Kowal won a Hugo for this novel, and it was well deserved. When I read the blurb, I thought of Hidden Figures – the true story of women who worked, unseen, in the space program. Unseen because of both their race and their sex. There are similarities, but Kowal’s work is original and unique, and fictitious, at least in this branch of the multiverse. It’s also hard to review without letting slip a few spoilers. I’ll try to minimize those prior to the last section and will telegraph the big ones before they come.
I picture Kowal coming up with this idea via a series of “What if?” questions:
What if there had been a meteor out there with our name on it just after the Korean War?
What if it were big enough to send us the way of the dinosaurs?
What would we do? As a country and as a species?
I like Kowal’s answers and mostly like her science. It’s well worth reading. It also caused me to confront some of my thoughts regarding both sexism and racism, themes Kowal introduces gently and handles nicely.
Spoilers are coming. In fact, they start in the next paragraph.
Elma York, our protagonist, is a brilliant mathematician and a former WASP pilot. When we get slammed by the big rock, the world leaders quickly admit that it’s an extinction event. We’re going to colonize the moon, Mars, and anything else we can reach. Good plan. Set in the 50s and 60s, Kowal makes the point that you need both men and women to start a colony, so you need females in the space program – she ends up using the term Lady Astronauts, as her vision of the media calls them. Her heroine, a bit ahead of her time, would be happy with simply calling them all astronauts. That’s what we do.
She hits the sexism point by having the Lady Astronauts wear bikinis for dunker training – something men do in their flight suits and boots. It’s the 50s and 60s, how quaint. We would never do something like that now, right? Remember that the next time you watch women’s beach volleyball, or women’s track.
Kowal goes after racism in the same way, gently but no less painfully, having her heroine realize belatedly that it didn’t dawn on her that all the female Astronaut Candidates (yes, we still call them than and abbreviate it to AssCans) are white until someone points it out.
It’s never whack-a-mole. Kowal makes her points firmly enough that you get it, then moves on. I appreciated it.
On the Feral Meter, it’s an 8 for Story – Kowal’s novel is shortish and only briefly mentions food riots and crop failures, things that would be resulting in thousands of deaths globally. Fair enough, that’s not what this story is about. On the Science side, it’s also an 8. She never considers alternate extinction-avoidance strategies beyond pooh-poohing an initial attempt at deep cellars. Her math works. Her aviation discussions work well enough that I didn’t scream at the book and her orbital mechanics mentions are appropriate for the story.
I passed this book on to my wife who is also loving it. That’s a solid two for two in the Daily household.
It’s available print, ebook, and audible. I listened to it. Kowal read her own novel and did an excellent job. Her voice is easy on the ears, and I assumed it was a professional voice actor doing the work (late edit here: Kowal is a professional voice actor.) Well done!
Find it, read it. Amazon link here.