Heather Reads Books's Reviews > The Calculating Stars

I haven't been this disappointed by a book in a long time. I should learn not to get my hopes up so high, but this one really pulled the wool over my eyes. It is a continuation of a story I did like: I read the short story (called "novelette") of Kowal's featuring the main character, Elma York. It's a simple but well-written story, and I considered Elma to have both heart and gumption. I liked her a lot. The story won a Hugo award, which is pretty notable.

So when I heard this novel was being published to tell the prequel story of how Elma York, the first Lady Astronaut, helped colonize Mars, I was here for it. 1950s Cold War era alternate timeline? A reimagining of the space race from a female perspective, in which a plucky heroine tears down prejudices and stereotypes? Cool, smart references to Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors? Real science in my science fiction? Yes, yes, yes, and YES. My body is so ready.

Did the book deliver on any of these things?

Not really. And in a rather cruel fake out, too, because the first one hundred pages or so is quite engaging. The depiction of Elma as a young married woman trying to get her life together in the post-World War II period only to have to grapple with a large scale disaster like the meteor strike rang quite true. I appreciated that she had bucked tradition and flew planes to aid the war effort. I appreciated that her background was Jewish, so that she would understand what it was like to come from a marginalized community. I thought it was interesting for her to discover that the rescue efforts by the government were divided along racial lines, and that she cared enough to do something about it. All of this is good stuff, often overlooked in fiction, which feels more important than ever to explore in our current tumultuous times.

After a time-skip, however, it's like the author decided to drop her own meteor on the narrative. It is difficult to encompass just how spectacularly this novel falls apart, but I must attempt to count the ways.

Characters. I realized halfway through there were either no characters I felt like I knew - or if I did know them, I didn't like them. Obviously we are with Elma the entire time, but she became insufferable so fast. What came off as a world-weary snark in the original story turned into self-absorbed arrogance and incomprehensible mood swings. She also had a strangely privileged background: despite growing up in Depression era 1930s as a girl in a Jewish minority community in the south, she somehow possesses a mathematical genius that allowed her to attend college in her early teens and earn a PhD in mathematics. .... Sure. And then during the war she was able to fly planes and avoid sexual harassment of other officers because she was the daughter of a general. Okay. Handy. Never mind that this novel is unapologetically set up to be about underdogs prevailing, as it states on the back cover: "Elma's drive to become the first Lady Astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her." Because of this, I found the incredible advantages she starts out with to be a strange narrative choice, to say the least. And she only stumbles from there.

The other most frequently seen character is her husband, Nathaniel. Again, I liked him at first, but soon his role as the Most Understanding Husband in the World grew wearisome. At every turn, Nathaniel knows exactly what to say! He's dedicated to the success of his wife's career, even though it's 1952! He's so compassionate! He never blames Elma, even when she is so out of it she forgets to pay the electric bill and their power is shut off! How did she find this AMAZING catch of a man? The book never tells us. I kept waiting for some memory of a meet cute, a wartime love story against all odds, but it never happens... though we do get a few out of place harlequin romance-esque sex scenes. So that was disappointing, as was the inhuman ability for Nathaniel to avoid any potential conflict between him and Elma (view spoiler)[even when she vomits all over his office from nerves and he thinks she's pregnant. But when it turns out she's not, he's super cool about it. I kept waiting for some discussion of having a family, since, you know, it's the fifties, but nada (hide spoiler)].

Everyone else in the book is barely more than a caricature of the worst variety: we get a (usually non-American) name, a mention of what makes them part of a marginalized group, and a sole defining quality of their character has something to do with said marginalized group. The Asian character has stilted English. The Arab character has to stick to Muslim prayer times in the rocket-ship. The French character speaks French. Women of all stripes complain about the men who are always groping them in the workplace. The disabled character talks about his disability. The Jews talk about their religion. I know this was some attempt by the author to show diversity and inclusivity, but these ensemble characters are so poorly drawn the effect is ironic: reducing these people to the one thing that makes them the "other" instead of taking pains to draw them as complex human beings reinforces the stereotype. You can't just stuff your book with exotic names and achieve proper representation.

