I finally finished it. Took too long to get it, and then too long to read it. Like Dawn says, I felt like I was being preached at. Also, it wasn't a good story with rich characters - it was history with characters filling roles. And then it just... ended... I feel totally manipulated, too, as if this just a setup for more in the series, in which I hope we learn about Parker's wife, and about the public's reaction to all this climate change, and etc.

Note the note at the end, at least of the trade paperback. Kowal admits that she changed bits of history for the convenience of her world-building. It's meant to be mostly historical fiction in re' the social and political attitudes etc. The 'alt' of the alt-history is the space program.

I didn't get nearly enough SF from it, either. Most of it was, tbh, boring.

I kinda liked the sex scenes though, as I agree with the others that it was nice to see these two nerds be so playfully and fully in love and in tune with each other, and so supportive of each other too. ( )

I hella enjoyed that - it was like Hidden Figures rebooted into an alternate timeline. TBH I mixed up my authors and thought this was written by the same author (it was actually written *before* Hidden Figures). It has some rage-inducing sexism and racism, but given what I learned from Hidden Figures it's relatively, and frustratingly, accurate to the time. ( )

Amazing retro history of the space race & fascinating apocalyptic story set in the alternate 1950’s.

Cannot wait to dive into the next book! ( )

I can't read any more of this. How did it win the Hugo Award? Feels like a college freshman wrote it. Ugh. ( )

Having read the NF books of women aviators and "lady astronauts" I was expecting much more from this book. I really never got what the point of it was. Very exciting set-up in the early pages that fizzles to personal emotional reflection for the rest of the book. Solid writing. Not what I was expecting. ( )

La historia alternativa bien hecha me flipa siempre.

Leyendo este libro, no podía evitar imaginarme una serie que adaptase esta historia, no sé a que están esperando para hacerla.

La descripción de la caída del meteorito impresiona y te engancha las primeras paginas para ya no soltarte, pero es luego el costumbrismo y rutina de una agencia espacial, y el personaje de Elma, lo que hace que no quieras parar de pasar cada pagina. Si a estos ingredientes base le sumamos una critica al racismo y las discriminación de la época, aunque sea otra realidad, dota al libro de muchos momentos únicos que explorar.

Tengo muchas ganas de leer la continuación. ( )

A curates egg. Marred by toe curling sex scenes. ( )

The main character was frustrating at times, but I generally enjoyed it. ( )

Kowal won a Hugo for the novelette that was the seed of this book. I worry that might prevent her getting nominated for a Hugo for this wonderful, entertaining, and provocatively enlightening novel. I cannot wait for the next in this series. I am also relatively sure I will be re-reading/re-listening to this book, raising it to a 5-star rating.
[Audiobook note: Kowal, herself, reads the audiobook. She is an accomplished audiobook narrator of other authors' works. So I knew she was going to do a good job with her own material. I was not disappointed.] ( )

The Calculating Stars (the first in the Lady Astronaut series) is an outstanding work of alternative history and deserves all the praise it has received. It won the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novel , the 2019 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the 2019 Sidewise Award for Alternate History. So, this book is kinda a big deal.

The Calculating Stars is an alternate history about the space race, in which a catastrophe (a meteorite crashing into the earth propelling rapid global warming) necessitates an earlier reach for the stars in the 1950s. We follow Elma York, WASP pilot and mathematician as she earns her place as part of the International Aerospace Coalition's team. But Elma isn't satisfied with just being a computer, she's a damn good pilot, and believes that herself and other women in the program are just as qualified to go to the moon as the men are. So Elma attempts to confront various gender barriers in order to become the first Lady Astronaut while a looming apocalypse ensues.

Meticulously researched, The Calculating Stars feels very authentic. The Apollo-era technology is well-researched and well-presented and always feels organic—more organic often than the characters. But Elma is the real start of the story here and by the end of the novel, you'll come to appreciate the time you've spend with her. Elma's personal life provides a fascinating human center to the story.

