★★★★☆ Postapocalyptic Jupiter buddy cops

The Mimicking of Known Successes

Malka Older

I picked up The Mimicking of Known Successes because it is a finalist for the 2024 Best Novella Hugo.

So, yeah. It looks like we finally managed to do it -- wipe out life on Earth. After decamping to Mars for a while and trashing that, too, we are now camped out on Jupiter. We hope one day to fix Earth and go back, but I'd say the real question is whether anything will be left of Jupiter when we're done with it. Over a hundred years have passed since the abandonment of Earth.

These are the main political divisions of the Jupiter colony. One political movement, the Classicists, works towards fixing, repairing, and returning to Earth. Their main political opposition is the Moderns, whose main goal is to make life livable on Jupiter. There are no political conservatives -- indeed, the word "Conservative" has become a slur. (I suspect that is a hint about Malka Ann Older's 2023 political inclinations, but that's just a guess.)

Nowhere in the novel is Jupiter referred to by that name. The inhabitants call it Giant. However, Pleiti mentions looking up and seeing Europa and Io, which are moons of Jupiter, so that's presumably the giant where they're all living. Jupiter is not a planet like Earth with a solid surface -- it's a gas giant. How the colonists engineered a place to live is only sketchily described. It was apparently done by fabricating several steel rings that completely encircle the planet. Trains run on these rings, and they support solid platforms on which people live and work. These rings are given names like "the 4°63' line" or "the 0°30' line". The numbers are the measures of small angles -- a longitude or a latitude, I presume. Latitude would make most sense, since the rings extend primarily East-West, however, the different rings intersect and there are rail stations at the intersections, so that one can get from one ring to another. This is puzzling, since lines of latitude don't intersect. That all this could be engineered strikes me as physically implausible. I would certainly like more information on how Older imagines it all. A map would have been helpful.

OK, I'm nerding out here. Apologies. However, the issues I just raised are relevant to the story. It's basically a mystery -- a brief and simple mystery. It's a novella, and there's not room for involved world-building and a complicated mystery. So, fair enough. I still enjoyed it.

The "buddy cops" I referred to in my title are, as you've already figured out from the series title, Mossa and Pleiti. Pleiti, our main point of view character, is not literally a cop -- she's a researcher at the big University of Valdegeld. (I'm using feminine pronouns for Pleiti, because the publisher's blurb does, but I suspect Older may be pulling a Scalzi here and deliberately leaving Pleiti's gender ambiguous, since I didn't notice any gender commitment for Pleiti in the novel itself.) Mossa IS a cop -- that is, she is an Investigator. She is trying to track down a missing university researcher, and she asks Pleiti to assist. Many years ago, when they were students together at the University, Mossa and Pleiti were an item. They broke up on graduation, but it is obvious that the feelings have not gone away. The romance takes a back seat to the mystery, but it is there.

This was fun, even if it felt a bit sketchy and unfinished. I was pleased to discover that it is the first novel in a series that, sadly, comprises only two books at the date of writing this review, 19-May-2024. I certainly plan to read book 2 (The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles), and probably eventually book 3, etc.

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