Because I'd just read The Calculating Stars the week before, I kept an eye on Mary Robinette Kowal's twitter feed while the landing was underway, because after reading the book, I knew that she'd be watching as avidly as I was.
What I think I'm trying to say with this is that I don't know if you could have pulled out a list of ingredients more likely to make me excited about and engaged in a book if you'd tried. Earlier race to put settlers on the Moon and Mars in the 1950s, revolving around the efforts of women to be considered as astronauts? Careful consideration of the ways in which the selection process was not only gendered but racialized? Anxiety as a fact of life for the main character, not a disability? All of this in one of the best written, most exciting and enthralling books I've read all year? In a book I really hope is on the Hugo ballot next year because it so fucking deserves to be?
Yeah, that's The Calculating Stars. And I feel like I've only scratched the surface. The book starts with a catastrophe - a meteorite hitting the water just off the East Coast of the U.S., obliterating millions and starting a chain reaction that will lead to global warming on a scale that may well make human existence on the planet untenable. The main character, Elma, was a World War II Women's Air Service Pilot (WASP). When the meteorite strikes, she and her husband are just barely in a survivable range, and only because light travels so much faster than the force blast and they have time to get to a reasonably safe location.
These chapters start the book, and they are heart-wrenching, terrifying. Kowal has done such an amazing job of bringing this to life, and Elma's grief at losing her family was so real.
The moment where Elma finally gets her brother in California on the phone, when he had thought his entire family had perished, had me in tears.
Elma is also a calculator for this version of NASA, and she and her husband get involved with trying to convince the new president (the only member of the cabinet left alive), that resources need to be put towards getting humanity off-planet, now. Because she suffers from anxiety, this is difficult, but she does it. The moment when she realizes that medication is a treatment that doesn't make her a failure was profoundly moving. I also like how perceptive Kowal is about both anxiety disorders, and the ways that specific anxieties can be created by circumstances - in Elma's case, being young and female and used as a prop by a math prof to shame the young men in college classes.
Elma is in the running to become a lady astronaut, although that's as much as a publicity stunt by NASA as anything. She and the other women take it seriously. But the book does not shy away from how this intersects with race in the 1950s. There are pointed and devastating comments on how refugee missions to the meteorite-affected zones are carried out to white areas, without perhaps conscious bias, but Black people end up just as dead as if it were done maliciously. Elma messes up herself as she meets the members of a Black Women's Flying Club, but is at least able to apologize and mend fences with some of the members - but some never forgive her, and that's their right too. White lady apologies are not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
When the requirements for the women's astronaut program go out, Elma's friends are quick to point out how they are covertly racialized, excluding women who don't have experiences that were only open to white women.
Oh, I could rave on and on. I love this book, folks. I just loved it. It made me cry, it made me happy, it made me angry, and it felt so true to this alternate version of a time and a place. There are some books that are not convincing. This one is, every moment, and I can't wait to read the next book in the series. I'd never read Mary Robinette Kowal before, but now she's on my list of authors to follow.
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