The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal

 

The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal is the third book in A Lady Astronaut Series.

Started: 7/6/2022
Completed: 11/27/2022
Recommendation: Mild Recommendation
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I did not like the change in narrator for this book.  I have consistently found this character off-putting and truly did not find her less so inside her own head.  Some of the details revealed helped explain why she was able to cope with the astronaut program (and, oddly, other details made it clear she should not have done well).  The "fog of war" approach to different aspects of the astronaut corps not really knowing what other parts were doing as well as sketch communications worked, but it just made me yearn for the smaller scope books which focused on one person and her effort to do one thing--be an astronaut--instead of the narrator for this book who seemed to be doing, well, almost everything.  Being one of the first exploring the moon did not jive very well with the concept of the women being after thoughts in the astronaut corps as a whole and so was a little too convenient.

The Fated Sky, Mary Robinette Kowal

 

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal is the second lady astronaut novel.

Started: 11/15/2021
Completed: 12/19/2021
Recommendation: Mild Recommendation
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

Some parts of this book are excellent (what is the proper way to handle a dead crew member in long distance space travel?).  Others are mostly annoying ("I miss my husband" is both obvious and it just is said over and over).  The end of the novel sort of suggests that there was much more, but the book was getting too long.  Why they chopped up the ending the way that they did is hard to understand.  It seems like there was a huge amount of detail about some of the crew members that was just left empty.  I picked up the next book, but I'm not sure if I will continue the series past that book unless things improve.

The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal

 

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal is sort of an alternate history science fiction novel and is the first "A Lady Astronaut Novel."

Started: 10/16/2021
Completed: 11/15/2021
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: The author of this series is up for a Hugo with the most recent book in the series, so I wanted to read the series (and maybe go to the conference this winter where I could vote)

Review:

The premise is a good one.  As a result of events described early in the book, the "calculators" are women (just like in the early part of NASA) and not machines.  This wedge is used to leverage women into the space program.  The book is well written and it looks at the issues of all kinds of biases.  The romance seems, well, 1950ish, but I wasn't in it for the romance anyway!