The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel (Lady Astronaut, 1)

Trite, unexciting preachy rubbish. Our heroine wants to be an astronaut when she’s not having anxiety attacks at the most inopportune moments...like astronauts do !! It’s set in an alternate history where America gets hit by a giant meteorite (but fear not we’re back to cocktails and dinner parties in no time) which is the prelude to extinction. So mankind sets about looking to colonise the solar system...in the 1950’s, with nothing in this alternate timeline that is that different to our 1950’s. So totally implausible then. In fact none of this makes any sense and most of it seems to centre around the happy domesticity of our heroine and her hunk of a husband, Theres no sense of impending doom...just lots of drinking and eating and trite observations on racism and sexism. It’s a joke of a book and another nail in the coffin of my opinion on awards nowadays. Maybe it got its award for its feminism...we’d be better served in this regard in giving awards to those female authors who can actually write. Might be worth mentioning that our heroine is also a self-absorbed,selfish piece of work who isn’t at all likeable or relatable.

This book won the Hugo award for best novel this year, so there must be quite a lot of people that liked it for some reason. I did not vote for it and I cannot fathom what it was that those who did vote for it saw in it. It took me three attempts to get to the end of the book. It is without question the worst SF book I have read and managed to finish in the last five years, easily beating the previous contender for this unwanted prize. What is quite sad about the awfulness of the book is that the author can unquestionably write clear, easily understood prose. Unfortunately that is not really enough for a good literary novel. It is certainly not even close to what is needed to make a good SF novel. Most of all I look for a sense of wonder and exciting ideas, a plot that makes sense is always good and ideally some believable characters to relate to. ‘The calculating stars’ provided me with none of these. In a nutshell the book is a wish fulfilment fantasy masquerading as Alternative History. It has no validity as such. To start with there is more than one Point of Departure, at least two, Dewey is elected president of the USA and a large meteorite hits near the eastern seaboard of the USA, both in the 1950s. Unfortunately we readers are left with no idea how having Dewey as president allows the USA to beat the Soviet Union in to space. It just happens because the author wants it to happen. The presentation of the meteorite strike and its immediate effects are not credible. Particularly noticeable is the insignificant death toll on the USA’s east coast and the lack of destruction whilst at the same time there are huge waves in ‘nasty Venezuela’. It just happens because the author wants it to happen. The even nastier Soviet Union collapses. Just because that is what the author wants to happen, I suspect there may be badly thought out patriotic aspirations at work here. The super intelligent mathematician heroine deduces from mathematical analysis alone that climate change as a result of the meteorite is likely. She does this about 35 years before this process was understood in the real world as the result of the work of thousands of scientists. Science just does not work the way it is portrayed in the book. Oh wait it does in this story, again just because the author wants it to. Then they allow this mega-prodigy that has made an intellectual jump that even Einstein, Newton, Clark-Maxwell and Michelangelo together could not make into space. This happens just because the author needs her wish fulfilment. What else? Women’s rights and racial equality are resolved quite reasonably and the author seemed to have little grasp of the history of the women’s movement and civil rights even just in the USA. Then the best bit of the lot climate is changing so the world’s response is “lets go into space” a complete non sequitur and laugh...

It seems a lot of alternate history science fiction novels revolve around a major turning point in history. The most popular one is of Germany winning World War II as in Phillip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle and SS-GB. Harry Turtledove has an entire series based on the South winning the Civil War unofficially called The Southern Victory Series. Mary Robinette Kowal's alternate history in The Calculating Stars is not just one turning point, but several. The first is that Dewey would defeat Truman and become President of the United States, second that the US would be ahead of the Soviet Union in the space race. Emma York is a former WASP, who flew with many perilous missions in WWII, and brilliant mathematician. She and her husband, Nathaniel, witness the meteorite impact and survive the subsequent shock wave. Since Nathaniel is literally a rocket scientist he is semi drafted into services to help at the local Air Force base. This sets the timeline for the most drastic change in history. In 1952, a meteorite crashes into the Eastern coast of the United states and destroys much of the east coast, including Washington D.C. It sets up an environmental change that will eventually render the earth nearly uninhabitable. It is decided that the current space program be accelerated to colonize space, first the moon and eventually Mars. In the hands of other writers, it may be natural to come up with grand ideas and scope of chronicling the race to space and tell a heroic struggle to not only survive the changing climate but to also do the impossible things such as reaching the moon. Mary Robinette Kowal chooses to make this a much more personal story. It is what makes this novel so unique and relatable. This is all told through the point of view of Emma as she navigates through this invigorated space program and the issues of the era, mainly the sexism that stands in the way of not only her, but others women in participating in the space program beyond being number crunching computers. After what was meant to be a PR appearance on the 50's era show, Mister Wizard, Emma gets dubbed with the nickname of The Lady Astronaut. Thus would begin an unwanted focus on Emma and the role women will have in the fledgling space program. You would think it's a no-brainer as do the women in the book. To colonize space, you are going to need women. But it is is still the mid-50s and not only is the idea of women's lib not existent, but it is even predating the major civil rights movement. And Emma not only suffers from the upbringing of the time with the haunting refrain of  her mother's "What will people think?" to her own issues of anxiety. Emma feels she and many other friends, most of whom are former WASP themselves are fully qualified. It of course should come as no surprise that women will eventually get the chance ...