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Older, Malka

Entry updated 19 February 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1977-    ) US humanitarian worker and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Tear Tracks" in Tor.com for October 2015, assembled with other tales as ... And Other Disasters (coll 2019). Her first novel, Infomocracy (2016), which initiates the Centenal Cycle, conceives the Near Future complexly-described Internet-permeated world in terms of information-dominated Politics, with every "citizen" "enabled" by a constant flow of information. On what might seem the positive side, nation states have – only twenty years hence – dissolved into a worldwide array of "centenals", affinity groups containing approximately 100,000 persons each, neatly prefiguring some similar Utopian developments espoused in Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning (2016). On the negative side, it is made clear that this system is highly vulnerable to gaming, and that figures behind the scene continue (as now) to vie for power. Set a decade later, Null States (2017) further explores the complex interrelations between information and democracy, with an emphasis on an affliction here called "narrative disorder", where the human need for story overwhelms the conjoined human need to perceive reality with some accuracy (see Perception). In State Tectonics (2018), inherent instabilities, which continue to generate seismic distortions of the body politic, threaten to end a precarious planetary comity. The series is remarkable for the geographical spread of venues chosen and described with a strong sense of place. [JC]

Malka Older

born 1977

works

series

Centenal Cycle

Born to the Blade

  • Trade Deal (no place given: Serial Box Publishing, 2018) [story: ebook: in the Born to the Blade Shared World series: na/]
  • Refugees (no place given: Serial Box Publishing, 2018) [story: ebook: in the Born to the Blade Shared World series: na/]
  • Assassination (no place given: Serial Box Publishing, 2018) [story: ebook: in the Born to the Blade Shared World series: na/]

The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti

collections

links

previous versions of this entry



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