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gaspunk on a gas giant
Oct. 29th, 2022 05:31 pmThe Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older.
I requested this book because it was by Malka Older and then slammed the download button without re-reading the marketing copy, which means I went in cold, with no conscious knowledge of the concept, length, or premise. It's novella-length; if you want to recreate my experience of reading the entire book in one joyful Friday evening of discovery, hit the pre-order button now.
Mimicking of Known Successes is the kind of book you get when a really smart person makes a list of their favorite tropes and then writes them all simultaneously. (In that sense, Aliette de Bodard's novellas are a good comparison.) To give you an example, at one point two characters visit their favorite restaurant:
There are layers on layers here: a joke about the book's central relationship, a cozy fire, an example of the crafted ecological management/historical recreation that forms the viewpoint character's career, and a reference to the platforms along rails above a gas giant that form both story setting and mystery structure.
The one major element of the premise you can't extract from this piece of gleeful scene-setting is that in addition to being a gaslights-on-a-gas-giant ecological adventure, Known Successes is a lesbian riff on Sherlock Holmes. Or maybe it's as fair to say, a queer riff. The Holmes character is clearly a woman, but for a while I thought the Watsonesque narrator's gender was deliberately ambiguous in the style of the Hilary Tamar mysteries. That was a misapprehension on my part, but the rumpled academia readings are certainly comparable to the Hilary Tamar books. You'll also find hot scones and levels of hurt/comfort you could scoop up with a spoon--and background musings on ecological disequilibrium.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)
I requested this book because it was by Malka Older and then slammed the download button without re-reading the marketing copy, which means I went in cold, with no conscious knowledge of the concept, length, or premise. It's novella-length; if you want to recreate my experience of reading the entire book in one joyful Friday evening of discovery, hit the pre-order button now.
Mimicking of Known Successes is the kind of book you get when a really smart person makes a list of their favorite tropes and then writes them all simultaneously. (In that sense, Aliette de Bodard's novellas are a good comparison.) To give you an example, at one point two characters visit their favorite restaurant:
Slow Burn was, most exceptionally, in the center of a small but dense wood. The owner had purchased soil, and saplings, and cultivated the fastest-growing firewood species she could find, all within her small allotted plot on Valdegeld platform. Tiny paths led through the trees to a slender building, and within the visitor found a long hearth...
There are layers on layers here: a joke about the book's central relationship, a cozy fire, an example of the crafted ecological management/historical recreation that forms the viewpoint character's career, and a reference to the platforms along rails above a gas giant that form both story setting and mystery structure.
The one major element of the premise you can't extract from this piece of gleeful scene-setting is that in addition to being a gaslights-on-a-gas-giant ecological adventure, Known Successes is a lesbian riff on Sherlock Holmes. Or maybe it's as fair to say, a queer riff. The Holmes character is clearly a woman, but for a while I thought the Watsonesque narrator's gender was deliberately ambiguous in the style of the Hilary Tamar mysteries. That was a misapprehension on my part, but the rumpled academia readings are certainly comparable to the Hilary Tamar books. You'll also find hot scones and levels of hurt/comfort you could scoop up with a spoon--and background musings on ecological disequilibrium.
(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC.)