Review: The Relentless Moon

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a couple of years since Mary Robinette Kowal put out a novel in this alternate history series of the Lady Astronaut, and a year or so since The Calculating Stars won that Hugo and got my attention onto this series but good. So now, I've finally bought and read a copy of the third book - one that's more of a sequel to Book 1 than Book 2, taking place roughly concurrently with The Fated Sky as promised, and following more early 60s progress on Earth and the Moon in the post-Meteor timeline. This time, our POV character isn't Elma York, but Nicole Wargin, Lady Astronaut and wife of the charismatic Governor of Kansas, who's looking to run for President in 1964. Of course, this being a dangerous post-apocalypse of a solar system, it throws every wrench it can in both their ways. Frequent disastrous mechanical failures of rockets to the Moon, Earth First terrorists stoking riots and trying to blame it on race, continued geological and climatic cataclysms on Earth, a polio outbreak on the Artemis lunar base provoking preventative measures that feel eerily prescient of COVID (which of course struck after Kowal finished writing this book), especially since this alternate timeline doesn't have a polio vaccine as Jonas Salk never finished his work on it. And, in Nicole's case, anorexia, which she's mostly got a handle on, but has caused her some serious long-term health complications that tend to loom large throughout the novel. While a bit on the long side, especially compared to its predecessors, The Relentless Moon is a more than worthy addition to Kowal's Lady Astronaut Universe, helping bridge the gap between the first two books and the upcoming fourth, The Derivative Base, pretty neatly, if I do say so myself.

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