Book completed

[eve_prime]

The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older. Mossa & Pleiti #1. I learned about this book when someone online asked about science fiction romances, and although in some ways I liked the book very much (the characters, the story, the unusual setting), I also found myself having major “suspension of disbelief” problems that kept distracting me. Two women who’d been in a romantic relationship in college find themselves working together to solve the mystery of a man who has disappeared. Their ancestors escaped from Earth after its ecosystem was destroyed, and they now live on platforms in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. One of them is a professional investigator; the other is a Classics scholar – where Classics no longer means Greece and Rome, or ancient China or India or such, but rather, life on Earth. In other words, she studies Earth’s ecosystems.

Now, I have no problem suspending disbelief when it comes to “faster than light speed” or “magic is real.” But how could humans live on platforms in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, platforms that aren’t enclosed in ways to protect them from the various swirling gases of the planet and to keep their supply of breathable air with them? They think this missing man may have stepped off the platform and gone hurtling down toward the planet, which would of course kill him, but why doesn’t their air supply likewise escape? When we’re more than halfway through the story, we learn that there are “atmoshields” that used to enclose the spaces, but the technology advanced so that the atmoshields are now permeable, so that the gases can come whirling through them (and people can step off platforms) – but the oxygen stays where it belongs? Eventually I had to decide to assume that the humans had somehow been engineered to live in such wild conditions, but then later I learned there were pigeons all over one of the places, and surely pigeons hadn’t also been engineered like that. Maybe I’m not the intended reader of the book… but giving us a narrator whose professional focus is ecosystem stability, so that we’re set up to think about such issues, makes it pretty hard to accept that this particular ecosystem works just fine.

Comments

[heleninwales]

I don't think I could suspend my disbelief sufficiently to be able to read that story. The atmosphere staying put for no real reason would put me off. Also why weren't there guard rails to stop people falling off the edge. And if the missing man fell to his death, what is keeping these platforms up? Perhaps they're in a stable orbit around the planet? If so, assuming the man went over the edge and thus out of the breathable atmosphere, that would kill him, but he would also stay in orbit and the body could be spotted. No, far too many holes in the science.

[eve_prime]

Yes, the platforms are in a stable orbit. That's a good point that the body should also stay in orbit, hm. We kept being reminded that the planet's actual winds were touching the humans (they wore "atmoscarves" to stay warm and protect themselves to some degree), and knowing that Jupiter's atmosphere is almost entirely hydrogen, helium, and poisonous gases but certainly not oxygen was very distracting.

Since you're not going to read the story, I'll mention that it turned out the railway line was a two-sided line, such that today's cars ran on a single rail on the top but in some previous generation they'd run on a single rail on the bottom... and this guy had hidden a car down there and dropped down to it. It seemed strange that this would be local knowledge that most people had forgotten.