Novellas, Collections, Novels, Serials, Short Fiction, Essays and Op-Eds, Academic, Poetry
Novellas
The Mimicking of Known Successes, coming from Tor.com in February 2023!
Pre-order now in hardcover or e-book from your favorite indie bookstore or large retailer! Links here.
Working on an audio version and will update when I have further info on that.
Cover coming soon! In the meantime, read these fabulous 5-star reviews from Charlie Jane Anders and Fran Wilde.
Collections
…and Other Disasters, now available from Mason Jar Press.
…and Other Disasters, the smart and moving collection of short fiction and poetry from acclaimed author Malka Older, examines otherness, identity and compassion across a spectrum of possible existence. In stories about an AI built for empathy, a corps of fighting midwives traveling to a new planet, and a young anthropologist who returns to study the cultures of a dying Earth, Older’s characters grapple with what it means to belong and be othered, to cling to the past and face the future, all while navigating a precarious world, riddled with natural and man-made disasters.
Novels
The Hugo Award Finalist Centenal Cycle!
Infomocracy, Tor.com Publishing, June 2016
Named among the best books of 2016: Kirkus’ Best Fiction of 2016, Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2016, The Washington Post Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016, BookRiot Best Books of 2016.
Available from iBooks, Powell’s, Overstock, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Walmart, eBooks.com, GooglePlay, Kobo, and your neighborhood bookstore (if it’s not there, ask them for it!)
Ten percent of earnings donated to The Accountability Lab to support their global work on grassroots governance.
Read the first five chapters at Tor.com
Null States, Tor.com Publishing, September 2017
Available at Porter Square Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, eBooks.com, GooglePlay, and Kobo.Ten percent of earnings donated to the Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion to support advocating for the stateless and mitigating and eventually eliminating statelessness.
State Tectonics, Tor.com Publishing, September 2018
Named among the best science-fiction and fantasy of 2018 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Chicago Review of Books.
Available at Porter Square Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, and Powell’s.
Ten percent of earnings donated to Global Voices to support local news coverage, globally available.
Serial Fiction
Ninth Step Station renewed for season 2 at Serial Box! 
Creator and Lead Writer: Malka Older
Writers: Fran Wilde, Curtis Chen, Jacqueline Koyanagi
Years of disaster and conflict have left Tokyo split between great powers. In the city of drone-enforced borders, bodymod black markets, and desperate resistance movements, US peacekeeper Emma Higashi is assigned to partner with Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detective Miyako Koreda. Together, they must race to solve a series of murders that test their relationship and threaten to overturn the balance of global power. And amid the chaos, they each need to decide what they are willing to do for peace.
MACH1NA at Serial Box, 2020
Episode 3: Go Big AND Go Home
Episode 5: Machines of Loving Grace
Orphan Black: The Next Chapter at Serial Box, 2019
Showrunner/Lead Writer: Malka Older
Writers: Madeline Ashby, Mishell Baker, Heli Kennedy, E.C. Myers, Lindsay Smith
Starting eight years after the beloved BBC America TV series ends, this new chapter of Orphan Black brings back familiar (very familiar) faces as well as introducing new ones (some of them also, ahem, very familiar).
Born to the Blade at Serial Box, 2018
Youth. Ambition. Power. Oda no Michiko and Kris Denn have much of the first two, and crave the last. To get it, all they must do is survive.
Short Fiction
“The Dangers We Choose” in Life Beyond Us, Nováková, Law, and Forest ed. Laksa Media, April 22, 2023
“The Plant and the Purist” in New Suns 2, Nisi Shawl ed., Solaris, March 14, 2023
“The Locked Pod” The Sunday Morning Transport, September 11, 2022.
“Legion” in Tomorrow’s Parties (Twelve Tomorrows series), Jonathan Strahan ed., The MIT Press, August 23, 2022
“Shared Data” in Popular Science, March 15, 2022.
“The Cached Map: A Jandro Jamaica Mystery” illustrated by Gabriela Palomo, in Mañana: Latinx Comics From The 25th Century, available in English and Español, 2021.
