoism, and they were very old, very craggy. “The scientist in Secret History was basically modeled on several of my professors at Moscow State University's biology department. It might as well be a fantasy city.' I was blown away when I discovered New York actually existed! To me, most of world geography was fantasy.” Reading Victor Hugo, I thought 'I'm never going to see Paris. I spent 20 years behind the Iron Curtain, where you don't expect to see beyond the one country. One of my favorite poets, Marina Tsvetaeva, also lived in Prague, so there is this secondary layering going on since this is the poetry I grew up with. You can spend a week in Prague and write about it for the rest of your life. “I've visited Prague for a short time, and it is a strange city, very Gothic and grotesque in some ways. With Jeff VanderMeer or China Miéville, theirs are very European cities, though in my own mind I may be imposing things that are not there. I don't know if it's so much fantasy cities, because when I read, I perceive them as real cities at some point, and I try to figure out what cities they were based on. To me, Moscow is the archetypal city, so when invent a city there's always going to be some part which is very old, and a river of some sort. She edited Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy (2008). Her latest book is The Alchemy of Stone (2008).

First novel According to Crow came out in 2005, but she made a bigger impact with literary fantasy The Secret History of Moscow (2007). She's since sold more than 40 stories to various magazines and anthologies. Her first story, 'Alphabet Angels', appeared in Analog in 2005, and won that year's AnLab Poll. She now works at The Richard Stockton College, teaching botany and plant ecology. She later moved to New Jersey to attend graduate school at Rutgers, studying the nearby Pine Barrens and getting a degree in ecology and evolution and 2001.

She attended Moscow State University before moving to Boston, where she worked at MIT's department of brain and cognitive sciences as a research assistant. Ekaterina Sedia ('I usually go by 'Kathy'') was born Ekaterina Holland in Moscow and lived in Russia until she was 21.

The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia