Malka Older, activist, scholar, teacher, international humanitarian worker and author of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses is one of my culture heroes for her ability to combine multiple activities, any one of which would constitute a demanding career for less gifted people. This is the third installment in her Mossa and Pleiti mystery series (the others are The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles), and I was so glad to find out that a fourth and fifth are planned. I prefer to describe these books as comforting, as the author does, rather than c_zy, that annoying term that has become such a marketing favorite recently. But that’s not why I read them. Each one is a well-crafted mystery set against an amazing background of human settlement of Jupiter and perfectly entwined with a complicated relationship of the two major characters.
Each novel reveals a bit more of the strange life of humans dwelling in cities built on platforms atop geosynchronous rings around a gas giant. However improbable it seems, people have adapted well after a couple of centuries to living under atmoshields that provide basically breathable air, though everyone needs a further dose of oxygen through their personal atmoscarves. Pleiti is a professor of Classical studies (the effort to rediscover details of life on a scorched Earth in hopes of one day resettling that planet) while Mossa is an Investigator who looks into cases of missing people and criminal activity. Pleiti lives in her comfortable suite of rooms at the Valdegeld university where she sometimes has to deal with peers in the Modern faculty (devoted to studying conditions on Giant, the name Older has given to Jupiter, and its moons). Mossa and Pleiti were lovers in college, later grew apart, but gradually came back together in the context of Mossa’s investigations in the first two books of the series.
So it is a shock to find Mossa in the Prologue to The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses lurking outside Pleiti’s rooms but unable to bring herself to knock on the door. That scene is followed in Chapter One by Pleiti wondering if Mossa’s declining all her invitations was beginning to add up to a problem. When she hears a knock on the door she opens, expecting Mossa, only to find someone she cannot quite place – Petanj, an old school mate who wants Pleiti to come to a distant university where her cousin, Villette, is up for a donship but has been getting serious threats. When Pleiti goes to Mossa’s apartment to seek her help, she is stunned by her lover’s refusal to even hear about the case or to have anything to do with her. So it is up to Pleiti to take on the role of investigator, though she feels not at all up to the job. She joins Petanj on a days’ long train ride to Stortellen and its university where Villette has been doing her research on the artificial atmosphere. During that journey, she realizes that Mossa must be suffering a severe bout of depression and berates herself for not trying harder to help her friend. For much of her trip and investigation, Pleiti will beat up on herself and have to fight off the yearning to return to Mossa’s side.
But Pleiti continues and is thrust immediately on arriving in Stortellen into a dinner party with a large group of Villette’s friends. Here we meet many of the possible suspects, each a well drawn character. Villette herself is a completely likable person so completely immersed in her research and optimistic about the world that she cannot imagine why anyone she knows would harbor deep animosity. Her research on atmospherics has led to her invention of a nose filter that makes atmoscarves unnecessary, and she wants to give away this new technology for the public good. Naively, she cannot imagine why anyone would object, yet there are many possibilities. The University could lose by not being able to profit from the license, the firms that sell atmoscarves could go out of business, and several colleagues could easily envy her expected early promotion to a donship. To Villette’s consternation, the threats keep coming and escalate from written forms to physical attacks.
At one point Pleiti, feeling a bit lost in the investigation without Mossa, reviews all the ungovernable impulses colliding in this story. In addition to the growing danger of the violent emotions of the perpetrator of threats, there is Mossa’s melancholy and her own yearning to get back to her friend. But there are still more – the jealousy of one of Villette’s friends who is convinced Pleiti must be her lover, the vitriol of Villette’s former tutor, the University Dean’s vicious put downs of Villette and Pleiti, the envy of a research collaborator. It’s an explosive mix that makes almost everyone a suspect and even leads the mild-mannered Pleiti into a violent outburst of her own.
One of the things I like about Older’s writing in this series is her use of words from different languages that pepper her style. I understood some from familiarity with the vocabulary, some from context and several that I had to look up, not always with success. There are also phrases compressed into single words, like atmoshield and gradudent. The style works and makes sense for a people displaced from Earth and intermixed in new ways, obliterating old nation-state boundaries. They would be expected to create a new eclectic language. In all likelihood, after a couple of centuries, a new language would go beyond a few words and become something quite different from today’s English. But Older’s style gives a hint of the changes that would probably occur without burdening us with a less easily comprehensible dialect.
The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, and the series as a whole, has just about everything I look for in a novel. The writing pulls me in as it weaves together a good mystery, interesting scifi elements about life around a gas giant, good characters and the ongoing complications of the relationship between Mossa and Pleiti. It’s a wonderful diversion from the true doomscrolling of the day’s latest intolerable news but one that keeps you in touch with the realities of human emotion.
My thanks to Netgalley and Tor Publishing for an advance review copy of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses for this review, which reflects solely my own opinions.
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