“Earthquake Relief. Mexico, 2051” in The New Humanitarian, August 2021
“Interviews of Importance” in Make Shift (Twelve Tomorrows), Gordon Lichfield, ed. MIT Press, 2021.
“The Badger’s Digestion; or The First First-Hand Description of Deneskan Beastcraft by an Aouwan Researcher“/”La Digestión del tejón o La primera descripción de primera mano del arte de las bestias llevada a cabo por una investigadora aouwana” Constelación #1, January 2021
“The Legacy” in the New Decameron Project, May 2020
“The Slow Steed and the Fast” in Serial Box’s How We Live Now collection, April 2020
“Actually, Naneen” in Slate’s Future Tense, December 24, 2019
“Saint Path” in …And Other Disasters, 2019
“Perpetuation of the Species” in …And Other Disasters, 2019
“The Divided” in …And Other Disasters, 2019. Available as an excerpt at Tor.com
“The United States Should Welcome a Strong, United Latin America” Op-ed from the Future, The New York Times, June 17, 2019
“Sturdy Lanterns and Ladders” in Current Futures: XPrizes Oceans Anthology, 2019
“Chapter 5: Disruption and Continuity [excerpted]” A People’s Future of the United States, One World, 2019
“Candidate Y” IRL Podcast, Mozilla, 2018; also available in …And Other Disasters
“The End of the Incarnation” Who Will Speak for America?, Temple University Press, 2018; also available (in slightly modified form) in …And Other Disasters
“Disaster Tourism” Twelve Tomorrows, The MIT Press, 2018
“Narrative Disorder” Fireside Fiction, 2017
“Fire Wire” Futurescapes: Cities of Empowerment, 2017
“The Black Box” WIRED, 2016; also available in …And Other Disasters
“The E-Mail Heiress” Reservoir Lit, 2016; also available in …And Other Disasters
“The Rupture” Capricious, 2016; also available in …And Other Disasters
“Tear Tracks” Tor.com, 2015; available in Some of the Best from Tor.com 2015 and, during March 2016, in the limited-time free anthology of work by Campbell-eligible authors, Up and Coming; also available in …And Other Disasters
“The Ethnographer’s Tale” an excerpt from the novel The Islanders, Bengal Lights, The Unnamed Press 2015.
Essays, Op-Eds, and Other Non-fiction
“Obsolete Borders, New Empires” American Quarterly, Special Issue: From Anarchy to Chaos: Generations of Empire Ed. Christopher Lee and Melani McAlister, September 2022
“Traffic Jams are a very USian disaster” Foreign Policy, January 11, 2022
“Hurricane Ida damage haunts those who’ve evacuated. They need help getting home.” NBC THINK, September 3, 2021
“What We Believe About Our Institutions” New York Times, May 19, 2021
“GDP Didn’t Save Countries from Covid-19” Foreign Policy, April 6, 2021
“Scarcity and Ethics: The pandemic is offering a crash course to wealthy countries on dealing with problems they can’t buy their way out of” Foreign Policy, March 12, 2021
“Nuclear Accidents Will Happen. What Do We Do About Them?” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March 11, 2021
“Disasters” Issues in Science and Technology, March 9, 2021
“The Texas Crisis Shows (Again) There’s No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster” Slate Future Tense, February 19, 2021
“Trapped in Stories” Apex Magazine, January 2021
“Democracy is Still Not Safe in the United States” Foreign Policy, November 30, 2020
“Campaign Debates Are Democracy Theater” Foreign Policy, October 23, 2020
“Why We Still Need Democracy” Foreign Policy, October 8, 2020
“Building a Shared Worldview Among Democrats and Republicans Could Be More Dangerous Than Healing” Foreign Policy, September 25, 2020
“The Only People Panicking Are the People In Charge” Foreign Policy, September 16, 2020
“Why Politicians Ignore Disaster Predictions” Foreign Policy, April 13, 2020
