Our favorite Jupiter-based sapphic investigators are back with The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. Malka Older drops another murder mystery into the laps of Mossa and Pleiti, this time involving the moon Io, ancient class hierarchies, and a fracturing future. Seventeen students and staff at Valdegeld University, where Pleiti researches Classical literature, have vanished. Mossa is hired to investigate, and she pulls her lover in to help. Once again, the problems of the past have trickled down to their present (our future). Our heroes traverse Jupiter and the outer limits of human civilization in search of answers. What they find out there is a secret big enough to kill for.
At first, I found the story a bit slow. Mossa is at the heart of the mystery, actively investigating big secrets and chasing down far-flung tips. I wanted to be off with Mossa, not staying home with Pleiti. But then not only did Pleiti get dragged into Mossa’s hunt for the truth but I also began to appreciate how her own adventures, while less active, were still exciting. It didn’t hurt that she also had to escape a murder attempt.
The title, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, doesn’t just refer to the mystery but also to Pleiti’s relationship with Mossa. Throughout the whole story, she is constantly second-guessing what she is to Mossa, and second-guessing her second-guessing. Everything Mossa says, Pleiti interprets and reinterprets it so much that she tangles her emotions up to the point where she misses the heart of what Mossa actually means. She keeps creating internal obstacles that lead to external confusions. Pleiti has something very good with Mossa that could become great one day if she could just get out of her own way.
The act of reading this book is, in and of itself, a joy. There are Easter eggs for other works of media (including Older’s own Centenal Cycle). And the way Older drops in words from other languages is brilliant. It demonstrates the diversity of this future—one where a majority of people are BIPOC, to the point where that designation no longer matters. This future is not beholden to the rules, castes, and social hierarchies of the Classical, Earth-bound world, and in fact intentionally chose to leave many of our old problems and problematic solutions behind. Queerness is also not a thing in this world, although that doesn’t mean anti-queer rhetoric doesn’t exist. There are those who see pairings like Mossa and Pleiti as an obstacle to population growth, a tactic we hear in our own time. Fortunately, the two women don’t waste time humoring bigots or trying to defend their right to exist. They have bigger fish to fry.
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The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
Expanding the available vocabulary also allows Older the opportunity to really play with language in a fun, creative way. One of the things I love about English is how much of a Frankenstein language it is. It’s built out of so many parts of other languages, to an extent I think most English-as-a-first-language speakers don’t even realize. When we need a new word for something, we often borrow it from another language, Anglicize it with our regional accents, and then act like was ours to begin with. One of my favorite examples of this is the avocado. Americans heard the Spanish pronunciation of the original Nahuatl word “ahuacatl” like “abogado”, then mispronounced it like “avogado.” This sounded a lot like “alligator,” so we attached “pear” to it to reference the shape and it became “alligator pear”; eventually we settled on the simpler “avocado.”
In Imposition we get Mossa referring to Pleiti as her copine (French for girlfriend), Pleiti has an “unsatisfying grignoter” (French for snack), a respected professor is described as an erai dueña (combining the Japanese term for great or superior and the Spanish term for a female patron or proprietor), and so on. I loved looking up every term I didn’t know, like I was prepping for the SATs or something. Older’s textual style gives the story a vibrant, exciting feel. It’s as compelling as our two charming protagonists themselves.
Malka Older’s The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is like a warm cup of tea. It’s like sitting in a patch of sunshine after a week of rain. It’s a picnic at the park in the summer and a stroll through fallen leaves in the fall. I recommend this series to literally everyone, but especially readers looking for cozy sci-fi, cozy mysteries, or Johnlock vibes.
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is published by Tordotcom Publishing.