If you love the history of the space race, alternative history, or just a great story of a women breaking gender barriers to reach the stars, pick up this book ( )

This is far and away the best book I have read this year. I found myself reading at 1 am knowing I needed to go to sleep to get ready for work. Sure that I wouldn't. There are so many things to love about this book. Alternate history well done....check.....great characters......check........great love story.....check.......Space flight.......big giant check.

Do yourself a favor and read this book right now. ( )

I wasn't watching how many hours were left on the audiobook, so I wasn't prepared for so abrupt an ending. I probably won't continue the series... I didn't come back to the book often enough while reading the first to warrant reading the second.

Everything about this book was awesome. Kowal tackles more issues in less than 400 pages than I ever dare hope to touch upon in an entire series. Love the vivid attention to detain in terms of how tragedy seeps into so many tiny aspects of life, and changes the way we think of everything, almost without us knowing. This book does a great job of showing momentum and diving into the deep end.

I would definitely recommend giving it a read! ( )

I almost missed out on Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series. I passed on the first book, The Calculating Stars, when it came out in 2018 because I read the Lady Astronaut label as meaning that I'd be getting some anachronistic, patronising, retro-macho humour dressed as Science Fiction. I should have realised how wrong I was when, a year later, The Calculating Stars won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History but all of those slipped by me. Anyway, I eventually picked up the book because I'd had such a good time with Mary Robinette Kowal's 2022 novel The Spare Man.

This alternative history opens in 1952 with an Extinction Event: a meteorite striking the Chesapeake Bay, obliterating most of the Eastern Seaboard and irrevocably changing the Earth's atmosphere so that the planet will become uninhabitable within fifty years. What drew me in to the novel was that, instead of dumping this information, Star Wars style: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...", Mary Robinette Kowal brought the event down to a human scale by telling the story as a first-person recollection that sets the tone for the book. It starts:

"Do you remember where you were when the meteor hit? I've never understood why people phrase it as a question, because of course you remember. I was in the mountains with Nathaniel. He had inherited this cabin from his father and we used to go up there for stargazing. By which I mean: sex. Oh, don't pretend that you're shocked. Nathaniel and I were a healthy young married couple, so most of the stars I saw were painted across the inside of my eyelids.

If I'd known how long the stars were going to be hidden, I'd have spent a lot more time outside with the telescope."

The person speaking is Elma York, a talented mathematician and former W.A.S.P. (Women's Auxiliary Service Pilot). Her husband, Nathaniel, is the lead engineer at N.A.C.A. (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) which is currently winning the space race with Russia. After a tense escape from the mountain, which includes Elma having to land her plane after its engine has failed, the couple become central to efforts firstly to convince the powers that be that there has been an Extinction Event and then to commit the resources needed to take humanity to the Moon and then on to Mars while there is still time.

This is a remarkable book. Yes, it covers a space program in an alternative history version of the 1950s, following an extinction event, and it does it well, but it does so much more than that. It's not an 'against the odds' struggle story, although the odds are stacked against Elma York and her desire to go into space. What makes it powerful is that It's a personal story about loss, mental health, discrimination, family and friendship.

The storytelling made me laugh and cry but never dropped into melodrama. It stayed true to the science without force-feeding me endless technical information and it reflected the politics and prejudices of the time without becoming preachy or sanctimonious.

What kept me engaged was that the astronauts, the men as well as the women, felt like real people with weaknesses as well as strengths which stripped away the emotional distance that sometimes makes it hard to take in the human collaboration and discipline and courage that makes space travel possible.

I also liked that Elma York was not a kick-ass heroine. She wasn't even a perfect geek-made-good heroine. She was an exceptionally bright woman who suffered from spells of chronic crippling anxiety. She is sometimes blind to her own privilege and her prejudices. She makes mistakes. She's also driven by her own ambition as much as by the desire to save humanity. All of which made me care about what happened to Elma York, to mourn her losses, regret her failures and celebrate her successes.

On top of all that, the plot is exciting, the pace keeps up the tension and Mary Robinette Kowal's narration is pretty close to perfect.