“Disasters Like The Coronavirus Don’t Happen In a Vacuum” Foreign Policy, March 12, 2020
“How a bad response to coronavirus will make things worse” The New Humanitarian, March 10, 2020
“Satellite Surveillance Can Trace Atrocities But Not Stop Them” Foreign Policy, January 21, 2020
“Presidential Debates Could Be Much More Imaginative” The New York Times, December 19, 2019
“Forward” in Media Law Through Science Fiction: Do Androids Dream of Electric Free Speech? by Daxton R. Stewart, Routledge, 2019
“The Kurds Are the Nation-State’s Latest Victims” Foreign Policy, October 31, 2019
“The United States Has Never Truly Been a Democracy” The New York Times, October 24, 2019
“Google Is Coming for Your Face” The Nation, October 14, 2019
“Climate change means the government faces more costs from natural disasters. If only it admitted it” NBC Think, October 1, 2019
“Disaster aid is a disaster because Congress shouldn’t be deciding what victims need” NBC Think, June 3, 2019
“Why I’m Pro-secession for Anyone who Wants It” PRI’s The World, 2017
“Our Other Futures” The Center For Fiction, 2017
“The Narrative Spectrum” in Fireside Fiction, 2017
“Microdemocracy is the Next Logical Step for the United States” in Ars Technica, 2016
“Thirsty for New” in People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, 2016
“Accepting Thanks” in Chasing Misery, 2014
Academic
Dissertation: “Organizing after disaster : the (re)emergence of organization within government after Katrina (2005) and the Touhoku Tsunami (2011)“
Older, Malka. “Temporary Organizations in Disaster Response: Crisis, Temporality, and Governance” American Behavioral Scientist December 27, 2022
Older, Malka. “What Disaster Response Can Teach Us about Democracy in the Anthropocene” in Holm, M., & Deese, R.S. (Eds.). (2022). How Democracy Survives: Global Challenges in the Anthropocene (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003218586
Older, Malka and Zachary Pirtle. “Imagined Systems: How the Speculative Novel Infomocracy Offers a Simulation
of the Relationship Between Democracy, Technology, and Society” in Engineering and Philosophy: Reimagining Technology and Social Progress. Zachary Pirtle, David Tomblin, Guru Madhavan, eds. Springer, 2021.
Older, Malka. “Disaster Response as Secondary Hazard” in Disaster Research and the Second Environmental Crisis: Assessing the Challenges Ahead. Kendra, James, Knowles, Scott G., Wachtendorf, Tricia (Eds.) Springer, 2019.
Older, Malka. “Changing stakes: resilience, reconstruction, and participatory practices after the 2011 Japan tsunami” in Governing for Resilience in Vulnerable Places. Trell, Restemeyer, Bakema, van Hoven (Eds). Routledge, 2017.
Older, Malka. “Securitization of Disaster Response in the United States: The Case of Hurricane Katrina” Revue Interdiciplinaire de Travaux sur les Amériques No. 9, July 2016
Older, Malka. “Concourir dans un régime d’abondance : le cas du tsunami de 2004” Gaëlle Dakan, Trans. Faire la concurrence. Patrick Castel, Léonie Hénaut, Emmanuelle Marchal, Eds. Presses des Mines de Paris, 2016.
Older, Malka. “When Is Too Much Money Worse Than Too Little? Giving, Aid, and Impact After the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004” Recovery from Indian Ocean Tsunami: Ten Years Journey. Rajib Shaw, Ed. Springer, 2014.
Poetry
“Inside” Rogue Agent, No Walls Issue 25, 2017
“Muse” Rogue Agent, Issue 19, 2016
“Alien Baby” Inkscrawl, Issue 10, 2016
“The Unseen Line: 東北” Sundog Lit, Issue 10, 2016
“War Poem” Sundog Lit, Issue 10, 2016 *Nominated for Best of the Net*
“Sonnets Google-Translated from the Japanese I” Sundog Lit, Issue 10, 2016
“Reverse Engineering” My Cruel Invention, Meerkat Press 2015
“Traveler’s Lament” Leveler, 2011
Malka Older 