Tordotcom Publishing is thrilled to announce that Brent Lambert has acquired the novella The Mimicking of Known Successes—a science fiction gaspunk murder mystery pitched as A Master of Djinn meets The Tea Master and the Detective—by Malka Older, author of the Hugo-nominated Centenal Cycle.
On a remote, gas-wreathed outpost of a human colony on Jupiter, a man goes missing. The enigmatic Investigator Mossa follows his trail to Valdegeld, home to the colony’s erudite university—and Mossa’s former girlfriend and a scholar of Earth’s pre-collapse ecosystems. Pleiti has dedicated her research and her career to aiding the larger effort towards a possible return to Earth. When Mossa unexpectedly arrives and requests Pleiti’s assistance in her latest investigation, the two of them embark on a twisting path in which the future of life on Earth is at stake—and, perhaps, their futures, together.
Said author Malka Older:
“Living through the past
yeartwo yearsfive years, I’ve thought a lot about the power of comfort reading, and so I packed this book with elements that bring me joy: a slow-building romance; an atmospherically Holmesian mystery; a storied academic idyll (constructed from reclaimed satellites); long train rides across the bleak landscape of a giant gas planet, and tea in front of the fire on stormy nights. At the same time, I also found myself needing to write about ecosystem loss and communities in conflict between returning to what was normal in the past and forging a new future. It’s the banter-filled, yearning comfort read I needed in my life, and I’m so happy to send it out into the world.”
Said editor Brent Lambert:
“I knew Malka’s story was going to burrow its way into my heart from the very first page. The world is beautiful in its imagery and terrifying in its origins, but what I really stuck around to watch unfold was the beautiful, hard fought-for relationship at the core of this story. Readers are going to really love this one!”
Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and The Washington Post. She is the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Realm, and her short story collection And Other Disasters came out in November 2019. She is a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and teaches in the genre fiction MFA at Western Colorado University. Her opinions can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, and Foreign Policy, among others.
The Mimicking of Known Successes will arrive from Tordotcom Publishing in 2023.