I've already downloaded The Fated Sky, the second book in the series. ( )

Overdramatized

I didn't go far with this, as the author was more concerned with describing scenes that wouldn't have been possible than getting it right. Unforgivable when such a scene described FACTUALLY would have been plenty.
DNF ( )

I spent a lot of this year reading non-fiction and historical fiction about women in WWI and WWII, resulting in a ridiculous amount of knowledge about the WASPs (and WAVEs and computers in Bletchley and...) So I was very into the concept of alt-fiction NACA recruiting WASPs as astronauts. The climate-based apocalypse hit quite close to home. I think one strength was how Kowal captures a lot of the energy at the time: focused, goal-directed, but still heavily hierarchical and sexist and really portrays a time in the US para-military well. I liked the exploration about how sexism affected white women and women of color differently. Kowal also had very good consultants for the meteorology and astrophysics. Unfortunately, the pacing was a bit off: the first third is compelling and fast, and the back two thirds definitely drags through the same problems, introducing more and more characters ( )

I did not enjoy this book much. I didn't care about the cliché characters, the "science", or, strangely, the setting.

Maybe that is because I read so much about the real events, which are some of the most riveting stories I have ever read. Frankly, why bother with fiction, if the truth is so much more interesting? ( )

I enjoyed it. Definitely one of those slower reads there's not "OMG" climax moment or anything like that, but it's an engaging read nonetheless. ( )

Lovely alternate history of the 20th century. Features a former WASP pilot who is now a computer working for the space industry. Liked how she and her husband use science to survive. ( )

I love Mary Robinette Kowal's writing and really wanted to like this book. I just couldn't get past the illogic at the heart of the book.
Her prose and characters are always delightful though.



Spoiler
WHY leave Earth rather than trying to survive on a planet that is much closer to habitable, despite the dire climate change? Mars is so far from being habitable and the resources to get any number of people there would be incredible. ( )

As I was trying to make my way through this I found myself repeatedly wishing it was a multi-POV book rather than 1st person. I think the range and enormity of issues that were trying to be addressed were just too varied to be well-drawn through one perspective. The alternate history and NACA were these huge worlds to build and I was getting no sense of them through just one person's head. It never felt real and thus I was never able to really care what happened to anyone. I was really looking forward to (and enjoyed as far in as I read) the sciencey bits but having read a lot of really good books about the space race it really just made me want to go read more non-fiction rather than keep slogging through a clunky fictional perspective. ( )

Summer 2019 (Hugo Nomination 2019 -- Novel);

Those little girls thought I could do anything. They thought that women could go to the moon. And because of that, they thought that they could go to the moon, too. They were why I needed to continue, because when I was their age, I needed someone like me. A woman like me.

I loved this book. I went into it being told that, and with a wary eye on how much more judgemental I can be on books wishing to be historical fiction (being written about the space race, while I was in the high holy days of everything 50th Anniversary of our walking on the moon), but all of that was so quickly and efficiently checked over to the side.

This book has its own pace, and it won't let you rush it, not even at the beginning when the world is burning around your ears, or later, when you realize months or years have passed, but without it feeling disjointed. I found that alone to be a really great point in its favor, because time skips, especially when trying to conver what would get America to focus on 'The Space Race' (and Space Colonization not just getting to space or the moon) and the actual timelines of making that happen as incredibly different things. Yet this book did them with steady, even aplomb.

There are so many topics I want to touch upon that were handled here so gracefully. There are so many large, hot button topics being handled with such care in this book, that it is very had for me to say any of them is truly more important than any other. It is the balancing of these, without slighting any of them for the other, while being able to comment on all of them from each disparate point, that earned so much of my esteem in this novel.

- The shift of the space race to being one that would involve, equally, a woman and, even more, generally women. That introduced them as the computers and war pilot of our own history but refused to leave them in the past and to leave the future and space only in the hands of men. The fact that this book is about women and the relationships between women, always helping each other forward, and even in making mistakes and atoning for those mistakes, is what makes it sparkle.

