When I finished The Mimicking of Known Successes a couple weeks ago I knew I wasn’t in love with that book, but that I wanted to continue reading the series to see how Malka Older built out her world and dug into her sapphic Watson & Holmes stand-ins because I had become quite attached to Mossa and Pleiti. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles begins the same way as its predecessor in that we get a prologue from Mossa’s point of view and then the rest of the story from Pleiti’s. It also involves Mossa looping Pleiti into her current investigation both because she wants to spend more time with her (we are given enough information to know that these two have rekindled their relationship, but it is still quite tentative as they each feel each other, and this new status quo of dating, out), and that it involves people associated with Valdegeld University.
Mossa’s POV introduces us to the notion that missing persons are perhaps the most common thing that Investigators look into, and it is an unnaturally high number of missing persons from Valdegeld that keeps Mossa’s attention and alarms Pleiti. Pleiti has new work situations to deal with after the fallout from the first book, and we watch as she is beginning to really reckon with how she feels about her Classical studies following all that she has learned and been asked to reconsider. The book also opens us up to new portions of the University, as many of the missing people are from the Speculative department, which I don’t remember encountering much of before.
Like with the first in the series, I don’t love how Pleiti views herself in Mossa’s affections. There are several places in the story where Mossa is clearly (to the reader, through Pleiti’s own recounting of events) making long term romantic overtures that Pleiti mentally undercuts at every turn. Perhaps Older will delve into this in future installments – what happened before to make Pleiti so nervous to trust – but for now, it sours my reading experience. I do love the expansion of the world, of the nods to current pop culture that Classics studies allow (Murderbot namedrop!), how truly multi-cultural the society of the platforms are, and the creature comforts that have made their way forward in time. I also found the reason for the disappearance of so many people to poke effectively at a larger human truth – that so many would choose to live a harder life simply to prove to themselves that they could, without delving into the why of their own psyche. I enjoyed this installment more but can’t quite seem to round up to 4 stars. But maybe I will later.
Bingo Square: Diaspora. This book, like its predecessor, is set within a diasporic community, and it expands on how the population, which generations ago fled an ecologically failed Earth, are scattered across regions (platforms on Giant, Io) which are separate from their geographic place of origin.
