The Mimicking of Known Successes imagines a future where humanity, having completely wrecked Earth and then Mars, has settled on the rings of Jupiter. The entire civilization lives on a series of platforms orbiting above the gas planet, connected to one another across the rings by a series of rail lines. On one of the most distant platforms a man has gone missing. He seems to have stepped off the platform to his death, but why? Inspector Mossa follows his trail back to the university at Valdegeld, where her ex-girlfriend Pleiti is now a scholar in the same department as the missing man. The Classics department studies all things Earth in an attempt to fully understand and – hopefully – recreate the global ecosystem and enable a return to the planet. Mossa recruits Pleiti in her investigation and they begin to look into the career of the missing scholar. No one seemed to have liked him much, but no one can understand why he would commit suicide either. As the questions mount up, Mossa & Pleiti begin to question whether he actually committed suicide at all, or if something more nefarious is at play.
The world-building in this book is exquisite. Older imagines a society that is both futuristic but reminiscent of the Holmes novels & Victorian England. Older’s idea of what human civilization would do if Earth became uninhabitable are also interesting. How would we react if the only animals we saw with any regularity were cats, pigeons, and cockroaches? How would we prioritize what species to recreate, and where? And what kind of technology would be required to live above an inhospitable planet like Jupiter? The reveals of the various mysteries are also fun. There are a few scenes that just deliver on the mysteries Older created really well, and felt like a good payoff.
I also liked the relationship between Pleiti and Mossa. We get most of the novel from Pleiti’s point of view, so don’t get to learn directly how Mossa feels. But Older does a good job writing these two as friends with a complicated past, and when they do finally kiss it feels well-earned. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed The Mimicking of Known Successes, and look forward to reading the second in the series.
(Shoutout to fellow Cannonballer Narfna, whose review of this book inspired me to read it myself!)