- Burgeoning racial awareness (and institutional obliviousness from her own upbringing, into racial defensiveness on the part of those being slighted, ignored, and overlooked) as displayed by our main character through the interaction with her initial crash saviors, her friends, and her fellow Lady Astronauts was absolutely, and mistake-were-made-but-i-kept-trying, believable. I loved getting to see this issue tackled by our main character personally, but, also, by the space program as race, skin color, and sex all intersected in The Program.

- The entirety of handling mental illness and medication from the beginning. The demonstration of what anxiety could look like, how debilitating both having it and ever considering any help for it (especially at what cost might be taken from that help), was in-depth and I appreciated it. I liked that this book showed martial support, therapy support, medicine support, friends & coworkers support, without it making the theme seem outlandish as it continued to be delicately woven through.

- I found myself deeply enmeshed in the constant weaving of the Jewish religion into the story as well. The way that worship first opened the doors to grief. The way that religious intoning ('to life') was the continued toast to dinners and celebrations and to those who are left living in the wake of so many who would never take another breath or live another day. I found myself appreciating the service and speeches, finding more of a reflection of how the world was hit, and was continuing to pick itself back up to push forward.

- I appreciated the healthy marriage depiction. While I did get tired of how often we got 'silly space euphemisms,' I was pleased with the fact that always lead into a fade to black, and that it continually showed us this couple was still having, for themselves and their own lifestyle, a healthy love and sex life. I love their marriage, and the delicate dance they did in trying not to bring their marriage into their workplace daily, where that kept and where it broke.

In the end, I'm definitely looking forward to reading all the other pieces in this series. ( )

I really wanted to love this book, but it was emotionally difficult, and without the reward of novel world-building or technology which I usually look for in sci-fi/fantasy. It seems much more like historical fiction than sci-fi. I don't think it was a bad book, it just wasn't for me. ( )

I loved this book. I went into it not knowing much about the background of the characters or the world. It wasn't until i finished it that I found out it is a prequel to a short story. I'm looking forward to reading more. There is something about prequels that often makes a story feel diminished - for me at least. It might be a personal thing. Maybe it's because you know where the story is going to end before you even start and it's hard not to feel like you are reading backfill. Another reason I'm glad I didn't know about the short story ahead of time.

Some of the criticisms I'm seeing on this book are around the protagonist being a "Mary Sue". If you're thinking about reading this book and those comments have you on the fence, I would highly recommend you disregard them. The protagonist is capable and talented and very good at what she does. But she struggles and fails at times too. I'm going to mangle the terminology... but I think there's some over lap between a pejorative Mary Sue (the term itself is troublesome) and a flatly written "chosen one" story arc. And for me, even a whiff of a one dimensional "chosen one" ruins a story.

While reading this book, I didn't get the chosen one / mary sue feeling at all. ( )

I really wanted to rate this higher than just a 'pretty good' read. The premise is good, I love the space program and Hidden Figures is one of my all time favorite movies, so this book should have rung all my bells. I just found the story to be so...uneven. First, there's this huge crisis of a meteor hitting the Earth, which fuels the launch of the space program. But after the first quarter of the story, the urgency of getting off the Earth largely disappears, and we're back to the alternate history of the space program. Which is interesting, but the story gets caught up in all the prejudices of the 1950's, which is accurate, but...what about the fact that everyone is going to die?

Also, I just never got invested in the characters. The protagonist (Elma) is identifiable, but the other women are just names. I honestly had a hard time remembering who was who. The antagonist (Parker) was the most developed male character, but even he was pretty cardboard. Elma's husband, Nathaniel, was completely flat. I liked the various subplots, 'lady astronaut interviews' and Aunt Esther and the 99s, but they didn't really get developed. In short, I guess I wanted more -- more characterization, more depth.

It just feels like the story never truly found its focus. I hope that the sequels, where we're dealing with a fictional timeline rather than alternate history, are a little more enjoyable. ( )