The body of letters, manuscripts, interviews and working notes of Nareon preserved after 1998. The author's biography is treated separately; here is what makes it possible to hear his own voice outside the novels.
The archive is unevenly organised: part remains in private hands, part is scattered across editorial offices, and part has over the years simply "vanished into the papers", and this dispersal has itself become a fact of the biography.
State of the archive
Nareon left no instructions about the archive and did not hand his papers "into the house" of literary foundations. Most of the manuscripts remained with the family, part "stuck" to editorial offices and publishers, and individual letters and drafts were sold at auctions in the 2000s.
Letters to editors
The most coherent corpus in the archive: more than two hundred letters from Nareon to the editors of Kaplya and the British Heron Press. It is in these letters that the "wiki about the cycle" finds most of its "direct authorial remarks", as distinct from the "novelistic" ones.
Letters to readers
Nareon answered readers' letters "by hand", and in the "fan collections" these replies are quoted most often. The best known is a letter to an unnamed woman reader in 1995, in which Nareon first explains the difference between "cooling" and the "empty arkivit".
Interviews
Nareon was interviewed rarely: only seven recorded sessions and two that fell through are known. One interview circulated among the manuscripts as the Heron interview; present-day texts of this interview are not found in the publishers' archives and are known only from fragmentary quotations.
Essays and notes
Nareon wrote essays "without dressed-up form": these are short notes about "things next to the novel", some of which "grew into scenes" in the later books. These notes are regarded in the "late drafts" as "an entrance into the laboratory".
Manuscripts and drafts
The manuscripts of the main books mostly remained in "working form": without fair copies, with notes in the margins and "insertions at the top". The drafts of the "late texts" and of the sixth book are scattered among the heirs' hands, and the wiki knows more about them from auction catalogues than from the originals.
Lost and disputed
Manuscripts attributed to Nareon regularly surface whose provenance cannot be confirmed. Some of them turn out to be the work of imitators, some "hang in dispute" for decades, and it is precisely this zone that gives "false memory" most of its fuel.