Title: The Lady Astronaut of Mars
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Tor Books
Format: Paperback
ISBN: B07QKTNM2P

Summary: On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, including Washington D.C. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space, and requires a much larger share of humanity to take part in the process.

Elma York’s experience as a WASP pilot and mathematician earns her a place in the International Aerospace Coalition’s attempts to put man on the moon, as a calculator. But with so many skilled and experienced women pilots and scientists involved with the program, it doesn’t take long before Elma begins to wonder why they can’t go into space, too.

Elma’s drive to become the first Lady Astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her.

The Lady Astronaut of Mars Duology is a recent pair of books that serve as prequels to Mary Robinette Kowal’s award-winning short story, Lady Astronaut of Mars. It’s sure to appeal to fans of Hidden Figures, although it’s main character is a Jewish woman rather than a black woman, it still tells the story of human calculators helping humanity reach the stars.

The first book, The Calculating Stars, starts off with a bang… literally. A meteorite crashes into the Earth, wiping out much of the Eastern seaboard and creating a long-term ecological disaster. The science suggests that it could be an extinction event, and humanity needs to find another home, pronto.

So where in our real history, we landed on the Moon as part of a space race with Russia, in this alternate timeline it was a multi-national effort in order to establish a footprint in space, with an eye towards an eventual Mars colony.

Both The Calculating Stars and its sequel, The Fated Sky, are told from the first-person point of view of Elma York, a brilliant Southern Jewish woman. Elma served as a WASP pilot in WWII and now serves as a “calculator”, doing math by hand for the nascent space program. Her husband Nathaniel is a rocket scientist. They have a beautiful relationship built on mutual love and respect.

This is a story of a woman trying to get herself and the other women who work with her the respect and recognition they deserve. The meteorite strike may have forced people to work together on a tight timeline, but it didn’t erase the attitudes of the 1950s. Elma has to fight against a lot of sexism, and the people of color in her life have to fight against racism (Elma also occasionally encounters antisemitism). As if that’s not enough, Elma has terrible social anxiety in a time where mental illness wasn’t well-understood.

Kowal is an excellent author and both books are really well-paced. That isn’t to say that they’re action-packed. There’s a lot of math and a lot of talking and a lot of panic attacks. The second book involves more space adventures, but the first is almost entirely earth-bound. Still, I was always left wanting to know what would happen next, how Elma and her friends would overcome the obstacles in their path.

There are some awkward moments in this book when Elma is confronted with her own color-blindness. I get it. As an author it has to be really difficult to accurately portray race relations at the time and have your character be believable, but likable. And so Elma frequently fails to realize that something has happened because of someone’s race, or that her or Nathaniel’s attempts to help come across as playing White Savior.

About Elma’s Judaism: it’s well-portrayed. She and Nathaniel are both Jewish, but not super observant. They came across as believable. Their faith informed their attitudes and decisions at times, but they were more driven by science and their love of space. There isn’t a lot of talk about God, no miracles. This is not inspirational fiction masquerading as sci-fi, it’s sci-fi with characters who happen to have a religious background, just like people in real life do.

I find it refreshing to see more fiction where people have a specific faith, as long as it isn’t the center of the novel and isn’t over the top. A lot of authors take the easy path of either not mentioning it, having their character be vaguely non-denominationally Christian-ish, or have their character be some sort of witch, whose practices may or may not bear any resemblance to actual witchcraft or Pagan religions.

In the real world, I feel like our faith or lack thereof is a larger part of our personality than it’s portrayed in books. In an effort to make the main character more appealing to a vaster swath of readers, authors have filed down that part of them. The thing is, even if a person is casually agnostic, or barely kind-of-sort-of Christian, that informs who they are. Were they raised agnostic? Is their family more devout and they’ve drifted away from the faith?

Giving a character a real faith, or lack thereof, gives them more depth. It makes them more believable. A skilled author can weave that into their characterization with a deft enough touch that the book doesn’t read like an “inspie” or turn off readers of other faiths.

Anyway. This went off on a tangent. These books are good. I read The Fated Sky in one insomniac night and was crying like a baby when it finished. Pick them up if you enjoy good feminist alternative history sci-fi with a diverse cast.