A Sunday Morning Transport Interview with Ignyte Award Finalist Malka Older

This interview is part of an intermittent series connecting authors and readers, about their stories — please join in the discussion in the comments!

This month, as a continuing part of our work to connect Sunday Morning Transport authors and readers, Devin Singer interviewed Malka Older, author of “The Locked Pod” (September 2022) — the story is a finalist for the 2023 Ignyte Awards!

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Devin Singer, for SMT: Congratulations on your second Ignyte nomination! It's very exciting for us to see this story, which we love, get recognized by the community. (Sidenote to readers: you can vote for the Ignyte Awards at this link: https://ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/vote/ until 11:59PM Eastern on Friday, June 30th!)

DS: Clearly, this setting and protagonist connected with readers. Tell us a bit about your main character and her unusual worldview. Was it inspired by something in particular?

Malka Older: I liked the idea about writing about some sort of community, some kind of communal living, and especially one that also encompasses really solitary, devoted kinds of work. So the main character is an academic, but as part of this community she also performs certain functions to keep it running, hopefully providing a balance of isolation and interaction. And she's a parent. I like writing parents in sci-fi because I don't think we see enough of them. 

DS: The Locked Pod plays with the structure of the murder mystery, asking a fundamentally different question than the *traditional* whodunnit. Tell us about your inspiration for this unusual angle.

MO: I wanted to take the "locked room" premise up to 11 with "surrounded by hard vacuum". But because the Hortus - short, by the way, for "hortus conclusus", or walled garden -is also a kind of locked room, if significantly larger, so I had to figure out a different angle on the central mystery. That also got me into some ethical questions I find interesting, so, bonus.

DS: You are both a writer and a public policy/disaster response expert, who actively tracks and engages with politics, current events, and breaking news. These are things the inhabitants of “The Locked Pod’s” Hortus avoid.

MO: Yes, I wanted to grapple with some of these questions. On the one hand, as you say, I'm someone who cares about what's going on in the world, both because I find it interesting, sometimes compelling, and because morally I think it's important to be aware of events beyond our immediate surroundings, especially because we are likely to be connected to them, vulnerable to or complicit in them, in some way(s). But at the same time I'm frustrated by (my own) slactivism, frustrated by how easy it can be to get mired in far-away drama at the expense of one's own discipline, and especially frustrated by the priorities of what we get sucked into: drama, especially surface drama, especially rich people drama, over events, oppressions, and structures that affect far more people much more direly.  

DS: Because of that perspective, we’re curious about what you think regarding how avoiding these things might benefit humanity? 

MO: I definitely don't think EVERYONE should avoid these things. But I do think that for some people, it's more conducive to take a long view, to not get caught up in everything, and sometimes the only the way there is, at least for a time, getting caught up in nothing external and just focusing.

DS: And relatedly, what would you do or undertake if you could cloister yourself away from current events for a while?

MO: I don't know, I get a lot of ideas from what's going on in the world, but there might be a point at which it makes sense for me (I have done it in the past, although not exactly by choice - I was in a place with no internet for 6 weeks or so). 

DS: What are you working on next? What are you excited about in the coming months?

MO: The next Mossa and Pleiti mystery, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, which is the sequel to The Mimicking of Known Successes, comes out in February, so I'm really excited about that, and I'm almost done with book 3 in the series.

In the meantime, I've got a lot of other projects I'm working on, so we'll see what comes out next!

Thank you so much, Malka, for joining us to talk about “The Locked Pod” and your upcoming work! Best of luck with the Ignyte Awards!

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