Tuesday, April 23, 2019

The Fated Sky (Mary Robinette Kowal)

The Fated Sky
A Lady Astronaut novel, Book 2
Mary Robinette Kowal
Tor
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)


DESCRIPTION: Dr. Elma York broke barriers when she became the first woman to fly to the Moon, the famed "Lady Astronaut" face of the International Aerospace Coalition. Now, she lives there several months out of the year, flying shuttles between the fledgling lunar colony and the orbital station Lunette. It's a dream job - but not the challenge it used to be. Worse, the world still reels from the escalating climate shifts caused by the Meteor. Plagued by Earth First activists and skeptics, many nations are starting to question the need for expensive space colonization programs when they have mounting problems in their own back yards... problems that might derail the first expedition to Mars and humanity's best - and possibly only - hope of interplanetary expansion before total climate collapse.
The IAC needs an infusion of good publicity to keep the ax from falling on an already frayed budget. They need their Lady Astronaut to go to Mars. But it's not as easy as shuffling a few names on a roster, and there are still barriers within the IAC that threaten to hold her and many other astronauts back... problems that will only become magnified once the expedition is underway and fourteen men and women are stuck with each other for the three-year round trip.

REVIEW: Building on the "punchcard-punk" alternate history of Kowal's first Lady Astronaut novel, which posited an accelerated space race triggered by a massive meteor strike in the 1950's, this book raises the tension and the stakes on a manned Mars expedition where the only mechanized computers are buggy vacuum-tube behemoths far slower than the human (mostly women) computers behind the Apollo program and other real-life pioneering space missions. But it's not just about the science and the numbers and the innumerable dangers of deep space, where the slightest miscalculation means the difference between life and death. Elma had already had her eyes forcibly opened to the systemic racism that runs just as deep as, possibly even deeper than, the sexism in the world in general and the IAC in particular, but must come to terms with her own place in that system... and with the fact that this is a problem she can't fix, where her best intentions only make things that much worse. She also must deal with problems that numerous drills could not have prepared her for, not to mention the psychological issues that cold science could not anticipate (such as Mission Control's methods for the hypothetical handling of a deceased astronaut in space, which prove disastrous on multiple levels in practice.) Several of the characters are familiar from the first book, with a few newcomers, but all reveal new aspects during the trip out to Mars, as adversity tests them all in unexpected ways. Human drama mingles with solid science to produce a tale that's relatable even to an an undereducated idiot like myself, proving that one doesn't need hyperdrives or laser cannons to craft good fiction out of space travel. (Also, like the first one, it can't help make me a little sad: we could've been so much further ahead than we are, in so many areas, if we'd kept that fire that drove us to the Moon and turned it outward to the solar system, instead of dithering and budget-cutting and science-denying our way to a possible point of no return.) It's a fast and enjoyable read in a setting that could easily support more installments or spinoffs.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Retrograde (Peter Cawdron) - My Review
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) - My Review
Red Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson) - My Review

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