Review: The Martian Contingency

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been waiting for almost five years to finally read the fourth novel in the Lady Astronaut universe, the third to feature Elma York as the primary POV. Unfortunately, this one is definitely a mixed bag for me, especially if it’s to be the last book in the series as Kowal has indicated. On the one hand, it’s still very technical in its approach, giving tons of reasons as to how the Martian habitat (do NOT call it a colony; Elma will hate your guts) has to deal with nearly impossible odds stacked against the survival of everyone living within.

Overall, though, this one undeniably feels like a string of short stories that were stretched to form a novel, with surprisingly little tension between individual story threads (though some of those individual threads are very gripping by themselves.) Additionally, while Kowal does a great job representing a variety of diverse cultures and experiences (and highlighting the disgusting racism that fueled old boy villain Vanderbilt deBeer, whose characterization feels tons more apropos now that Elon Musk fills in the role of “incurably racist Afrikaner” in today’s world), there are still a few issues that I’m surprised she didn’t address better. Namely, the character of Kam, whom Kowal admitted to having had Elma unintentionally misgender in the second book because Kam wouldn’t have been able to come out as a trans man yet. I honestly think it would’ve been better to have had the detail of Kam’s gender identity come up in this book instead, because Kowal’s idea of a workaround is to have Elma go out of her way not to refer to Kam with any gendered pronouns, as if to say that the character is supposed to be unaware of Kam’s true gender even though the author and reader know better. Then again, it’s not a first for Kowal, handling character genders in an unusual way - I still remember how in The Spare Man, she had everyone introduce their pronouns alongside their names, but also did away with gendered honorifics.

Kowal may not get everything right, but again, it’s the technical details of the world building where she shines the most. That, and also the in universe news articles at the start of each chapter, many adapted from real world articles of the time. It’s also interesting to see how the Martian calendar is developed - the Martian months are named by adding “m” at the end of their abbreviations, resulting in names like “Marm,” “Maym,” “Julm,” and “Octm;” there are seven sols of the week with their names taken from ours; they use terms like “yestersol” and “tosol;” and they need to match various religious celebrations to the old calendar as well (Jewish, Christian, and Hindu holidays among them.)

I really do hope to see more of this series from Kowal, though if this is truly the last in the series…well, I understand.

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