Escaping Gravity: A Review of The Lady Astronaut Series

The SpaceX launch had me hankering for some space travel science fiction and both The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky have been sitting on my shelf for a while. Also, my husband and I told each other we’d read more science fiction together during quarantine. That hasn’t happened yet, so I jumped in and dragged him along with me.

The Calculating Stars (2018)
Written By: Mary Robinette Kowal
Pages: 421 (Trade Paperback)
Series: The Lady Astronaut (Books 1)
Published By: Tor

I’m reviewing these together because, in the end, I felt like they read like two parts of the same story. Even separated by four years, I think they work best as a duo. You could read just the first one, but then you’ll be missing a lot of the excitement of the second. Likewise, if you only read the second, you’ll miss Elma’s growth and origins from the first.

The Premise for The Calculating Stars:

On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the east coast of the United States, including Washington D.C. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space, and requires a much larger share of humanity to take part in the process.

Elma York’s experience as a WASP pilot and mathematician earns her a place in the International Aerospace Coalition’s attempts to put man on the moon, as a calculator. But with so many skilled and experienced women pilots and scientists involved with the program, it doesn’t take long before Elma begins to wonder why they can’t go into space, too.

Elma’s drive to become the first Lady Astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her.

Minor spoilers ahead for both The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky.

Discussion: I was really excited for this series, kind of a Seveneves set in the 1950s, with a meteor strike and an extinction event to speed up the development of space flight and colonization. And that is what this was, but it ended up being very different from what I was expecting, as well.

The Calculating Stars was much more about sexism and racism and getting women into space than it was about any actual exploration or colonization. Don’t get me wrong, it was riveting and full of a really familiar conflict, just not what I was expecting. Although, I guess I should have been, considering it takes place between 1952 and 1958.

In fact, there was a lot about the book that felt incredibly relevant right here and right now. A meteorite hits the Earth, and they realize the planet will suffer a runaway greenhouse effect, making it uninhabitable in just a few short decades. Elma and her immediate circle all know this to be true, but they have to fight against the ignorance and disbelief of the rest of the world, which just can’t fathom the extent of the disaster. The world doesn’t feel warmer to them, so clearly it’s all a hoax or an overreaction.

And even while Elma deals with the obvious sexism and prejudice against women in the space program, she starts to see the racism prevalent throughout as well. Her own blindness to racial inequality is pointed out to her as characters of color notice that all the astronauts selected are white men.

It all felt very familiar. Personally, as well as globally.

I was also really impressed with the portrayal of anxiety and Elma’s journey with mental health in a time when that was really only just starting to be addressed. Learning to acknowledge anxiety, manage it, and talk about it openly was a prevalent theme throughout the first book which carried over into the second.

So, while The Calculating Stars wasn’t the space exploration adventure that I was looking for, it had its own sort of swirling conflict and gravity, culminating in triumph for Elma as well as triumph for mankind.

And The Fated Sky picked up that triumph about four years later and continued the story.

The Fated Sky (2018)
Pages: 371 (Trade Paperback)
Series: The Lady Astronaut (Book 2)
Published By: Tor

The Premise for The Fated Sky:

Mary Robinette Kowal continues the grand sweep of alternate history begun in The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky looks forward to 1961, when mankind is well-established on the moon and looking forward to its next step: journeying to, and eventually colonizing, Mars.

Of course the noted Lady Astronaut Elma York would like to go, but there’s a lot riding on whoever the International Aerospace Coalition decides to send on this historic — but potentially very dangerous — mission. Could Elma really leave behind her husband and the chance to start a family to spend several years traveling to Mars? And with the Civil Rights movement taking hold all over Earth, will the astronaut pool ever be allowed to catch up, and will these brave men and women of all races be treated equitably when they get there? This gripping look at the real conflicts behind a fantastical space race will put a new spin on our visions of what might have been.

Discussion: This one was much more of what I was expecting for the series with actual exploration and survival in space. We start the book on the established lunar colony with a look at Elma’s role as a pilot, astronaut, and poster child for space flight.

While racism is still a source of conflict in the book, it’s now focused in on Elma and her teammates, making the issue more immediate and more personal than the looming problem it was in the first installment. I like that Elma was quick to see inequalities and quick to recognize her own blindness and prejudices, but I did wish she would do more about them than just think to herself “oh, I’m such a horrible person, I just keep screwing up.” But I suppose when you’re trapped on a space ship in the 1960s where tensions are high and the threat of death by space is imminent, you have to pick your battles. And while I would have liked a nice clean arc ending with interpersonal understanding and a problem solved, I also recognize that’s a very naïve and idealistic view of the world.

Other than that, I really love a book that can portray a happily married couple in a realistic and encouraging way, especially dealing with the challenges you’d expect when one is risking their life in space exploration. Elma and Nathaniel don’t have a blissful, easy road to walk, but they are loving, supportive, and conflicted all at the same time. They fight, they disagree, but they manage to do so while circling back around to meet in the middle with more understanding and kindness than where they started.

This also held true with Elma’s relationship with Parker. Early in the first book, Parker was set up as Elma’s personal antagonist, the man who made her life miserable. He could have easily been a cardboard cutout designed to be hated. But between the two books he and Elma move from enemies, to rivals, to colleagues, to friends.

Even early on, Parker is nuanced in a way that made it hard to universally hate him. He wasn’t just a bull-headed rival with an extraordinary amount of ego and sexism. Sure, we loved to despise him from Elma’s point of view, but we could also see his charm and the way he led and understood people. As we followed him through The Fated Sky, we saw him make an effort to change and grow in a way that made him far more heroic than any cardboard cutout. In the end, I feel like his was one of the most rewarding character arcs of the series.

The only thing that I really feel I can complain about is…the rocket euphemisms. I think you can only get away with one double entendre about rockets in a book about space. And that’s only with the recognition that it’s going to be really, really cheesy when you do. But holy cow, they were everywhere. As a young married couple, Elma and Nathaniel have a lot of sex, and as a rocket engineer and a physicist, the co-opted jargon was a major feature. It went from eliciting eyerolls to just plain annoying.

In Conclusion: I’m glad I had the second book lined up and ready to go. The first was great, but it didn’t really scratch the itch I had going in and the second one totally did. I was really excited to read that there are more books in the Lady Astronaut series on the way. Now that they’re finally in space, I can’t wait to see how the political climate changes as the Earth’s impending doom approaches. And I’m interested to see what’s next for Elma and Nathaniel in an actual colony, and Elma and Parker now that they’re sort of friends.