When we think of humans colonizing other planets in our solar system, we typically think of the Moon, Mars, or maybe one of the moons of Saturn — something solid. But in her new romantic sci-fi mystery novella The Mimicking Of Known Successes (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Malka Older decided to set her mystery somewhere a bit gassy.
Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” But what if you didn’t just vote for a politician, but also for the kind of government they would lead? This was the premise of Malka Older’s 2016 political cyberpunk novel Infomocracy, the first book in The Centenal Cycle trilogy. With that series coming to a close, I traded emails with Older to discuss this series as a whole, as well as the third and final installment, State Tectonics (hardcover, Kindle).
Science fiction stories have a long history of injecting politics into their plots. The latest example of this is Malka Older’s new novel Null States (hardcover, digital), the second book in her Centenal Cycle after 2016’s Infomocracy (paperback, digital). Though in talking to her about both novels, it seems America’s most recent election, as well as other political events around the world, didn’t have as big an impact on her novels’ plots as you might imagine.