The Mimicking of Known Successes

[psocoptera]

The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older, 2023 novella. A detective story in a neat and novel SF setting, plus exes-to-lovers f/f romance. I think this one is likely to show up on ballots; I wasn't quite blown away, but I definitely enjoyed myself, and look forward to the next one. Spoilers behind the cut. I'm not convinced the Jupiter setting "could really work", but who cares, Railsea in space, I've never seen anything quite like that before. Older does nice work with little details, all the scarves and tea and fires, this is very much Misty Olde Oxford (except, again, In Space). As for the mystery, I liked how sympathetic the villains ended up being - some interesting stuff here about the perfect being the enemy of the good, and the endless inertia/ivory-tower-ness of academia. And I liked the way the second-chance romance mirrored the question about a second chance for the Earth. Pleiti has changed, and is ready for a second try, and maybe humans have changed, and are ready for a second try? I guess you can divide "we lose the Earth" books into "it was our fault" and "it wasn't our fault", and this definitely seems to be more Wall-E than Lady Astronaut. I couldn't quite buy an ecological catastrophe that actually *sterilized* the Earth, such that we would have to reintroduce every niche of life, but, enh, much like the Jupiter ring/platforms, I'm willing to roll with it for story purposes.