I thoroughly enjoyed Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, an alternate history mashup of Hidden Figures, The Right Stuff, and classic science fiction, all wrapped up in a thinly-veiled metaphor for climate change. That doesn't entirely do it justice, of course, but you'll have to read it for yourself to see what I mean by all that. I enjoyed this Hugo finalist so much, I just might give it my #1 spot on my ballot due in a few days. Stay tuned to this blog to find out!
In an alternate history 1952, a meteorite hits Earth off the coast of Washington, DC, destroying the American capital and surrounding areas. This also ejects enough material into the atmosphere to cause massive climate change: cooling in the first few years but then incremental warming after that.
Scientist, pilot, mathematician, and all around geeky badass Elma York is our narrator. We follow her as she battles sexism, anxiety, the media, and government bureaucracy in her role in the accelerated space program, all with help from her supportive husband Nathaniel (with whom she has some hot geek-on-geek PG-13 sex scenes).
Elma was an Air Force pilot in WWII as well as a math wiz and scientist, so she's pretty much 150% astronaut material, or she would be if the 1950's sexism in this alternate history weren't pretty much the same as it was in our timeline. Some readers (mostly men, I imagine) might think Kowal is laying it on a bit thick when it comes to the sexist bullshit Elma faces, but if anything it's probably a bit toned down to what a woman in a hyper-male-dominated field like aerospace in the 1950's would have faced. It all made me love Elma even more. She's a great character who I was rooting for from page one. Some of my favorite parts are when she kept mocking men who didn't think we would need women in long term space colonies (think about it for a second!).
There's plenty of technical geeking out when it comes to planes and orbital mechanics and whatnot, so people who like what I call Engineers' SF will love this (think of The Martian as a key recent example of the kind of SF I'm talking about). That Kowal leans heavily on the social issues keeps it from being totally pure Engineers' SF (race is also a big factor, and a bit of anti-semitism, too).
There are also some fun little alternate history connections. Mr. Wizard also has a show in this history and there are mentions of Martin Luther King, Jr., Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Dwight Eisenhower, etc.
Another thing I loved about the novel was that it felt like classic science fiction. What I mean is that Kowal isn't trying to be super fancy with her prose to impress the pretentious MFA crowd. She doesn't care much about the "show don't tell" rule, which I think is a dumb rule in science fiction, because you have to tell the reader about your world. She's free to have the narrator clue us in about facts about the world that we need to know to enjoy the story. Honestly compared to a lot of other stuff in the field these days, it was nice to read something relatively straightforward, but with some depth, too. Of course, the place it doesn't feel classic is in its treatment of social issues, so it's not purely a retro phenomenon, either (sometimes one wonders whether Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov ever met a woman).
I really enjoyed the novel overall, but I have a couple relatively minor criticisms. One is that it did lag for me about three quarters through. I never wanted to stop reading the book, but I did start to wonder where it was all heading. It picks up right at the end, though, and makes me really excited about the sequel.
The other thing is that, while this isn't purely Engineers' SF, it's not exactly what I call Big Ideas SF, either. There is some discussion of social issues, but there's really not much discussion of things like whether humans should colonize space, how we decide who gets to go, or what space exploration says about bigger questions about what it means to be human and our place in the universe, and so on. I'm hoping for more of that in the sequel.
As I mentioned earlier, the whole thing is wrapped up in a metaphor for climate change. While our climate change isn't exactly what the people in the novel are facing, we, too, are dealing with what is probably an existential issue for humanity, one that a good chunk of people seem keen to ignore or outright deny. I was haunted by the deniers and the lack of political will in the face of such a clear and present danger in the novel, but not as much as I am haunted by the same things here in our timeline.
See also my Goodreads review.
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