The Mimicking of Known Successes etc. by Malka Older
2025-06-21 11:55![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreads.The Mimicking of Known Successes and two more
4/5. A series (two novellas and a short novel) about an investigator on Jupiter who reconnects with her old girlfriend, a professor, to solve crime.
Ignore that this is Holmes/Watson. I sure did. Making them lesbians does not suddenly make me care.
Also ignore the summary above which makes these sound like mysteries. I mean, they are. That is what is going on here. And the mysteries are fine, whatever.
No, I read these for the worldbuilding, which got more and more interesting the deeper we go. Our narrator – the professor – is a “classicist,” meaning someone who studies old Earth ecology pre climate collapse in the theoretical hope of one day rebuilding that ecosystem. As opposed to the “modern” faculty, who study life as lived on Jupiter, can you imagine, what a waste. It starts out reading like a bit of a joke, sometimes lightly funny, sometimes scathing, at the expense of academia. And then it gets more and more nuanced, and our narrator starts to untangle ever deepening layers of her biases, and questioning the project of her university and her life. And she has to ask genuine questions about whether she was, in a particular instance, the villain. And I have almost never seen that done like this, where it is a real question for the character and for the narrative, not just some stupid character self-indulgent sob fest. No, there’s a real and complex question there, and these books let it breathe.
Content notes: Toxic academic politics, futuristic racism, violence, depressive episodes.
4/5. A series (two novellas and a short novel) about an investigator on Jupiter who reconnects with her old girlfriend, a professor, to solve crime.
Ignore that this is Holmes/Watson. I sure did. Making them lesbians does not suddenly make me care.
Also ignore the summary above which makes these sound like mysteries. I mean, they are. That is what is going on here. And the mysteries are fine, whatever.
No, I read these for the worldbuilding, which got more and more interesting the deeper we go. Our narrator – the professor – is a “classicist,” meaning someone who studies old Earth ecology pre climate collapse in the theoretical hope of one day rebuilding that ecosystem. As opposed to the “modern” faculty, who study life as lived on Jupiter, can you imagine, what a waste. It starts out reading like a bit of a joke, sometimes lightly funny, sometimes scathing, at the expense of academia. And then it gets more and more nuanced, and our narrator starts to untangle ever deepening layers of her biases, and questioning the project of her university and her life. And she has to ask genuine questions about whether she was, in a particular instance, the villain. And I have almost never seen that done like this, where it is a real question for the character and for the narrative, not just some stupid character self-indulgent sob fest. No, there’s a real and complex question there, and these books let it breathe.
Content notes: Toxic academic politics, futuristic racism, violence, depressive episodes.