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fffriday2023-12-06 09:24 pm
chestnut_pod) wrote in fffriday2023-12-06 09:24 pm
Entry tags:
The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older
Back copy:
This has a great first sentence: “The man had disappeared from an isolated platform; the furthest platform eastward, in fact, on the 4°63' line, never a very popular ring.”
I like all the material culture: the recognizable but alien description of the “train station and station pub” equivalents, the clothes, the food. The prose is simple, doing the slightest bit of offbeat classic sci-fi pastiche with a quiet competence that makes me appreciate it all the more. There’s some fun inclusion of non-English languages that don’t seem forced, but rather like quite natural loanwords or calques that would crop up in the far future on a planet populated by the remnants of all Earth. Plot-relevant catnip. The characters were lightly sketched, but fun, familiar types. It’s a little bleak, both because the premise of Earthly destruction and the eventual end of the mystery plot hit rather close to home, but it’s also a little cozy and a little funny and a lovely way to spend an evening.
"On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend, a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems.
Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together."
This has a great first sentence: “The man had disappeared from an isolated platform; the furthest platform eastward, in fact, on the 4°63' line, never a very popular ring.”
I like all the material culture: the recognizable but alien description of the “train station and station pub” equivalents, the clothes, the food. The prose is simple, doing the slightest bit of offbeat classic sci-fi pastiche with a quiet competence that makes me appreciate it all the more. There’s some fun inclusion of non-English languages that don’t seem forced, but rather like quite natural loanwords or calques that would crop up in the far future on a planet populated by the remnants of all Earth. Plot-relevant catnip. The characters were lightly sketched, but fun, familiar types. It’s a little bleak, both because the premise of Earthly destruction and the eventual end of the mystery plot hit rather close to home, but it’s also a little cozy and a little funny and a lovely way to spend an evening.
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