The Relentless MoonA Lady Astronaut Novel by Mary Robinette Kowal 07/14/2020 Macmillan-Tor/Forge

This one stars Nicole Wargin, one of the original 6 Lady Astronauts in this 1950 alt-history where a meteor impact forces the world to look to Mars for a new home for humanity. Earth is facing a slow death, and Kowal has managed to create all the excitement of the space race with a (mostly) new set of players. The biggest technological difference is the lack of electronic computers, relying on the sort of people we saw in Hidden Figures, often women, frequently people of color, and always having to fight for their place.

I worried that having Nicole, a white person of privilege, married to a Senator in the first book, now Governor would obscure the issues that the author so deftly makes relevant in the book, but instead, she turns out to be a perfect lens to look through, aware of the disparities in the world and leaning into the struggle in very genuine ways.

It’s a great story from all the standpoints SF can be great. It holds a mirror up to the here and now, it digs into hard science, and by setting it in the past it doesn’t need (or allow) super=science, and the characters, especially Nicole, are fully realized and challenged. Nicole’s personal struggles include ambition and anorexia nervosa, in addition to coping with the sort of chauvinism that we only wish had disappeared in the past.

If you haven’t read the first two, this could use a paragraph or two of scene-setting, perhaps, but if you read this, you’re covered. I read this as an eBook, which is what most of my reading is these days, and I kept looking anxiously at the % remaining, hoping it would stop shrinking so fast. Highly Recommended.