I enjoyed Mary Robinette Kowal's third entry in the Lady Astronaut series (The Relentless Moon) more than the second volume (The Fated Sky), but not as much as the first one (The Calculating Stars). The biggest problem is that it's probably a lot longer than it needs to be, although maybe for what Kowal is going for, it's just as long as it needs to be.
Back in the first book, a meteor hits Washington, DC in the early 1950's, which is a national tragedy, but also a worldwide one, given that this will change the climate making Earth uninhabitable. So we get an interesting alternate history of the early space program where the international community gets together to invest in space exploration with the goal of getting a lot of people into space before the planet becomes uninhabitable. There is also, predictably, opposition to this goal in a metaphor for current debates about climate change.
The first two books focus on Elma, the First Lady Astronaut. In the second book, she's en route to Mars and a lot of the new universe smell has worn off as the series becomes more of a fun experiment in Engineers' SF: how could people go to the Moon and Mars with 1950's and 60's technology?
That aspect of the series continues in the third volume, but this time our narrator is Nicole Wargin, one of the other Lady Astronauts who in 1963 is making regular trips to the international moon base and who happens to be married to the Governor of Kansas (where the new US capital and a major space center are now located).
Nicole is different than Elma (she has fewer groan-worthy sexual innuendos and just says what she means about sex and everything else), but she's also a highly successful woman astronaut with a complicated, but loving marriage. I continue to enjoy the depiction of the complexities of longterm relationships in this series.
Nicole goes to the Moon (eventually). There is a mysterious saboteur, presumably working for the anti-space program Earth First crowd. Nicole spends a loooooong time investigating who the saboteur(s) is/are as the moon base continues to suffer dangerous technical difficulties, and the political situation back on Earth deteriorates. The mystery and the drama are real, if a bit leisurely paced.
The book will probably appeal most to readers who enjoy the technical aspects (what I like to call Engineers' SF). There are also some interesting political issues with the Earth First crowd (still a metaphor for climate change), and a polio outbreak on the moon (while Kowal wrote this before the COVID-19 pandemic, her acknowledgements were written later and make this connection).
There's an interesting speech about putting aside their differences from Earth while on the Moon, but not much is made of it. There's really nothing I'd call Big Ideas SF (no ethical debates about the space plan, despite the fact that they can't bring everyone to space, no discussions of the drive to survive against the odds or what spaceflight will do to humanity, etc.).
I've mentioned my criticism of the length. It's over 500 pages, which seems long for a first-person narrative that takes place mostly over a couple months. But at some point I realized that my criticisms are just reflecting what Kowal is trying to do. This is good, engaging Engineers' SF with some mild social and political commentary, and the length may be what Kowal needs to get the scientific and technical detail along with the personal details and the slow burn of the investigation.
So, if a book is good in being what it's trying to be, I have to hand it to Kowal: she did a great job. My criticisms are mostly borne out of my own SF preferences, which should in no way detract from what Kowal is trying to do.
I read this mostly because it was nominated for a Hugo this year (I put it at my #3 choice). I suspect there's another volume on the way, and I might pick it up just to see what the Lady Astronauts do next.
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