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A review by chestnut_pod
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
4.0
This has a great first sentence: “The man had disappeared from an isolated platform; the furthest platform eastward, in fact, on the 4°63' line, never a very popular ring.”
I like all the material culture: the recognizable but alien description of the “train station and station pub” equivalents, the clothes, the food. The prose is simple, doing the slightest bit of offbeat classic sci-fi pastiche with a quiet competence that makes me appreciate it all the more. There’s some fun inclusion of non-English languages that don’t seem forced, but rather like quite natural loanwords or calques that would crop up in the far future on a planet populated by the remnants of all Earth. Plot-relevant catnip. The characters were lightly sketched, but fun, familiar types. It’s a little bleak, both because the premise of Earthly destruction and the eventual end of the mystery plot hit rather close to home, but it’s also a little cozy and a little funny and a lovely way to spend an evening.
I like all the material culture: the recognizable but alien description of the “train station and station pub” equivalents, the clothes, the food. The prose is simple, doing the slightest bit of offbeat classic sci-fi pastiche with a quiet competence that makes me appreciate it all the more. There’s some fun inclusion of non-English languages that don’t seem forced, but rather like quite natural loanwords or calques that would crop up in the far future on a planet populated by the remnants of all Earth. Plot-relevant catnip. The characters were lightly sketched, but fun, familiar types. It’s a little bleak, both because the premise of Earthly destruction and the eventual end of the mystery plot hit rather close to home, but it’s also a little cozy and a little funny and a lovely way to spend an evening.