Don’t ask me how it’s been four years since I read and reviewed The Relentless Moon, the third full-length novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series. Stuff’s been going on, I guess. But I finally happened to check at my local public library when the first book chronologically in the saga (if not the first published) was on the shelf; I checked it out, read it, and it left me feeling good all over.
A little background is in order. Kowal introduced Elma York in the 2012 novelette The Lady Astronaut of Mars. It was intended to be a one-off about an alternate timeline in which women joined the Earth’s astronaut corps in a race to establish space colonies following a planetary disaster in the early 1950s. The women mostly had been auxiliary pilots during WWII, and all of them at first were drawn from the ranks of the U.S. space agency’s “computers,” mathematics geniuses who did the calculations for things like trajectories, orbital velocities and lunar insertions before electronic computers were fast or reliable enough to do it. (This part really happened — see Margot Lee Shetterly’s 2012 nonfiction book Hidden Figures or the movie of the same name, also from 2016.)
Kowal realized she didn’t want to let Elma York go, or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, she filled in the backstory with The Calculating Stars, published in 2018. And as they say, the rest is (ongoing) history, with the latest entry The Martian Contingency published just weeks before I write this in early 2025.
Like The Relentless Moon, which is about another of the women computer/astronauts Nicole Wargin, The Calculating Stars is written in first person, but this one’s through the eyes of the Lady Astronaut herself (and we eventually find out how she gets that moniker). When we meet her, Elma York (née Wexler) and her husband Nathaniel are horny young married professionals on vacation in a secluded cabin in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. Both work for the space agency NACA, she as a computer, he (a Manhattan Project veteran) as chief engineer.
In this timeline, Dewey did defeat Truman in 1948, and launched the American space program almost immediately. By the time this book opens in early March 1952, the U.S. has already put men into orbit and is planning a space station, and Moon and Mars colonies. But everything changes when a chunk of asteroid splashes down off the Eastern Seaboard, wiping out Washington, D.C., and killing hundreds of thousands if not millions in the U.S. and around the world.
Alma and Nathaniel survive the blast and she is able to get them to a safe airport, in a harrowing flight in her Cessna. When they start to learn the extent of the disaster, Alma correctly calculates that the ejecta from the meteorite will cause a brief period of global cooling, and then a permanent global warming that will end most life on Earth, including humans.
That message eventually gets through to the rump government in Kansas City, and the space program is pushed into high gear, in order to establish colonies in space and save at least a few humans. The Calculating Stars is the story of the years leading up to the first moon landing, and of the role that the women pilots and computers play. Elma York is an appealing character, whip-smart but often lacking in self-confidence. She’s terrified by the increasingly public role she plays in the space program. As she becomes its public face, she faces opposition from a veteran astronaut as well as from at least one of the other women in the computing ranks, in addition to her own physical and psychological limitations.
Kowal handles the story masterfully, with just enough scientific jargon and facts to keep it feeling authentic but not enough to bog it down; her dialogue is solid and contributes to the believable characters; and especially she conveys the inner reality of a woman of the pre-feminist 1950s and ’60s who believes in her own capabilities and chafes against society’s restrictions, but often doesn’t even recognize many of the sexist assumptions she unwittingly accepts. She even handles a few mild sex scenes with grace and aplomb.
The Calculating Stars and the entire Lady Astronaut series is a fun and important entry into the realm of speculative fiction for its gender perspectives, solid science and engaging storytelling. Highly recommended.
(Tor, 2018)
