★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The Fated Sky
• Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
• Year: 2018 (mine was library trade paperback)
• Pages: 371
• Genre: Science fiction
• Publisher: Tor
• ISBN 978-0-7653-9894-9 (trade paperback)
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

The followup to Kowal’s multiple-award winning The Calculating Stars, this book was published later the same year, didn’t win any awards, and doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. (There is a Wikipedia page for a book with the same title, but it’s a 1996 YA historical romance, and unrelated to this one.)

Here, Kowal continues the alternate history she began the first book, keeping a core set of characters and adding to it. (Reminder, a meteorite wiped out D.C. in 1952 and caused accelerating climate change that will make life unbearable on Earth in 50 years. The first book was about getting to the Moon.) Now first-person narrator Elma York is part of the first mission to Mars (in the 1960s), which humans hope to prepare for a mass exodus of Earth. While the primary plot point is the long and difficult journey to the red planet, several sub-arcs weave throughout.

 

Praise

Again, the story moves quickly and the book is easy to read — despite voluminous evidence of world-building, research into life in space, and a believable sense of actually living in the 1960s — while obvious things have changed, some other things haven’t. Kowal’s narrator (York) has to deal with the rigid sexism of the times while also coming to a better understanding of the racism her Black colleagues are experiencing.

While a few of the problems that popped up seemed contrived and/or clichéd — like the mission duty roster placing the women in the spaceship’s kitchen/laundry — I did understand that something like that very well would have happened, if women were allowed on the mission at all. (And of course I recall hundreds of sci-fi stories written in the 1950s and ‘60s which indeed brought women along on the space journeys but confined them to cleaning and cooking and baby-making.) Other issues felt they arose more naturally from the plot — like the “Earth First” groups back on Earth who worry that the space program is siphoning too much money from their real, current problems, and fear they’ll be left behind when the population shift to Mars eventually takes place.

One thing Kowal did superbly here, which I forgot to mention in the first book, is the interplay between York and fellow astronaut Stetson Parker. Parker is meant, I think, to be the representative of who we used to see in astronaut stories like The Right Stuff, a very qualified former war pilot who’s also white, handsome, and charismatic. Kowal presents his casual competence so well, but also with strong undertones of not understanding his own racism and sexism, that I could almost count how many times she watched or read those old astronaut classics. Even more perfect is how Parker and York clash, even when they’re trying not to, because neither understands the depths of the other’s motivations. At points, I thought they were going to have an affair, but Kowal carefully wrote around this and continued to perfectly express how two very competent people sometimes just don’t get along.

 

Points Off For...

I didn’t actually remove a point for this, but it irked me that “Curtis Frye” was a bad guy. Of course my name doesn’t have an E on the end, but it does seem like any time a “Fry” or “Frye” is mentioned in science fiction, they’re usually a bad guy. (Or really stupid, as in Futurama.) This complaint is, of course, specific to me.

I did catch a grammar error near the end (“become” should have been “became” or “becomes”), but that’s not enough to remove a point either. And a few times the placement or movement of characters was unclear to me; during an entire passage for example, I thought two people were inside the airlock already, but then Kowal said they went into the airlock. That might have been a consequence of me being distracted by shrieking, playing children as I read.

 

Conclusion

I held off the fifth star simply because this book didn’t “wow” me as much as the first one did. Still, I think it’s very good. Though I’ve read a dozen or more “let’s go to Mars” stories, I’ve never read any like this one, which dealt so accurately with the science, included so many qualified women and non-white people, dealt head-on with the prejudices they experienced, and had so many compelling characters.

Soon I plan to read the third book in the series, which was released a month or so ago (The Relentless Moon), and if it’s anywhere near as good as these first two, this could end up being my favorite sci-fi trilogy.

 

 

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