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bloodygranuaileIn Oh God How Many Book Clubs Am I Even In Now news, the BSpec book club is reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, which for some reason I thought was a standalone but is actually the first book in the Lady Astronaut series.
The Calculating Stars is about one Dr. Elma York, a young Jewish mathematician who served as a pilot in World War II and now works as a computer at not-quite-NASA. Her husband Nathaniel also works there as an engineer. Elma and Nathaniel are taking a nice quiet break from their high-powered jobs in a little cabin in the Poconos when a meteorite hits Earth in the ocean off Washington DC, immediately obliterating a chunk of the East Coast and setting into a motion a killed-the-dinosaurs-esque extinction event. This puts Nathaniel and Elma on track to work in the new International Aerospace Coalition’s new and very important project to establish human colonization in space.
This is a very Tor Books kind of book in that it is in some ways comfortingly familiar--a fun sci-fi adventure with a recognizable genre flavor that’s unapologetically a power fantasy (or, more specifically, a hypercompetence fantasy) for its readers--but still quite imaginative, socially aware and deliberately catering to an audience of (usually very online) progressive nerds outside the traditional audience of straight white guys. The Calculating Stars does not fit the Disaster Queers In Space model that marks Tor’s most best work (in my extremely biased opinion), as Elma and Nathaniel are heterosexual, although like in her other works, Kowal makes a point of developing the relationship to showcase it as mutually affectionate and supportive and generally healthy. Like the other issues of social and political importance that are touched on in the book--and there are several--there’s not much here in the way of subtext, it’s just text, which on the one hand is nicely straightforward (people talk about stuff, just like in real life!) but on the other hand means I’ve not got much to analyze in review other than to note that Kowal deals with such subjects in the context of a fun space adventure. Our protagonist, Elma, has social anxiety and specifically a terror of public speaking, which becomes an issue as she becomes an increasingly public-facing figure in her quest to push the politically timid space program to put women into space. As white Jews, Elma and Nathaniel also face antisemitism while working to fix their own white people nonsense and become more aware of the racism in the space program. And, of course, navigating the crushing casual sexism of the ‘50s, the deliberate attempt to push women back into domestic spaces and downplay their accomplishments during the war, the sexual harassment and constant belittling at work, is a driving theme. Kowal also manages a distressingly realistic portrayal of political timidity in the face of catastrophic climate change; the parallels to contemporary political issues are about as subtle as Las Vegas but it provides a cathartic fantasy of maybe possibly still being able to do something about them.
Anyway, it was generally a fun read, it’s got planes and math and space and other such entertaining things, and I think it’ll be fun to talk about at book club, although I’ll be unsurprised if we also don’t because it’ll be our first in-person book club since last summer so it might turn into social time. It is likely I will read the sequels at some point, so that I can follow Elma’s adventures fighting sexism in space.
The Calculating Stars is about one Dr. Elma York, a young Jewish mathematician who served as a pilot in World War II and now works as a computer at not-quite-NASA. Her husband Nathaniel also works there as an engineer. Elma and Nathaniel are taking a nice quiet break from their high-powered jobs in a little cabin in the Poconos when a meteorite hits Earth in the ocean off Washington DC, immediately obliterating a chunk of the East Coast and setting into a motion a killed-the-dinosaurs-esque extinction event. This puts Nathaniel and Elma on track to work in the new International Aerospace Coalition’s new and very important project to establish human colonization in space.
This is a very Tor Books kind of book in that it is in some ways comfortingly familiar--a fun sci-fi adventure with a recognizable genre flavor that’s unapologetically a power fantasy (or, more specifically, a hypercompetence fantasy) for its readers--but still quite imaginative, socially aware and deliberately catering to an audience of (usually very online) progressive nerds outside the traditional audience of straight white guys. The Calculating Stars does not fit the Disaster Queers In Space model that marks Tor’s most best work (in my extremely biased opinion), as Elma and Nathaniel are heterosexual, although like in her other works, Kowal makes a point of developing the relationship to showcase it as mutually affectionate and supportive and generally healthy. Like the other issues of social and political importance that are touched on in the book--and there are several--there’s not much here in the way of subtext, it’s just text, which on the one hand is nicely straightforward (people talk about stuff, just like in real life!) but on the other hand means I’ve not got much to analyze in review other than to note that Kowal deals with such subjects in the context of a fun space adventure. Our protagonist, Elma, has social anxiety and specifically a terror of public speaking, which becomes an issue as she becomes an increasingly public-facing figure in her quest to push the politically timid space program to put women into space. As white Jews, Elma and Nathaniel also face antisemitism while working to fix their own white people nonsense and become more aware of the racism in the space program. And, of course, navigating the crushing casual sexism of the ‘50s, the deliberate attempt to push women back into domestic spaces and downplay their accomplishments during the war, the sexual harassment and constant belittling at work, is a driving theme. Kowal also manages a distressingly realistic portrayal of political timidity in the face of catastrophic climate change; the parallels to contemporary political issues are about as subtle as Las Vegas but it provides a cathartic fantasy of maybe possibly still being able to do something about them.
Anyway, it was generally a fun read, it’s got planes and math and space and other such entertaining things, and I think it’ll be fun to talk about at book club, although I’ll be unsurprised if we also don’t because it’ll be our first in-person book club since last summer so it might turn into social time. It is likely I will read the sequels at some point, so that I can follow Elma’s adventures fighting sexism in space.