The Fated Sky

July 1, 2018

After successfully establishing base colonies on the moon, the International Space Coalition looks to the next step: traveling to Mars. Lady Astronaut Elma York definitely wants in on that trip, but this voyage will be both historic and especially dangerous. It's 1961, and the burgeoning civil rights movement may finally see individuals of all races on equal footing across the globe. But in the meantime, Elma must face the ups and downs of being a woman in a male-dominated field as she struggles to make her mark. As a nearly three-year trip to the next planet in our solar system looms, will Elma be able to leave her husband and chance at a family behind? VERDICT This gripping follow-up to The Calculating Stars is a near-perfect combination of real-world issues set in an alternate universe. Highlighting the racial tensions of the early 1960s with a frantic race for space colonization, Kowal's deft writing is sf at its best.--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2018
Elma York's enterprises as the Lady Astronaut continue in this follow-up to Kowal's The Calculating Stars? (2018). It's 1961, three years after that novel's conclusion, and mankind has set up a temporary society on the moon. When Elma returns to Earth, the International Aerospace Coalition?desperate for good PR?assigns her, its most famous astronaut, to its first Mars mission. Elma agrees, even though it means leaving her husband behind for three years and, as she realizes belatedly, replacing her more qualified Taiwanese friend. Most of the story occurs within the Mars-bound spaceship. Fires, broken antennas, and E. coli by turns threaten the crew's safety, ramping up the suspense and drama. Racism and misogyny complicate matters further. Elma's boss still thinks it's funny to make sexist jokes, while some colleagues want to keep the brown-skinned astronauts on the kitchen and laundry roster. In the process of trying to fix these social issues, Elma often makes them worse. An alternative look at the midcentury space race led by an intelligent, well-meaning, but flawed heroine.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 2, 2018
Kowal continues her exquisite exploration of race and gender relations in an alternate 1961 that is still shockingly close to our own. The stunning second part of Kowal’s duology picks up 10 years after a meteor strikes Earth (depicted in The Calculating Stars) with series heroine Elma now serving as a pilot to the lunar colony. After she survives being taken hostage by a terrorist organization opposed to space travel, Elma is asked to join the first Mars mission, replacing a close friend and incurring the resentment of the existing crew. For Elma and her colleagues on both ships, contained in close quarters for three years far from family and friends, the journey is filled with tension, joy, terror, and sorrow, including the deaths of crew members and an anxious period when contact with Earth is cut off. The clever details of life in space—from baking challah in zero gravity to finding tricks for communicating privately, as well as the more horrifying practicalities of how to deal with illness and corpses—create an immersive world that will stay with the reader well past the final page.

June 15, 2018
A female physicist journeys further into space in Kowal's (The Calculating Stars, 2018, etc.) sequel, set in an alternate version of the 1960s.In 1961, Dr. Elma York is about to finish her three-month stint on the moon. In Kowal's last book, set a decade earlier, a meteor smashed into the East Coast, destroying many cities, including Washington, D.C. The U.S. government believed that this was the beginning of the end for our planet, so an international effort to colonize space began with pilot and physicist Elma at the forefront. Now, having reached the moon, the space program sets its sights on Mars. Elma desperately wants to go there, but the round trip will take three years, taking her away from her infallibly supportive husband, Nathaniel, and any possibility of starting a family. The story is loaded with historically accurate science, and while Kowal is striving toward hard sci-fi, the analytical readers that this genre attracts are likely to have questions. For example, would an international coalition really need South Africa's support so desperately they would agree to include a virulent racist on a racially integrated mission? Why is there not even a single mention of the Soviet Union or its cosmonauts? And the biggest question: Are we supposed to like Elma York? She's irritatingly quirky, repeatedly using rocket metaphors as euphemisms for sex ("I slid my hand down to his trousers to see if launch conditions had been met"). She's also morally reprehensible in one key scene. FBI agents ask her about two of her colleagues, and she realizes that they're doing so because those fellow astronauts are black. She's about to do the right thing and walk out--but when the feds threaten her program's funding, she sits right back down and tells them everything they want to know. Later, when Elma is finally castigated for her racial cluelessness by an astronaut of color ("For the love of God, stop talking....I cannot take the protestations of a well-meaning white woman"), readers will find themselves nodding in agreement.The worst tendencies of white feminism--in space.

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