“Interviews of Importance”

2021 Older, Malka [Ann] (b. 1977). “Interviews of Importance.” Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future. Ed. Gideon Lichfield (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), 43-55. PSt

The story is set in a future where society at least appears to be caring more for its aging population through the establishment of an Elder Resources program that is designed to connect aging people “with working-age people, both to reduce loneliness and isolation . . . and to have some early warning and support for vulnerable people in any kind of future disaster” (45) Also, the new digital democracy required everyone to be technologically competent to participate and vote, and the system is designed to ensure that the elderly had the needed competencies. It is told from the viewpoint of a young woman who works in a low-paid job to contact people in their sixties or older to first set up an interview in which she asks set questions about their lived history, with a particular emphasis on what is now called “historically oppressed groups” (46). They are then encouraged to join a network which will contact them regularly. The young woman is cynical about her job but is also desperate to learn her mother’s history. The Latinx female author has a doctorate from the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations in Paris and has been a Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk Management at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. See her brief statement “Thirsty for New” in People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! Ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Kristine Ong Muslim. Special Issue of Lightspeed, no. 73 (June 2016): 396-97.