The Calculating Stars

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

Probably somewhere around 3.5 to 3.75 stars. Overall, this was a book that had a refreshingly unique premise. There were some important issues in it that were just a bit touch-and-go and weren't explored as in-depth as I would wish, and I felt like the book could do with a bit more focus and impact, but overall this was not a bad read and while the 1950s misogyny in it has softened somewhat today (though perhaps not in certain fields of study), a lot about it is sadly all too relatable.

Our protagonist is Elma York, an ex-WASP pilot for the USA during WW2 and also mathematics genius. She and her husband Nathaniel York are taking a break in the outskirts of Washington when a meteorite impacts D.C., wiping everyone and everything within a large radius. Aside from the immediate devastation, climate scientists ring the alarm bells to state that the greenhouse effect from the meteorite impact will greatly accelerate and heat up the planet, making it uninhabitable for humans. Suddenly, the space race becomes imminently important, and no longer a race as much as a collaborative international effort - if humanity is going to survive at all, colonizing other more habitable planets in space may be the only way out.

This book is set during the early 50's and reimagines how human history may have turned out if such an extinction event had happened just then, right at the beginning of the space race. Most his-fic books merely use time periods as a pretty backdrop for characters who still sound and act and think very much like they're from 21st century, but this one - doesn't, and I have to give Kowal credit for that. This also means that we see some attitudes from pretty much every character in the book that would be pretty unpalatable to us today - misogyny, racism, sexism, anti-semitism, fanatic nationalism... the works. I liked that these attitudes weren't just attributed to the antagonists of the novel while the protagonist and the people allied to her are miraculously liberal-minded just so that they'd be more appealing to a 21st century readership. While Elma is certainly feminist for her time, and her husband Nathaniel is almost unrealistically supportive of her career in STEM, both of them still occasionally slip up with thoughts that are very much of that time period. Elma gets moments where she is racked with guilt for not being a proper wife, because she's not taking care of the bills or doing house chores. Nathaniel, while supportive, sometimes still struggles to balance his support for Elma with the pressures of the all-male and misogynist environment that he works in, being the lead engineer of the IAC (the book's fictional equivalent of NASA).

I did enjoy that we saw character growth and development in the book, especially for Elma since the whole book is from her perspective. At the beginning of the book, though not actively racist, she is still fairly sheltered. The first time she enters a bar frequented by Black people with Eugene Lindholm, a Black pilot who hosts Elma and Nathaniel after they escape the devastation of the meteorite impact, Elma realises that she has never been in a room with so many Black people before, and makes some faux pas along the way. She does advocate for diversity in the Lady Astronauts being hired by the IAC, championing for Helen, a Taiwanese pilot and “computer” (a name given to mathematicians in the IAC, I suppose?) and who gets frequently passed over because she isn't white.

That being said, however, I felt that the book barely scratched the surface of these topics. A lot could have been done for a book set in the 50s, but ultimately Elma was still the white heroine of the story, set apart from her peers even though she acknowledges that they are just as deserving as her. I wouldn't usually have a problem with this because that's how most stories go, but if the topics were touched on in the book but then we still have an ending where we only have one white person winning out, the issue of racism and diversity feels like they were just shoehorned in to check mass appeal boxes. We did see Elma struggle massively against the weight of misogyny through the book, but then I think not enough was said about the privilege she had because she was 1) white and 2) married to a relatively influential engineer - both of which were briefly acknowledged but then never delved into.

Another huge part that didn't work for me in this book were the really awkward intimate scenes. I'm totally fine with sex scenes when they make sense for the plot but it just didn't really feel necessary at all in this book, and there were so many! Not only that, but they were all bogged down by really, really cringey maths and rocket-inspired sexual innuendo. E.g. ”I'll have to see how good you are at launching rockets.” Oh my god, I get it, Elma and Nathaniel are a very, unrealistically happily married couple whose sex drives are always on high. It just felt like very out of place, and also detracted from the other more important issues I'd have liked to see discussed more in the book, as I mentioned above.

We also have our primary antagonist for the book, Lt Parker, misogynist supreme and primary obstacle in Elma's way. I appreciate that Kowal tried to give him some depth instead of being a cartoon villain, but I also felt like he flip-flopped a lot between being weirdly tolerable and even giving Elma some opportunities, to downright blackmailing her and then actively trying to leak potentially damaging information about her to the press. It was all very confusing.

I also felt like the ending could've been more fully fleshed out - everything felt a bit too rushed and convenient to get the nice ending that we expected. In particular, I was very surprised that we didn't even get to see a last farewell scene between Elma and Nathaniel, considering how much intimacy we've been seeing from them through the book. However, I also really liked how we saw Elma's anxiety play out in the way she kept having thoughts about it could be the last time she talked to this person, or the last time she did this thing, in the days and moments leading up to her first space flight. It was incredibly relatable for me as someone who also has those anxious thoughts leading up to an event that I'm fearful and anxious about, so I appreciated the accuracy of that.

Ultimately, it was entertaining enough. I may pick up the next book but probably not so soon.

Felt like i was reading an autobiography even though it was fictional. An interesting read about a mathematician/pilot's journey to becoming an astronaut while also living in the aftermath of a meteorite landing that caused a natural disaster. All set in the 1950s.