Review: The Calculating Stars

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This year's Hugo winner for Best Novel, and oh so very well-deserved it was - and oh, how I'm going to start reading every Mary Robinette Kowal book I can get my hands on now! A brilliant piece of alternate history that reads like the love child of Deep Impact and Hidden Figures, Kowal's novel takes us to a 1952 where a meteorite impact off Chesapeake Bay wipes out the East Coast, plunges the world into a nuclear winter, and then, by 1956, promises a huge spike in global warming due to the greenhouse effect caused by all the steam and ejecta from the impact. So the world's fledgling space agencies are now determined to start some emergency interstellar colonization...but because it's the 1950s, there's a lot of less-than-stellar gender and racial politics involved, which our heroine Elma York, as a gifted engineer and as part of a diverse team of gifted engineers from around the world, ends up having to challenge head-on. No wonder she's prone to anxiety attacks - wouldn't you in her shoes? But this is - excuse me - a damn fine novel, and I'm very glad that not only is there a sequel already available (I hope it wins next year's Hugo already!), but Kowal has promised at least two more stories to follow. Given that this is all meant as a prequel to Kowal's Hugo-winning short story "The Lady Astronaut of Mars," I can only imagine just how increasingly expansive in scope her work will get!

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