The Mimicking of Known Successes Summary and Reviews

Media Reviews

"Older packs a punch in this slim volume, delivering a romantic sci-fi mystery replete with ruminations on environmentalism and the importance of adapting to change...Older keeps the tone largely upbeat throughout this charming Gaslamp romp, focusing more on characterization and the leads' rekindling love than on the dystopian worldbuilding until the heavy-hitting philosophical questions raised in the final pages. Combining an old-timey aesthetic and a powerful message, this sapphic genre-bender is a treat." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This quiet yet compelling whodunit will attract fans of Becky Chambers or Connie Willis." - Booklist (starred review)

"It's hard to pull off a novel that attempts to have equal footing in two genres—never mind three—and typically one of the genres ends up taking on a minor role...but The Mimicking of Known Successes, a work of speculative fiction, a traditional mystery, and a romance, is a walloping success." - First Clue (starred review)

"Recommended for readers who enjoy a bit of mystery mixed with their SF (like Mary Robinette Kowal's recent The Spare Man and Eddie Robson's Drunk on All Your Strange New Words) and anyone who cannot resist a Sherlock Holmes pastiche." - Library Journal

"Every once in a while, a book comes along that is both a comfort read and a rousing, fist-pumping adventure, and The Mimicking of Known Successes absolutely is both of those things. An utter triumph." - Charlie Jane Anders

"Older has created a wonderfully sci-fi take on the gaslamp mystery. Add in the wry depiction of academia and the warmly authentic portrayal of a relationship in the process of rekindling, and this is exactly my kind of story!" - Freya Marske

"A magnificently imaginative setting, a nicely developed and satisfyingly resolved mystery, a beautifully understated central romance, and a lot of thought-provoking ideas make this an immensely satisfying read [that] does more at novella length than many books manage in three times as much." - K. J. Charles

This information about The Mimicking of Known Successes was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Malka Older

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 Reviews, 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.

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