This is a slim volume at only a hundred and sixty or so pages. It's likely to be a novella rather than a novel. However, I found it to be a gift that kept on giving, because it grew wonderfully over that space to be a real gem. Once I realised exactly what Malka Older was creating here, it boggled my mind that she made it work.

Initially, this is pure science fiction. Mankind was forced, long ago, to leave our planet because we messed it up beyond our ability to keep it viable for human life. In the future, when we're set, we live on platforms built around the planet Jupiter, which we simply call Giant. Our narrator, once we get past the prologue, is a classics scholar at the university in Valdegeld, who studies pre-collapse Earth ecosystems with the goal of figuring out how to make the Earth habitable once more. That's high concept science fiction.

Except it's a mystery from the very prologue and it gradually becomes a very Victorian mystery, in which that classics scholar, Pleiti, assists Investigator Mossa in her search for the truth that lurks behind an apparent murder. A university professor, Bolien Trewl, took a journey to the last stop on a particular rail and apparently either leapt to his death in the surface of Giant or was helped on his way by hands unknown. Nothing about the case makes sense and it will take someone with the insight and tenacity of Mossa to figure it out.

Mossa is clearly cut from Sherlockian cloth, as much an anomaly on the platforms around Giant as Holmes himself was an anomaly in the streets of Victorian London. She's excessively polite, almost clipped with Pleiti, who was a former girlfriend when they were students together. It's not difficult to imagine that Mossa is much older than Pleiti, because of her manner, but the evidence suggests that they're of similar age. She's very precise, whether in grammar, in demeanour or in her work. She could easily be seen as a character apart, which I'm sure was deliberately done, but she's also an endearing character. I cared more for Mossa by the end of the book than Pleiti, who's entirely likeable.

Even though we never forget that the story is taking place on platforms surrounding Jupiter, that location is surprisingly Victorian too. There are no roads, only railway lines, even if the trains used are personal and free. People read broadsheet newspapers not holographic tablets. The settings are libraries and museums. It's very much Victorian England in space, merely with far more in the way of real estate, so nothing has to be crammed together. There's even a zoo, the Koffre Institute for Earth Species Preservation, though it's colloquially known as the Mauzooleum. It's home to all the species we've managed to either save or recreate from DNA, 'Jurassic Park' style.

And, for a Victorian mystery set on a high concept science fiction space world, it ends up amazingly topical. I won't spoil the ending, or even the middle, because this is a peach of a book that I highly recommend you devour before the second volume in the series is released, tentatively titled 'The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles'. Just to keep us on the hop, the topicality isn't around any of the things we might expect, especially the environment given the setting. Instead, it manages to find a way to address our polarised society where extreme measures are taken in frustration by a whackjob community that ditches rationality.

And yes, that means that this is a very contemporary novella phrased as a mystery from the past but set in a vision of the future. That's a heck of an ambitious approach for a book that's merely a hundred and sixty pages long, but Older absolutely nails it. It never feels rushed and everything is content to move along at the speed it's meant to move along, just as precise as Mossa's methods, but it gets everywhere it needs to go at exactly the point it needs to go there. It feels effortless, a novella she just tossed off in an afternoon, but I'd bet she planned this down to exquisite detail. If she did, then that hard work pays off.

If there's a flaw, and I'm not going to say there is but others might disagree with me, it's how hard the author hits us with unusual terminology from the outset. I don't mean an invented language, like Anthony Burgess's 'A Clockwork Orange'. I mean real, valid words used in an appropriate way, that we merely haven't ever seen before. The first page proper, prologue done and out of the way, includes "ráfagas of wind", "sans abris" and a "lenten approach". Ráfagas are gusts, taken, as lots of words here are, from the Spanish, and "sans abris" are homeless people, from the French, but I have little idea about that "lenten approach". Maybe it means "moderate". Maybe it doesn't.

Older doesn't stop with the vocabulary on that first page. One more and she gives us "andén", the Spanish word for "platform", perhaps just to avoid using "platform" over and over or perhaps for a more specific meaning of a stepped terrace. Two more and she introduces a "qibla astrolabe", a double whammy. An "astrolabe" is a scientific instrument used for measuring time, among other observations, but "qibla" is the direction a Muslim faces to pray towards Mecca. And four further pages in, she hits us with "comemierdería", another Spanish word, this time with seven syllables and as many meanings.

To be fair, she lets up somewhat after that and I have no problem with seeing words that I've never seen before. I like looking things up and learning and they never threw me out of the story, maybe in part because all the above showed up before the story had got established. However, some may find this a little daunting, especially those who don't like Victorian literature. I should underline a phrase there—a little—because this still felt highly accessible to me, unlike, say, Ada Palmer's 'Too Like the Lightning', which is fascinating and immersive but linguistically unapproachable to many.

I am eager for more Mossa and Pleiti and I'm immensely happy to see that Malka Older plans for this to begin a series. I will be keeping my eyes open for the release of book two. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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