Review: The Fated Sky

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The sequel to this year's Hugo winner for Best Novel, The Fated Sky is, according to Mary Robinette Kowal, the second half of a duology - but it's not the end of the Lady Astronaut series, because Kowal has at least two more companion novels planned, at least one of which is meant to be roughly concurrent with this book in the timeline. The alternate timeline, now moved up to 1961 and beyond. Nearly a decade after the meteorite impact that kick-started this whole story in The Calculating Stars, Elma York and all her fellow Lady Astronauts are fighting for their rights and recognition against a backdrop of not only the Civil Rights Movement, but also an accelerated Space Race. In these new 1960s, there's already an Artemis Base on the Moon (tip of the cap to Andy Weir there?), but the fight for racial and gender equality continues to brew both on the Moon and on Earth, forcing all our favorite Lady Astronauts to constantly side-step interfering government trouts and separatist forces of varying stripes. There's even some subtle inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues as well - though Kowal acknowledges that one character, Kam, is transgender but hasn't quite figured himself out well enough to come out publicly, meaning that Elma, as narrator, unintentionally misgenders him through the entire novel. I think that might be the only real reason why I found myself taking off a star on this book - especially since such misgendering in the prerelease copy led to the delay of The Madness Blooms. Well, at the very least, Kowal acknowledges this breach of etiquette in the author's note, and I sincerely hope that she does better going forward. Because there's at least two more novels ahead, and I can't wait to read any of them!

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