Review: The Fated Sky, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sat Feb 20 20:45:14 PST 2021


The Fated Sky
by Mary Robinette Kowal

Series:    Lady Astronaut #2
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: August 2018
ISBN:      0-7653-9893-1
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     380

The Fated Sky is a sequel to The Calculating Stars, but you could start
with this book if you wanted to. It would be obvious you'd missed a
previous book in the series, and some of the relationships would begin
in medias res, but the story is sufficiently self-contained that one
could puzzle through.

Mild spoilers follow for The Calculating Stars, although only to the
extent of confirming that book didn't take an unexpected turn, and
nothing that wouldn't already be spoiled if you had read the short
story "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" that kicked this series off. (The
short story takes place well after all of the books.) Also some minor
spoilers for the first section of the book, since I have to talk about
its outcome in broad strokes in order to describe the primary shape of
the novel.

In the aftermath of worsening weather conditions caused by the Meteor,
humans have established a permanent base on the Moon and are preparing
a mission to Mars. Elma is not involved in the latter at the start of
the book; she's working as a shuttle pilot on the Moon, rotating
periodically back to Earth. But the political situation on Earth is
becoming more tense as the refugee crisis escalates and the weather
worsens, and the Mars mission is in danger of having its funding pulled
in favor of other priorities. Elma's success in public outreach for the
space program as the Lady Astronaut, enhanced by her navigation of a
hostage situation when an Earth re-entry goes off course and is met by
armed terrorists, may be the political edge supporters of the mission
need.

The first part of this book is the hostage situation and other
ground-side politics, but the meat of this story is the tense drama of
experimental, pre-computer space flight. For those who aren't familiar
with the previous book, this series is an alternate history in which a
huge meteorite hit the Atlantic seaboard in 1952, potentially setting
off runaway global warming and accelerating the space program by more
than a decade. The Calculating Stars was primarily about the politics
surrounding the space program. In The Fated Sky, we see far more of the
technical details: the triumphs, the planning, and the accidents and
other emergencies that each could be fatal in an experimental spaceship
headed towards Mars. If what you were missing from the first book was
more technological challenge and realistic detail, The Fated Sky
delivers. It's edge-of-your-seat suspenseful and almost impossible to
put down.

I have more complicated feelings about the secondary plot. In The
Calculating Stars, the heart of the book was an incredibly well-told
story of Elma learning to deal with her social anxiety. That's still a
theme here but a lesser one; Elma has better coping mechanisms now.
What The Fated Sky tackles instead is pervasive sexism and racism, and
how Elma navigates that (not always well) as a white Jewish woman.

The centrality of sexism is about the same in both books. Elma's public
outreach is tied closely to her gender and starts as a sort of
publicity stunt. The space program remains incredibly sexist in The
Fated Stars, something that Elma has to cope with but can't truly fix.
If you found the sexism in the first book irritating, you're likely to
feel the same about this installment.

Racism is more central this time, though. In The Calculating Stars,
Elma was able to help make things somewhat better for Black colleagues.
She has a much different experience in The Fated Stars: she ends up in
a privileged position that hurts her non-white colleagues, including
one of her best friends. The merits of taking a stand on principle are
ambiguous, and she chooses not to. When she later tries to help Black
astronauts, she does so in a way that's focused on her perceptions
rather than theirs and is therefore more irritating than helpful. The
opportunities she gets, in large part because she's seen as white,
unfairly hurt other people, and she has to sit with that. It's a
thoughtful and uncomfortable look at how difficult it is for a white
person to live with discomfort they can't fix and to not make it worse
by trying to wave it away or point out their own problems.

That was the positive side of this plot, although I'm still a bit wary
and would like to read a review by a Black reviewer to see how well
this plot works from their perspective. There are some other choices
that I thought landed oddly. One is that the most racist crew member,
the one who sparks the most direct conflict with the Black members of
the international crew, is a white man from South Africa, which I
thought let the United States off the hook too much and externalized
the racism a bit too neatly. Another is that the three ships of the
expedition are the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and no one in
the book comments on this. Given the thoughtful racial themes of the
book, I can't imagine this is an accident, and it is in character for
United States of this novel to pick those names, but it was an odd
intrusion of an unremarked colonial symbol. This may be part of Kowal's
attempt to show that Elma is embedded in a racist and sexist world, has
limited room to maneuver, and can't solve most of the problems, which
is certainly a theme of the series. But it left me unsettled on whether
this book was up to fully handling the fraught themes Kowal is
invoking.

The other part of the book I found a bit frustrating is that it never
seriously engaged with the political argument against Mars
colonization, instead treating most of the opponents of space travel as
either deluded conspiracy believers or cynical villains. Science
fiction is still arguing with William Proxmire even though he's been
dead for fifteen years and out of office for thirty. The strong
argument against a Mars colony in Elma's world is not funding
priorities; it's that even if it's successful, only a tiny fraction of
well-connected elites will escape the planet to Mars. This argument is
made in the book and Elma dismisses it as a risk she's trying to
prevent, but it is correct. There is no conceivable technological
future that leads to evacuating the Earth to Mars, but The Fated Sky
declines to grapple with the implications of that fact.

There's more that I haven't remarked on, including an ongoing excellent
portrayal of the complicated and loving relationship between Elma and
her husband, and a surprising development in her antagonistic
semi-friendship with the sexist test pilot who becomes the mission
captain. I liked how Kowal balanced technical problems with social
problems on the long Mars flight; both are serious concerns and they
interact with each other in complicated ways.

The details of the perils and joys of manned space flight are
excellent, at least so far as I can tell without having done the
research that Kowal did. If you want a fictionalized Apollo 13 with
higher stakes and less ground support, look no further; this is
engrossing stuff. The interpersonal politics and sociology were also
fascinating and gripping, but unsettling, in both good ways and bad. I
like the challenge that Kowal presents to a white reader, although I'm
not sure she was completely in control of it.

Cautiously recommended, although be aware that you'll need to grapple
with a sexist and racist society while reading it. Also a content note
for somewhat graphic gastrointestinal problems.

Followed by The Relentless Moon.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-02-20

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-9893-1.html

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


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