Super sci-fi
I thought the “Lady Astronaut” series of science fiction books would be more of a curiosity than an exciting read. Boy, was I wrong.
The series, four books so far, is by Mary Robinette Kowal, whose other works I know nothing about.
The four, in proper order (and you do miss a little if you don’t read them in order) are: The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky, The Relentless Moon, The Martian Contingency.
The stories are set in a fictional future based on a fictional past — an “alternate history,” if you will. In 1952, a meteor strikes Chesapeake Bay, wiping out much of the Eastern Seaboard and setting the world on a collision course with a rough stretch of global winter followed by an intense global warming that cannot be survived.
Out of the devastation arises a somewhat changed worldwide order (the capital of the U.S. is now Kansas City) and shaky international cooperation on a space program designed to get people off the planet before it becomes uninhabitable.
The chief characters in the series are men and women of the space corps who travel first to the moon and then to Mars in search of a new home for humanity. The central character is Elma York, an experienced pilot and mathematician who overcomes much antagonism to become the original “Lady Astronaut,” the first woman in space.
Sexism and racism are among the several contentious issues the books explore in their re-imagining of history. Elma and her husband are Jewish. Two of their closest friends are Black. One white astronaut from South Africa is a racist jerk. Even in an alternate reality, some things don’t change much.
One of the delights of the books is the way the author re-imagines things. Electronics are in their infancy. Computers are stuck in the punch-card stage. The real “computers” here are female math whizzes (think Bletchley Park) who do complex calculations in a fraction of the time needed by mechanical devices.
Trying to sabotage the space program are “EarthFirsters.” These people think all resources should be devoted to saving people on the dying planet. Though their tactics are despicable, they drive home a point the books never dance around: There will never be enough rockets to get all the people of Earth off the planet before it dies. Decisions will have to be made about who lives and who dies.
Maybe future books in the series will face that issue squarely.
Author Mary Robinette Kowal expertly mixes real issues with real personal drama. Just when you think the space program and the lives of those in it are running smoothly, along comes another set of impossible complications. These books are a fun read. They’re long – all nearly 400 pages or more – but they read as fast as books half that length.