Hugo 24 Novellas: The Mimicking of Known Successes

Because I read this when it first came out but didn’t get around to writing a review, I thought I should re-read it for the Hugo reviews. Except I didn’t. And me not getting around to re-reading it completely stalled my attempt to review all of the novella finalists. But you didn’t come here to read excuses or sentences that start with “but”.

Above (or perhaps partly within) the clouds of Jupiter is a human colony. There survivors of the environmental collapse of Earth have made a new life in floating settlements joined by railways. Despite the circumstances, this is a society that has reached a degree of stability with infrastructure and higher education. However, much of the intellectual effort is devoted to the issue of a return to Earth and the work needed to stabilise humanity’s former home.

Pleiti is one such researcher and is also caught up in the academic life of a prestiguous university. However, her academic pursuits are interrupted by the reappearance of an old-flame, the brilliant (but self-absorbed) detective Mossa.

A Holmes/Watson murder mystery in an unusual setting is something I always find entertaining. Overall I enjoyed this and I liked the idea of the unusual setting. However, the story as a whole didn’t entirely work for me. Part of the issue here is the nature of human colony felt under-explained — that’s not always an issue for me with science fiction, there’s lots of really good sci-fi that lets the reader fill in the blanks and plenty of not-so-good sci-fi that gets bogged down in info dumps. However, part of a Holmesian mystery is that eye for detail and circumstance which defines how the underlying mystery is revealed. Yet I finished the story with a vague sense of the characters having moved around an empty movie set – the world didn’t feel real or lived in. That’s probably just the difficulty of conveying an original (and on the face of it) interesting setting within the limits of a novella.

Where the story worked much better was in the relationship dynamic between Mossa and Pleiti. The two are presented as much closer as intellectual equals (but with different interests) than the stereotype of Holmes/Watson and Mossa comes across more as a woman who struggles with relationships rather than just an arrogant arse. This really helps the story move above the template that pairing of personalities suggests.

I do enjoy Malka Older’s writing and while I had on balance positive reaction to this story, as whole it didn’t really grab me. As I am implied in the open paragraph, I wasn’t sure how to review it when I first read it and haven’t been sure how to review it since partly because I thought I’d end up with a review that would read oddly negative when I’d actually enjoyed what I had read.

There is a sequel and that adds another paradox. I assume if I read it, the setting would begin to feel more like a real place but the first story didn’t grab me sufficiently that I’ve the urge to read the sequel. I suspect this is a story where people’s mileage will vary enormously. I suspect I got focused on the background rather than the characters – like a diner at a restaurant looking at the plates rather than the meal.