"The Calculating Stars" & "The Fated Sky" by Mary Robinette Kowal

Review:

Two fairly short, well paced sci-fi novels that tell of an an alternate history branching from 1952, when the Eastern seaboard of the USA is hit by a large meteorite.



The story follows a female protagonist who is a scientist, 'computer' and ace pilot, as she, and her refreshingly supportive lead space engineer husband, face the trials and tribulations of fast tracking a space program to ensure against the consequences of this catastrophic event.

The first novel of this duology could stand entirely on its own, but I enjoyed it enough to buy into the continuation and be entirely please I read them both. Even though it's not the kind of hard sci-fi I'd generally go for. There's great technical adherence to the practical realities of spaceflight (and American life) in that era. But no attempt at predicting on technological or societal changes in our own future. And its not really a space opera in the usual sense.

In shines in its feminist tilt, looking at struggles against counterproductive sexism, and racism, in the space program setting. From the perspective of an unlikely heroine, who's main problem is crippling physiological anxiety stemming from physiological mistreatment by the male establishment. Rather than the rigours of spaceflight itself.

The main male characters are interesting constructions, too. The husband appears to be almost an idealised reference for how a feminist might specify best practice male behaviour (towards women). Perhaps a little artificial, but refreshingly non 'rough around the edges'/interestingly imperfect. I found their, more subtly written, physical romance scenes heart warming.

The most interesting character arc is that of a more senior male antagonist. He's initially a somewhat 2D male chauvinist, borderline(?) rapist, who our protagonist is forced to deal with and get to know better, in halting steps forwards and back. Ultimately not ending up going quite where I expected.


Issues [Spoilers]:


It was a clever concept, to marry a thought experiment of pre-microprocessor spaceflight to a feminist protagonist/story - back in the 50s, most mathematical computation work was done by human 'computers', essentially grinding the numbers by hand. And this numerical drudgery was often (usually) done by women. So, when it's too early in the history of miniaturisation to take a sufficiently powerful electronic computer into space, it might not be unreasonable to need female astronauts on certain missions. Despite an unreasonable institutional aversion to it.

However, the axiomatic concept of pouring insane amounts of capital and resources into a massively more ambitious interplanetary colonisation effort, to save the human race from unstoppable meteorite driven global warming, is clearly not plausible.

(1) For a start, the main efforts of the space program take place in (central) USA, after it's main population centres and all Eastern ports, etc (up to 100 miles inland or more) have been obliterated. The economic impact would be civilisationally devastating. At any time. But especially when the US was still financing the restoration of the rest of the world, after WW2. At the least the US would be crippled worst than any war in its history. But we only see the effects of this devastation in human terms - of grieving and injured refugees (and racism in this context).

(2) Putting men on the moon over a decade early would likely be extremely costly, in terms of having failures for the sake of expediency, with so little time to figure entirely new things out. But vaguely plausible in terms of spaceflight. Less so the process of assembling spacious space stations and moon bases in only a couple years thereafter. Something that's entirely glossed over, between books.

That's orders of magnitude more mass to lift and from the extremely clumsy and dangerous spacewalk scenes, that we do see, there's no way big structures could be fabricated in situ. And no massive launch vehicles mentioned that might be capable of lifting pre-made structures. Anyone who's played Kerbal Space Program a fair bit should really appreciate the scale of these issues.

(3) In 2020, we'll definitely have the capability, very soon (via SpaceX), to put dozens of people on Mars. But any civilisation there is going to be utterly dependant upon Earth for supplies and about as capable of self sustaining as a 1 week old human zygote!

Our level of technological capability requires hundreds of millions of people in economically coordinated activity, just to stay afloat! Tens of thousands of different, niche, technical roles are involved. To replicate that on another planet (before trans-human AI and robotics, etc) would require even more population, with massive overheads like needing a spacesuit to work outside, all accommodation being radiation hardened and making your own soil from scratch, etc.

With upcoming 3D printing technology, hydroponics, etc, etc, some of this become more tractable. But back before integrated circuits...? Just no.

(4) The "Earth First-ers" in the book are dead right. The novel's Mars colonisation hopes are temporary salvation for the 1%, at best (although there was massively less wealth inequality after WW2, when so much capital had been destroyed, resetting society through 96% plus upper tax rates, etc). And also a doomed effort, for any who did actually reach another planet.

Geo-engineering is always going to be the only option. Massive scale cloud seeding, etc. De-carbonising of energy supply would actually have been fairly viable too, via nuclear reactors, hydroelectic, etc (rather than solar PV). Maybe we'd have even seen an alternate history where thorium reactors dominated over the more costly, military oriented uranium type, out of necessity for better options. Although I don't *think* that anthropogenic global warming was really a blip on anyone's radar 7 decades ago. It's enough of a struggle, now...