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