★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The Lady Astronaut Of Mars
• Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
• Year: 2012, 2013 (read it online)
• Pages: N/A
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Publisher: Tor
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

This novelette won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Novelette (after first being disqualified in 2013), and its prequel (The Calculating Stars) just last night won the 2019 Hugo for Best Novel. It can be read online at Tor.com (both here and here).

The story — which I read in about half an hour — describes the inner struggle of astronaut Elma York, age 63, as she contemplates the choice of taking one more space mission or staying on Mars to experience the death of her ailing husband, Nathaniel. The story is set in an alternate space travel timeline, one that is more fully fleshed out in recently published prequel novels.

 

Commentary

I found the narrative poignant and evocative, and unusual among the many sci-fi stories I’ve consumed in that the main character was older (especially for an astronaut), and that it strongly featured the struggle of a caregiver and her competing/contradictory emotions.

In my experience, people in sci-fi stories older than middle-age (if used at all) tend to be side characters, and usually in a few stereotypical roles like distant parent or grandparent, statesmen, tycoons, generals/admirals, or unnamed societal castaways. Here, the reader gets inside the head of a 63-year-old woman — though the writer is close to my age. Further, illness in science fiction tends to be a plot point (evidence of alien infection, perhaps, or the plot requires a quarantine time gap or many deaths) rather than front-and-center as an experience.

 

Points Off For...

In addition to my general rule of withholding a fifth star unless something is truly spectacular, I felt immediately critical of the first sentence. The first sentence gave me the distinct impression I was reading a third-person narrative, with “Dorothy” being the main character. But then the second sentence switched gears suddenly, indicating we were in a first-person story, told by someone other than Dorothy. It took a few minutes (and multiple re-readings of the first few paragraphs) before I settled in my head that the story wasn’t about Dorothy and that it was first-person.

 

Conclusion

It won’t take much of your time and it’s a pleasant (but also a bit sad) story that requires little from the reader. I recommend it.

 

 

---

---

comments powered by Disqus