Bingo 24: Celestial
The Mimicking of Known Successes takes place at some point in the future when humanity has left Earth (maybe hopes to go back) and largely now lives on Jupiter. By virtue of setting, discussed in some detail, this is a cosmic setting with some cosmic questions about the future of planet Earth and humanity and other species.
This novella is marketed as a sapphic romance (there’s a little), a murder investigation (also a little), gaslamp (kinda), and maybe a few other things too. For such a little book, that’s a lot, and it shows. There’s a vague feeling of almost blandness the whole time; it’s an interesting mystery (academia setting), interesting pair of main characters (former somethings, one now a scholar, one a high level police-person, kinda Holmesian in nature), and an interesting setting (not much backstory or history, just that humanity somehow managed to migrate to Jupiter, an entirely gaseous planet but apparently theoretical hope of someday regaining Earth), and yet there’s nowhere near enough satisfying detail about any of it to be fully developed by the end. There’s a lot of vague hints about what happened between our now and the now of the story (unclear how far back we are), there’s the building of the now relationship between Moss and Pleiti but only vague backstory, the mystery is probably the most concrete thing besides what life is like on Jupiter, and that’s not even terribly the point.
The university setting and its hierarchies is interesting but not totally developed (I’m a university academic myself, so I could be a little biased), the competition between departments and fight for survival against public opinion, and what it is Pleiti actually researches (she says it indirectly but IYKYK and it’s pretty great if you do) is all good stuff, but somehow none of seems to matter. Maybe the sequel builds on that, but for now, this is on the one hand, really intriguing, but on the other, almost not quite worth all of the suggestion with very little payoff. I really want to like this one, but it’s hard to say with so little concrete content to work with.