Not In Sight

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles (The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti, volume 2)

By Malka Older

13 Sep, 2024

**Doing the WFC's Homework**

12 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 13 Sep, 2024

**Doing the WFC's Homework**

12 comments

2024’s The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is the second volume in Malka Older’s The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti.

From time to time on humanity’s new home, Giant (a renamed Jupiter), people vanish. Third year Valdegeld¹ University student Strevan is one of them.

Investigator Mossa is on the case… but it is not the case Mossa expects.

The involvement of Valdegeld University is a welcome aspect of the case, as it facilitates the ongoing romance between Mossa and Valdegeld University classical scholar Pleiti. In addition to the usual reasons people might welcome romantic distraction, Pleiti is still processing the fallout from the couple’s previous case.

Mossa is the first person to look at the university’s missing persons statistics as a whole, rather than on a case-by-case basis. Mossa is therefore the person who discovers the issue may not be a missing person. It may well be missing people. The records suggest seventeen people have vanished. Strevan is the first one whose absence has attracted comment.

An innocent explanation is found for one of the seventeen (not Strevan). Perhaps the same will be true of the remaining sixteen? Perhaps the remaining sixteen are unconnected, save for the statistical fluke of timing? Or perhaps there is a grand unified cause for the sixteen unexplained absences…

Mossa and Pleiti travel to Io, infamous colony of dead Earth’s loathsome rich, to search for clues in Strevan’s upbringing on Io. Mossa stays behind on Io to finish her inquiries, while Pleiti returns to her academic duties at Valdegeld. On her return she makes a horrifying discovery. Strevan is no longer missing, He’s dead. Murdered.

Mossa and Pleiti share the results of their separate investigations and Mossa believes she has discovered a bold utopian conspiracy. The two undertake a long rail journey to confirm Mossa’s theory.

But the answer to “who killed Stevan?” lies back in Valdegeld.

~oOo~

The world-building in this book really bothered me. I couldn’t believe in the planet-girdling rail lines² or the semi-successful terraforming of the moon. How could this have been done by humans who found Earth beyond their ability to salvage?

Given the frequency with which I encounter recent SF novels with absurd world-building, this kind of thing apparently doesn’t bother anyone else anywhere near as much as it bothers me. For me, it’s fingernails on blackboard. I managed to finish reading this book by remembering how I powered through Ringworld (preposterous, inherently unstable). If I did that, I can deal with rings around Jupiter, hovering in the gaseous atmosphere.

OK, but what about all the other cool details, you ask? The elements mentioned above are distracting enough for me that it’s hard to notice other aspects. But my editor liked the quirky language and cuisine.

Older presents a scathing view of academia³, at least as practiced at Valdegeld University. Also, Pleiti is beginning to have mixed feelings about her job. Future Mossa-Pleiti tales may expand on this theme.

The ongoing romance between Mossa and Pleiti is a tribute to the human ability to get past awkward inarticulateness given sincere good will and sufficient mutual attraction. The human race has no doubt benefited greatly from that ability.

The mystery (or mysteries as it turned out) was (or were) quite satisfactory, an asset in what is, after all, a mystery series.

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: I keep misreading Valdegeld as Vaingeld. I blame Danegeld. In my defense, a name suggesting the university pays protection money to arrogant people rather than deal with them effectively would be very on-brand for Valdegeld.

2: The ring and platform system was built within Jupiter’s atmosphere. I’d say “on Jupiter” but that may not the right term for what the author describes as “a permeable planet.”

3: Are universities corrupt, status-obsessed establishments or is this an issue specific to Valdegeld? As it happens, this is a detail I could verify for myself, working as I do at a university in a city with several universities and a number of minor but credentialed (inexplicably in some cases) colleges. When asked if universities are corrupt, status-obsessed establishments, three academics angrily denied it, one informed me through several intermediaries that they do not talk to casuals and demanded that I did not sully their divine person with my mortal gaze, and the last one shouted in alarm, filled a valise with bearer-bonds and fled to Ecuador. I will take those responses as “no.”

