Book Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Ann Older

 

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Ann Older

169 pages, Hardcover
Published March, 2023 by Tordotcom

 Sometimes the concept of a novel is so good you marvel at the fact that it wasn't done before. The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Ann Older is  The first of a novel series of novels meant to invoke a cozy gaslamp mystery feeling.  In the  Holmes and Watson tradition, our detectives are two characters Mossa & Pleiti who have survived the ecological devastated earth to live in tightly packed platforms high in the atmosphere of a gas giant we assume is Jupiter but referred to through the book as Giant.

This is my second time reading Older and I really enjoyed the blend of social justice activism and near-future world-building of Infomocracy. That novel had more in common with political thrillers than the weird works of the Cyberpunks although the comparisons were out there. Think the Ryan Gosling movie Ides of March meets Leguin. It is part political and part spy thriller.  So yeah I am still four years later suggesting Infomocracy.

This novel which was born out of the isolation of the pandemic, is a great high concept that is not exactly for me. I am not a cozy gaslamp mystery reader but I highly respect the idea and execution. Someone who is Holmes-head (I don't know what they are actually called) would probably find lots of easter eggs and stylistic touches that are sailing over my head.

The mystery is cozy in the sense that the unexplained suicide of a character who didn't seem like he wanted to die is low-stakes. It is not the fate of the universe. There are details that set a Holmes-like mystery with facts that twist and turn the story.

The novel is written in first person from Mossa's point of view. I am rarely a fan of novels told in first person but the story was told well enough that I forgot about it. Unlike Ascension by Nicholas Binge it CONSTANTLY reminded me.

The thing that worked for me was the world-building that expressed the details of an ecological crisis and Earth's postmortem. Page 31 of this book is an info dump but it does an amazing job of answering the many questions the first thirty pages gave me. I liked the way you are through into the world and that was just the right amount of pages to leave the reader wondering.

"There had after all, been many species on earth, once.
Even the small subset of that number whose genetic information had been collected before they were driven out of existence,  and a smaller faction of those who had been resurrected for the Mauzooluem, still resulted in an extremely large panoply of species."

The setting provides a set of stakes and pressures that counterbalance the so-called "cozy" nature of the mystery. The world-building is so well done, subtle at times, intense at others but always handled with skill.  As a real-life Animal rights person I noticed a shout out to my peeps in this future.

"There were of course Animal rights activists who argued that the animals shouldn't  have been reconstituted to live in what is essentially captivity."

Mossa points out that few have taken up this view because that is what humans are dealing with. What is interesting to me about this is what this means for this mystery series. All the mystery cases will be a result of the characters essentially existing in captivity.

Mossa as a character has Holmes's careful considerable intelligence when he calls the academic Pleiti we get the idea that their partnership is more than the mystery. As curious as I was about them I admit I was also interested in the street preacher who only appears on page 46. I am probably the only reader who felt that way but I wanted to know his deal.

Mossa calls back to the street preacher in chapter 17 and that was the first time in a while I really thought about the first-person narrative. Really cool high-concept science fiction and an excellent translation of the concept.