World-building woes. One of the things I was really interested in with this premise was the alternate history aspect. How would the post-war Cold War era progress with some sort of catastrophic event decimating the US, with repercussions felt around the world? Would it ratchet up tensions between America and the Soviet Union? What would the space race look like if it was to Mars to live, not just the moon to say we can? What about the very real climatic changes the earth would be undergoing as it was slowly dying? What about decolonization? Western democracy versus Communism? The nuclear arms race? So much was happening at the time on the world's stage and I couldn't wait to see how it played a role.

Boy, was I disappointed. I realized by the end I had no idea what had happened in most of the United States, let alone around the world. There is a vague mention of the former Soviet Union (when did it collapse? Why?), what sounds like the beginning of the Algerian war, and local food riots, and Communist China also having a space program, but the characters don't really react to any of these events. (It is revealed in the "historical note" in the back that the author pulled most of the news stories that start each chapter from real newspapers, and these provided most of what I understood about what was going on in the world, and they were largely divorced from anything the characters interacted with, much to my confusion when I was reading. This makes me suspect maybe she plopped these in after the fact to try to simulate current events without having to write them into the narrative herself.) The space program is somehow hiring a number of foreigners, but there's no explanation of why or how.

Worse, despite predictions in the first part of the novel that the earth would soon become uninhabitable, there is no real indication of hard times in the characters' periphery, nothing to put the pressure on to solve problems and get those people to Mars. There was even a section where some one-off characters posit that the notion that the earth was warming as a result of the meteor that destroyed the eastern seaboard and killed millions of people and displaced millions more was a hoax. Reader, I get the wink and the nod, but I would think this was a harder event to deny than gradual climate change.

Pacing and plot. This is where the book really started to get counter-intuitive. It is a not-short 400+ pages, and it has a second book. That's fine. There's a lot of time to cover here. Decades, really. But things go glacially. (view spoiler)[For instance, I really figured we'd get to Mars by the end of the book. Spoilers, we do not. Elma doesn't even break atmo until the last sentence. (hide spoiler)] Then, instead of the plot being taken up by high-stakes situations, like how to make a foreign planet hospitable for longterm human life while people are slowly choking to death outside by the bad air and starving from world-wide crop failures, what is the main obstacle for Elma? Is it institutional sexism that keeps her from the space program even though she is clearly the most qualified for the job? Is it the crushing societal expectations coupled with social pressure and ostracism trying to force her into a domestic life she doesn't want nor need?

Nope.

It's stage fright.

That's right. She can do Einstein-level math in her head, avoided German bombers in WWII, but she just can't talk in front of a crowd. She throws up every time, because some boys were mean to her in school I guess?

This is literally the main conflict of the book. It's not Elma against a broken system, or humanity against all odds. It's Elma against herself, and it's baffling because it seems to be the exact thing that would feed the misconception that women are too emotional to go into space. I found myself thinking she did seem too emotional to go into space! What if she has a panic attack while trying to do some maneuver that got the rest of the crew killed and the bajillion dollar rocket destroyed? How far would that set the program back while the rest of humanity was at stake?

Then, the solution comes up quickly with a ham-fisted "it's okay to ask for help" message and some anxiety pills seem to give her an immediate cure all. Never mind that I'm pretty sure most medication for nervous disorders back then knocked you off your feet and/or were highly addictive. Surely Elma is space-worthy now!

I could keep going, because plenty more happens that defies explanation, but I'm tired. I'm especially tired of books that try to shove modern day agendas into period pieces. I'm certainly for more nuanced discussions of mental health issues, but reducing Elma's struggles to some minor and frankly first-world problems is a kick in the teeth to anyone who weathered real persecution and forged a path to progress through social activism. This book, despite its promising premise, betrays a shallow understanding of these historical struggles on almost every level.

Needless to say, I'm skipping the sequel.