Review: The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

[Russ Allbery]

The Calculating Stars
by Mary Robinette Kowal

Series:    Lady Astronaut #1
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: July 2018
ISBN:      1-4668-6124-X
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     429

Elma York is a (human) computer, working for the early space program in
the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1952. She and her
husband Nathaniel, one of the lead engineers, are on vacation in the
Poconos when a massive meteorite hits the Atlantic Ocean just off the
coast of Maryland, wiping out Washington D.C. and much of the eastern
seaboard.

Elma and Nathaniel make it out of the mountain via their private plane
(Elma served as a Women Airforce Service Pilot in World War II) to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where the government is
regrouping. The next few weeks are a chaos of refugees, arguments, and
meetings, as Nathaniel attempts to convince the military that there's
no way the meteorite could have been a Russian attack. It's in doing
calculations to support his argument that Elma and her older brother, a
meteorologist, realize that far more could be at stake. The meteorite
may have kicked enough water vapor into the air to start runaway global
warming, potentially leaving Earth with the climate of Venus. If this
is true, humans need to get off the planet and somehow find a way to
colonize Mars.

I was not a sympathetic audience for this plot. I'm all in favor of
space exploration but highly dubious of colonization justifications.
It's hard to imagine an event that would leave Earth less habitable
than Mars already is, and Mars appears to be the best case in the solar
system. We also know who would make it into such a colony (rich white
people) and who would be left behind on Earth to die (everyone else),
which gives these lifeboat scenarios a distinctly unappealing odor. To
give her credit, Kowal postulates one of the few scenarios that might
make living on Mars an attractive alternative, but I'm fairly sure the
end result would be the end of humanity. On this topic, I'm a
pessimistic grinch.

I loved this book.

Some of that is because this book is not about the colonization. It's
about the race to reach the Moon in an alternate history in which
catastrophe has given that effort an international mandate and an
urgency grounded in something other than great-power competition. It's
also less about the engineering and the male pilots and more about the
computers: Elma's world of brilliant women, many of them experienced
WW2 transport pilots, stuffed into the restrictive constraints of 1950s
gender roles. It's a fictionalization of Hidden Figures and Rise of the
Rocket Girls, told from the perspective of a well-meaning Jewish woman
who is both a victim of sexist and religious discrimination and is
dealing (unevenly) with her own racism.

But that's not the main reason why I loved this book. The surface plot
is about gender roles, the space program, racism, and Elma's
determination to be an astronaut. The secondary plot is about anxiety,
about what it does to one's life and one's thought processes, and how
to manage it and overcome it, and it's taut, suspenseful, tightly
observed, and vividly empathetic. This is one of the best treatments of
living with a mental illness that I've read.

Elma has clinical anxiety, although she isn't willing to admit it until
well into the book. But once I knew to look for it, I saw it
everywhere. The institutional sexism she faces makes the reader want to
fight and rage, but Elma turns defensively inward and tries to avoid
creating conflict. Her main anxiety trigger is being the center of the
attention of strangers, fearing their judgment and their reactions. She
masks it with southern politeness and deflection and the skill of
smoothing over tense situations, until someone makes her angry. And
until she finds something that she wants more than she wants to avoid
her panic attacks: to be an astronaut, to see space, and to tell others
that they can as well.

One of the strengths of this book is Kowal's ability to write a
marriage, to hint at what Elma sees in Nathaniel around the extended
work hours and quietness. They play silly bedroom games, they rely on
each other without a second thought, and Nathaniel knows how anxious
she is and is afraid for her and doesn't know what to do. He can't do
much, since Elma has to find her own treatment and her own coping
mechanisms and her own way of reframing her goals, but he's quietly and
carefully supportive in ways that I thought were beautifully portrayed.
His side of this story is told in glimmers and moments, and the reader
has to do a lot of work to piece together what he's thinking, but he
quietly became one of my favorite characters in this book.

I should warn that I read a lot into this book. I hit on the centrality
of anxiety to Elma's experience about halfway through and read it
backwards and forwards through the book, and I admit I may be doing a
lot of heavy lifting for the author. The anxiety thread is subtle,
which means there's a risk that I'm manufacturing some pieces of it.
Other friends who have read the book didn't notice it the way that I
did, so your mileage may vary. But as someone who has some tendencies
towards anxiety myself, this spoke to me in ways that made it hard to
read at times but glorious in the ending. Everywhere in the book Elma
got angry enough to push through her natural tendency to not make a
fuss is wonderfully satisfying.

This book is set very much in its time, which means that it is full of
casual, assumed institutional sexism. Elma fights it in places, but she
more frequently endures it and works around it, which may not be the
book that one is in the mood to read. This is a book about feminism,
but it's a conditional and careful feminism that tactically cedes a lot
of the cultural and conversational space.

There is also quite a lot of racism, to which Elma reacts like a
well-intentioned (and somewhat anachronistic) white woman. There's a
very fine line between the protagonist using some of their privilege to
help others and a white savior narrative, and I'm not sure Kowal walks
it successfully throughout the book. Like the sexism, the racism of the
setting is deep and structural, Elma is not immune even when she thinks
she's adjusting for it, and this book only pushes back against it
around the edges. I appreciated the intent to show some of the
complexity of intersectional oppression, but I think it lands a bit
awkwardly.

But, those warnings aside, this is both a satisfying story of the early
space program shifted even earlier to force less reliance on mechanical
computers, and a tense and compelling story of navigating anxiety. It
tackles the complex and difficult problems of conserving and carefully
using one's own energy and fortitude, and of deciding what is worth
getting angry about and fighting for. The first-person narrative voice
was very effective for me, particularly once I started treating Elma as
an unreliable narrator in denial about how much anxiety has shaped her
life and started reading between the lines and looking for her coping
strategies. I have nowhere near the anxiety issues that Elma has, but I
felt seen by this book despite a protagonist who is apparently totally
unlike me.

Although I still would have ranked Record of a Spaceborn Few higher,
The Calculating Stars fully deserves its Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award
wins. Highly recommended, and I will definitely read the sequel.

Followed by The Fated Sky.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-08-24

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>