Roman Bessnow
Roman Bessnow was born in Odessa, Soviet Union, and later emigrated to the United States. For roughly four decades he has worked in software engineering, research and development, and systems architecture. In parallel, he has spent many years working with music and sound reproduction and studying analytical psychology, philosophy, consciousness, and the relationship between human beings and the systems they create.
His fiction grows from those overlapping disciplines rather than treating them as separate subjects. The Mutations brings engineering, music, psychology, philosophy, satire, family memory, artificial intelligence, and metaphysics into the same literary architecture.
Roman Bessnow has also written publicly for many years under the name Romy the Cat. GoodSoundClub is his long-running body of work on audio, music reproduction, listening, engineering, and the culture surrounding them. The names belong to the same person; the subject has widened. The earlier work remains part of the intellectual history from which The Mutations emerged.
Less Officially
I was born in a city where children learn sarcasm before multiplication and where irony is considered a basic mineral.
I have spent enough years teaching machines to behave logically to discover that people remain completely unpatched. That may be the most useful thing engineering ever taught me: systems become most interesting exactly where their assumptions stop working.
English is not my first language. I write in it with the confidence of a man entering a cathedral through the ventilation system. Whether this is courage, madness, revenge, or poor planning remains under review.
I am suspicious of certainty, particularly when it becomes well dressed. I live between the memories of my childhood in Odessa and America, between comedy and apocalypse, and between the sincere desire to become normal and the terrible suspicion that it may already be too late.
