Alex Cabe reviewed The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older (Mossa and Pleiti, #1)
A promising setting, a little light on mystery
3 stars
The world building here doesn't fundamentally make sense, there's no universe in which building 200,000 mile rails to colonize Jupiter is more feasible in terms of knowhow or resources that fixing Earth or even colonizing the Moon or Mars. However, you owe it to the author to suspend disbelief on the central premise and go for the ride. The worldbuilding about all the heat and light coming from gas flames was so good it felt like it was the initial idea that the setting formed around.
The strengths were the worldbuilding and the formal language that made everything feel retro-futuristic.
The primary weakness, in my view, was that a good mystery often involves a unique or creative "perfect crime". In order to write a perfect crime, you have to work within the rules of the real world. If your perfect crime involves a creative interpretation of a fictional world, the …
The world building here doesn't fundamentally make sense, there's no universe in which building 200,000 mile rails to colonize Jupiter is more feasible in terms of knowhow or resources that fixing Earth or even colonizing the Moon or Mars. However, you owe it to the author to suspend disbelief on the central premise and go for the ride. The worldbuilding about all the heat and light coming from gas flames was so good it felt like it was the initial idea that the setting formed around.
The strengths were the worldbuilding and the formal language that made everything feel retro-futuristic.
The primary weakness, in my view, was that a good mystery often involves a unique or creative "perfect crime". In order to write a perfect crime, you have to work within the rules of the real world. If your perfect crime involves a creative interpretation of a fictional world, the rules you yourself made, it feels less clever. As an example, there's a reveal that a suspect had a creative way of riding the train. This didn't really feel like anything to me because the author hadn't previously established how people normally ride space trains.
There wasn't a lot to the love story, but I am guessing it will build in later installments.
I liked it and thought it was very funny that "conservative" is a swear.
