'The Mimicking of Known Successes', the first book in the 'Mossa and Pleiti' series by Malka Older, was one of my favourite books of last year. It was a novella, only a hundred and sixty pages or so, that did a lot with that limited space; being a Victorian-style mystery set in a high concept future, on artificial platforms circling Jupiter, that ended up being rather topical to us in the present. I've been keenly awaiting the sequel and this is it, just under a year on.

This time out, it's a full novel, over two hundred pages, albeit not a particularly thick one. It's just as apparently effortless as its predecessor and I thorougly enjoyed it too, but it suffers inevitably from being a sequel. Everything that felt fresh last time out doesn't here, because, of course, it's not any more, even if we relish the return trip. However, Older wisely expands her scope a little so there are new layers to what's going on around Jupiter, known to residents as Giant, by trawling in a part of this society that lives on the moon of Io, where Mossa was also born.

It's set a little later than the first book. Neurotypical Pleiti and neurodivergent Mossa are now in a relationship once more, though it's still in the awkward stage, not yet as strong as we hope that it'll become. They're very different characters and so it's likely that readers might empathise with one or the other but not both, but we're always very much on their side regardless and want them to succeed. Given that they're also a Holmes/Watson combo, in its original form where Holmes is a genius but Watson is highly capable himself rather than many of the subsequent film adaptations where Watson becomes a bumbling fool, it's good to see that they now have official support to do this together, even if Pleiti remains a scholar rather than changing her career to Investigator.

The mystery once again begins with a missing person, a student at Valdegeld University. However, it seems a little different from the outset, because the missing person in the first book was only a missing person in the official sense, because everyone assumed that he was dead. Here, we have a very different default assumption. Even before Mossa realises that there isn't merely one missing person from Valdegeld but seventeen, so deepening the mystery, the thinking is that missing does mean missing rather than dead. If that first student and the various others are alive, then where are they and why did they all simply vanish?

That may be the primary reason why this book didn't carry as much impact as its predecessor did, because the stakes simply aren't as high. When we think someone's dead, we wonder whether he committed suicide or whether he was murdered. Usually, when we think someone's missing, we're focused on who took them and why, with an associated worry about what their kidnapper might be doing to them. Here, there's always the possibility that they simply went somewhere else and the urgency just isn't there. Sure, that's changed somewhat when the scope rises to seventeen people, but solving the case remains more of an intellectual exercise than a race against time.

Where I found most value was the deepening of the society on Giant. A couple of the students who have gone missing are from Io, Giant's third largest moon. Even though it's also a very dangerous place, given that it's the most volcanically active world anywhere in our solar system, this is where the first people to arrive in the vicinity from the dying Earth settled.

In the first book, people are different for what we might consider minor reasons, such as how the university is broken up between philosophies: Classics (like Pleiti), Moderns, and Speculatives. We think of all these people as relatively similar in class and circumstance, with a shared experience built from where they're forced live. Here we learn that the pioneers think of themselves as more prestigious, so there's absolutely a class distinction in play and they live very different lives to the majority on the platforms.

This serves two important purposes. One is to deepen the mystery, as we realise that the missing include not only descendants of these pioneers but also some of the porters and janitors working at the university. The other is to vary the sense of alienation that everyone feels. The people who live on the platforms don't seem to see it as their home, merely a temporary place to survive until they can figure out how to get back to Earth. They're ex-pats in a way, living around Jupiter but, in their minds, still seeing themselves as Earthlings. The descendants of the pioneers on Io have the least stable environment of anyone, but the older folk there feel more of a connection to where they live, which in turn alienates them from those on the platforms and also their children, as the younger you are on Io, the more likely you're going to want to move to the platforms.

What this means is that Older continues to shine at world-building. I am fascinated by her creation here and ache to find out how it develops further over future books. It's the best part of this book. I'm still engaged by the lead characters and feel invested in their success both as a romantic pair and as effective colleagues in investigation. Maybe both aspects of that will feel more substantial as Pleiti, who clearly loves Mossa, gets more comfortable about Mossa's feelings about her, as an anomaly even in her own society. I can see some readers having trouble with this romance, not for the reason that they're both female but for the reason that Mossa isn't remotely traditional as a romance character. She doesn't really understand what romance is. I appreciated that and it plays strongly into a deeper theme too, which leads to the title. Why do we make things harder?

The least aspect of the book is the mystery, which is well-investigated but rather open-ended in its resolution, which works well from the world-building aspect but not so much from the mystery side of things. Readers of mysteries tend to want them wrapped up tightly with a bow on top. This one is emphatically not, even if it's for very good reasons. I enjoyed it a great deal, but nowhere near as much as the first book. The reasons why make me wonder about what the third one will do. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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