Comments

Mark Pontin

"Given the frequency with which I encounter recent SF novels with absurd world-building, this kind of thing apparently doesn’t bother anyone else anywhere near as much as it bothers me. For me, it’s fingernails on blackboard." . When it's written by complete scientific illiterates, it's simply not science fiction, is it? Just contemptibly stupid.

Besides the issue of a gas giant's "permeability," Jupiter's gravity is about 24.79 m/s², which is roughly 2.53 times Earth’s gravity, 9.81 m/s²12. In other words, if you weighed 100 kg on Earth, you'd weigh approximately 253 kg "on" Jupiter. So then HOW and, most of all, WHY would human beings attempt anything so difficult as building rings in Jupiter's upper layers?

James NicollMark Pontin

This passage caught my eye:

"Cling-rail derived from the early days of the settlement, when the rings encircling the planet, set on geosynchronous spins through carefully managed feats of engineering, were the only thing keeping the human population on Giant alive. They still were, come to think of it (...)"

If it's an orbital structure, then a lot of the issues I have with it go away (although "where's the 2.5 g?" gets replaced by "Wouldn't they be in free fall?" But other details suggest the rails are in the atmosphere.

Chakay FirepawJames Nicoll

I would think that the idea is something like an 'inside-out' ringworld: They're spun up to 1.5 g and people live on the outside so that the overall effect is 1 g, (2.5 g down from Jupiter, 1.5 g up from the ring).

Wiredog

Fled to Ecuador? Why, when Costa Rica is much nicer?

MikePWiredog

Their PhD from 1949 ensured they spent their life obsessing over Ecuador so it was very, very important that's where they went.

Robin Webber

It's the absence of telephones that keeps snapping my suspenders of disbelief. There's no explanation why their aren't communication cables attached to the rail rings, and worse no explanation why there is no telephone between a scholar's rooms and the porter's. Or within an area of habitation.

Kept feeling like Victorian Era in Space, with no concern for consistency in the setting's details. Fine for some, but it makes ne itch and I am done with this writer.

Robert CarnegieRobin Webber

Maybe humans didn't create this structure, aliens or godlike AI did, and whichever it is isn't willing to give humans other stuff such as got us into trouble last time.

If it's the AI one, maybe the humans also don't use telephone or, I'm assuming, television, because the AI will use those to create deepfake messages for whimsical reasons of its own. So no telephone message can be trusted. Of course, that also would go for telegrams.

Stewart

With regards to Ringworld, a non-rotating Ringworld is obviously (once it has been pointed out) unstable; once the slightest asymmetry of position occurs there's a net force moving the centre of the Ringworld away from the star which increases monotonically until part of the Ringworld melts within the star. Since I haven't seen it proposed as a resolution, I infer that a Ringworld spinning at high speed (scrith is unreasonably strong) doesn't change the final result, but does anyone know offhand what happens with a spinning Ringworld?

David GoldfarbStewart

A spinning ring is no different from a stationary one for this purpose.

Alan BragginsDavid Goldfarb

Niven said he wrote The Ringworld Engineers in part to address fans who had pointed this out. (As a retroactive fix, not as a reveal of an always intended sequel plot hook.)

Pam Adams

I'm willing, with stories like this, to accept the scientific implausibility, as story background and move on, just as I'm willing to accept wormholes allowing faster-than-light travel or dragons. As long as the story obeys its internal rules, I'm good.

I rather agree on the plausibility of the university system as well.

Jeffronicus

I am reminded of the passage in Dead Silence (2022) where the main characters follow a signal to the coordinates where they expect to find the hulk of a luxury cruise liner that disappeared in the outer solar system and the crack crew can't find it until someone thinks to shine some lights "up" instead of forward and, oh, there it is, covered in reflective ice crystals.