Belated Wednesday Reading: The Fated Sky (Lady Astronaut #2)by Mary Robinette Kowal

[chomiji]

I wanted to like this. It's not a bad book, and Kowal is a lovely human being who has several times poured oil on the troubled waters of the professional SF community, but I couldn't get hooked properly.

The story of Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, started out in The Calculating Stars. As others have noted, this was very much an AU of Hidden Figures, except from the point of view of a nice liberal Jewish white woman who is a pilot and a calculator. I should perhaps point out that I am also a liberal Jewish white woman (dunno if I'm nice). This second volume takes the AU space program past its moon base stage and into the long voyage to establish a base on Mars. Elma is part of the crew, which is split across two ships.

I should like like Elma, but I don't. Maybe it's a bit of a culture clash: she's a southern U.S. Jew from my parents' generation, whereas my folks were from New York City (well, the Bronx) and I was raised in the DC area. She never seems very Jewish to me, no matter how many times she goes to synagogue, whispers prayers in Hebrew, and celebrates holidays. In fact, there are only two times she really comes alive for me. The first when she deals with her near-crippling social anxiety (usually by mathematical means, such as mentally reciting as many digits of pi she can remember).

The second time is a confrontation she has about halfway through the voyage with two of her African American colleagues. They discover that she's been trying to intervene secretly on their behalf in the matter of the unequal assignment of menial versus scientific duties (as well as in a subplot about African Americans accused of sabotage back on Earth), and they are unsurprised to find out that it's backfired on them. It's happened all too many times before. Elma is about to go off in a classic display of White Women's Tears (stoic brainiac version) when she has her revelation: it's not about her. It was never about her. I remember my own similar but much less dramatic epiphany (which occurred during Racefail, IIRC) that intention is not magic, and that when you screw up, you need to deal with it and not make your own discomfort the center of the discussion, and I appreciate what Kowal is doing.

Finally, Kowal seems to have a habit of using characters for one particular purpose and then more or less forgetting about them. Once Elma has her Burning Bush episode with her black colleagues, they fade into the background. Once the commander finally confronts the real racist in the crew, we barely hear a peep about the creep for the rest of the trip. Given that we're talking about less than a dozen people crammed into two small ships, this is pretty odd.

On the other hand, as the stakes ratchet up, there's some real tension about how the crew will get to Mars, and in what condition. Things get grotty and immediate in a very effective way about a third of the way along, and at that point reading became compulsive.

So, a mixed bag. This felt like a dutiful and carefully written attempt to make an old-school space adventure with new-school heart, inclusive and personal, but I didn't care about the story's flaws while characters' lives were on the line.

Comments

[ursula]

I have a similar reaction to Elma (I'm maybe 2/3 of the way through Calculating Stars; the library keeps taking it back). I think it might be indeed a culture-clash thing: the other person I know most frustrated with her is from New Jersey.

[ambyr]

I don’t think it’s regional; I’m a Jew who grew up in NC, and Elma’s Jewishness feels very awkwardly pasted on to me. It’s one of the reasons I stopped after the first book.

[chomiji]

Yeah, it reminds me of my reactions to the protagonist of the Invisible Library series. I can't warm up to Irene at all. I keep reading the series because the worldbuilding and plots are pretty good, but I'm not really interested in that woman and I don't believe in her positive feelings toward just about anyone. To me, it all feels pasted on.

[muccamukk]

I finally decided last took in this series, after reading like six books by Mary Robinette, that I just wasn't ever going to find her MCs all that relatable. SHE obviously finds them relatable. I like her, as a person, but I always find them very nice and very bland.

And she's obviously trying to respect the whole own voices thing, but that always seems to end up backgrounding the marginalised characters too much, and end up being about the Nice White Lady too much.

And if I read ONE MORE rocket pun about sex.

(I should be ALL OVER a NASA AU with justice for the Mercury 13, but I haven't read a single one that's worked for me.)

[sovay]

And she's obviously trying to respect the whole own voices thing, but that always seems to end up backgrounding the marginalised characters too much, and end up being about the Nice White Lady too much.

Caveat that I have not read the book, but if you write your Jewish protagonist to feel like the yardstick of the Nice White Lady and not any kind of marginalized character in her own right, I think that is badly represented. The point is not to bastardize intersectionality into oppression Olympics; the point is that Jewish whiteness when it exists is always conditional, and especially if Kowal's AU NASA at all resembles our historical one, the protagonist should not be structurally interchangeable with any other non-Jewish white female calculator-astronaut who could have carried the book.

[edit] To be clearer, I am fine with her having epiphanies about what is and isn't about her! That's an important part of being an adult person in a complex world! But I get really twitchy when Jews with white privilege are treated as "just like white non-Jews, but with different religious practices," because that's how we end up with people insisting that national and global levels of anti-Semitism can't be rising murderously, because everyone knows Jews aren't marginalized enough to be in danger. Also it just isn't true.

[muccamukk]

It's been a while, but I'm trying to remember if her protag did face much in the way of discrimination based on her religion. There was mention of having trouble with kosher, since she was a refugee, and of course it's so close to WWII that that was still echoing through her family, but it did feel very much, to me (not Jewish) as another Kowal NWL protag, who happened to be Jewish. But I might not be remembering it very well. (It was last book that I was threw up my hands and said, you're Jewish mathematician astronaut feels exactly like your WWI heiress ghost hunter, feels exactly like your regency magician lady of quality, and I GIVE UP.)

[chomiji]

I can't honestly remember Elma's getting any thing worse than some askance looks for her Jewishness. She certainly didn't seem legit worried about it. In the current political climate, I regularly feel cold in my gut when I read the news: "Jews will not replace us" and so on. In Elma's place, I would have been really worried about being such a prominent public figure because someone was bound to try to dig up dirt about her and her husband, possibly disguised as Red Scare stuff. But that rarely if ever comes up.

[sovay]

In Elma's place, I would have been really worried about being such a prominent public figure because someone was bound to try to dig up dirt about her and her husband, possibly disguised as Red Scare stuff.

If the Red Scare is a factor in this AU, then the fact that she's Jewish, especially Ashkenazi Jewish (and not American-born? muccamukk said she was a refugee), should absolutely have had people calling her a Commie.

[chomiji]

Trying to avoid spoilers, but a large number of people in the U.S. are killed or become refugees within their own country as a consequence of a disaster that occurs in the opening pages.

[sovay]

Trying to avoid spoilers, but a large number of people in the U.S. are killed or become refugees within their own country as a consequence of a disaster that occurs in the opening pages.

Check.

(I am more or less completely spoiler-indifferent, although I understand that other people who read your comments may not be.)

[muccamukk]

Yes, sorry, Internally Displaced, is probably the technical term, and that did bring back resonances with family lost overseas, but not as many as one would think in a book set in the 1950s.

[conuly]

And if I read ONE MORE rocket pun about sex.

Is it possible to over do those?

[muccamukk]

If every single sex scene, and there were a lot in the first book, proving that the heroine was a red-blooded american woman who was really into her husband (I GUESS), is rocket pun-based? The answer is, "Yes. Yes it is."

[chomiji]

It didn't help that they generated, like, zero heat. I don't think I could write a whole novel-length well-researched SF work like this, but dude, I can write a hotter pre-sex scene than that.

[kis]

Interesting review.

[chomiji]

♥