Perhaps there’s a discipline, or trans-discipline, of flexibility and reactiveness, or a calculation of the principles involved in ecosystem survival rather than the litera­l mimicking of known successes.”

Imagine a humanity exiled from the Earth they once called home, confined to live in a captivity of their own making, in shielded platforms set along a network of orbital rings crisscrossing the storm-streaked surface of Giant, their name for cloudy Jupiter. Imagine a humanity racked with the “epigenetic ache” to return to a world they evolved to live on but have never known, a world irrevocably ravaged by the greed and sins of their ancestors. This is the setting of Malka Older’s breathtaking science fiction novella, The Mimicking of Known Successes, a genre-hybrid about navigating the incommensurability of vanished pasts and precarious presents.