This week we are joined by the editors of the new anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. The book champions realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers from around the world. To assemble the book, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz (@ghidorahnotweak), and Malka Older put writers, organizers, scholars, and others in conversation with one another to dive deep on the messy work of making change.
Read a story from the book online! “Where Memory Meets the Sea” by Laia Asieo Odo was previewed at Electric Literature.
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Episode Guests
Barbadian writer and editor Karen Lord is the author of Redemption in Indigo, which won the 2011 William L. Crawford Award and the 2012 Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Best Debut), and was nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her other works include Unraveling, the second novel in the Redemption series, and The Best of All Possible Worlds, The Galaxy Game, and The Blue, Beautiful World (longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction) in the Cygnus Beta series. She also edited New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, and coedited We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope with Annalee Newitz and Malka Older.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Convergence’s Bookshop. Purchases made through our bookshop support our movement media work.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who also writes science fiction. They are the co-editor, with Karen Lord and Malka Older, of the anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays About Protest, Resistance, and Hope. They are also the author of several other books, including Automatic Noodle, an instant USA Today bestseller; The Terraformers, which was nominated for the Nebula Award; and Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. They have a monthly column in New Scientist magazine, and are a member of the Flaming Hydra collective. Previously they were the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct and a contributor to the New York Times.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Convergence’s Bookshop. Purchases made through our bookshop support our movement media work.
Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. She is the Executive Director of Global Voices, a community of journalists, editors, translators, and activists providing community journalism from all over the world and advocating for Indigenous and minority languages, media literacy, digital rights, and online freedom of expression.
Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named among the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, the Washington Post, and Book Riot; with sequels, it was a finalist for a Hugo award. The Mimicking of Known Successes, a murder mystery set on Jupiter, was on four best of 2023 lists and was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and Ignyte awards for Best Novella. The sequel, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, was named one of the best science-fiction books of 2024 by Esquire, and the third book in the series, The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, came out in June 2025. She is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, where she teaches on predictive fictions.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to Convergence’s Bookshop. Purchases made through our bookshop support our movement media work.