CBR11 Bingo: Award Winner
I read almost no alternate history – but I absolutely love the thought experiments.
I read this book for two reasons: I don’t think I read enough award winners, and I know I don’t read enough books written by women.
Most of my reading is for pleasure. I’m not necessarily trying to challenge myself, or expand my horizons. I’ve tried reading books held in high esteem by people much smarter than I, and I even tried reading more literature a couple years ago. But I don’t necessarily think is the way it should be. I probably should branch out and read books that are more challenging. The only problem is figuring out what constitutes a more challenging read. Who decides it? The quickest barometer, I think, is to look at the kinds of books that win awards. It’s not a perfect measurement, of course, but it’s better than nothing.
Mary Robinette Kowal has been writing for twenty years, and has been nominated (and won) numerous awards throughout her career. The Calculating Stars is the first book in her Lady Astronaut series, and it won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards in 2019 for best novel. So the pedigree here is pretty indisputable. Kowal is a respected author, and this book (in particular) is widely appreciated and celebrated.
In 2012, Kowal published a story called The Lady Astronaut of Mars. It was nominated for Best Novelette, but was disqualified because it was originally written to be published as an audiobook. It failed to get the required votes for the Best Dramatization category, but eventually won the Best Novelette in 2014, after it was reworked into a short story and published on Kowal’s website. With that confusing backstory, Kowal published The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky as prequel novels to this original story.
The series is an alternate history science fiction series that sets its deviation point in 1952 with a meteorite strike in the Chesapeake Bay. The devastation is so great that it fundamentally alters the earth’s climate, and spurs global warming at a rapidly accelerated rate. Mathematician and former WWII WASP pilot Elma York is at the center of this discovery and, along with her husband (a chief engineer with the International Aerospace Coalition). Her prediction gives everyone 50 years to implement a planned colonization of space before conditions become too bad on Earth. She, along with a number of other female pilots, strive to join the space program, with the goal of eventually building a colony on Mars.
For all it’s deviation from our timeline, however, this book is still set in the 1950s. So, obviously, these women have a huge uphill battle to face.
Overall, I think the hype was well earned, and wasn’t disappointed in what I found here. The only thing that I had even a slight negative response to were the love scenes between Elma and her husband. There were a lot of puns about rockets. I mean – a lot of puns. So many puns.
But I found the story engaging and the resistance (against both female astronauts and climate change) to be authentic and relevant.
This didn’t really feel like “literature” to me, though. And I’m not really even sure what that means. It just kind of felt like a book that wasn’t really in my wheelhouse, but ended up being really enjoyable.