The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

Pleiti and Mossa are back. Hooray! I had The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses on pre-order and read it immediately it arrived. Didn’t you?

As we are now three books into the series, it is worth taking a step back and looking at the world that Malka Older is constructing.

For the benefit of those of you who have not read the books, they are mysteries set in universities that are in human colonies in the skies of Jupiter. Earth has become uninhabitable and, after a period of desperate survival in space stations, humanity has started to build a new life for itself. The main characters are loosely based on Holmes and Watson, with the main viewpoint character being Pleiti, an academic who tries to study life on Earth through the medium of novels written by people who lived there. Her on-off girlfriend, Mossa, is a professional if somewhat unorthodox detective.

A major theme of the books is the conflict between Classicists such as Pleiti (people who study Earth) and Modernists (people who study Jupiter). This book brings that conflict much more into focus as Pleiti is recruited to help a Modernist scientist at another university whose career is being threated by a jealous rival. That the rivalry is often silly is made very clear.

Of course the overriding theme of the books is the awfulness of so much of academic life. Older clearly has an axe to grind, but from my limited experience it is one that desperately needs use. Politics in academia can be even worse than in fandom.

Meanwhile Older is working on building up a vision of the new world she has created. Novellas don’t give you much space for worldbuilding, but over the course of a series more can be done. One of the things Older does very effectively is note a shift in language. She uses new words such as ‘graduents’ (graduate students) and ‘dafuq’ (a swear word). There’s just enough of it to show the reader that we are not in Kansas without the text becoming hard to decipher.

The plot of the new book is also tied in to the worldbuilding. On Jupiter (Giant, as it is called in the books) humanity lives on artificial platforms that float in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. Each platform is covered by an atmoshield which keeps the breathable air in. However, the air quality is not good, and when outside everyone wears an atmoscarf to provide further filtering. Vilette, the scientist to whose aid Pleiti comes, has invented a miniaturized version of this technology that is a threat to the existing atmoscarf industry.

A common theme of the books is the difficult relationship between Pleiti and Mossa. It seems that Mossa is highly neurodivergent and mostly incapable of rationally understanding her feelings for Pleiti. In the new book this spills over into fully-fledged depression. It is an interesting setup, but one that I think could become dull if it is repeated in every book, which I fear it might be because of the straightjacket requirements of the romance genre.

Finally we are seeing the beginnings of an overarching story arc. Academic rivalry notwithstanding, the key issue facing Giant society is whether to devote their efforts to the eventual re-colonisation of Earth (the Classicist position) or to make the best of their new world and forget the old. Pleiti, as a Classicist, has obviously devoted her career to the former position, but she is beginning to fear that she might be wrong. I look forward to seeing how that develops.

Which is another way of saying, “more please!”

Title: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses
By: Malka Older
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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