The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
2019 Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award Winner (Review contains spoilers)
I was really chuffed to find this book at the local library before lockdown, it had made a clean-sweep of all the awards, and can there be a better recommendation than that? It appeared to be a large book, but not dauntingly so.
The setting is in the early 1950's where our protagonist Elma is a young lady camping with her husband in the mountains on the East coast of the USA and thus happen to not be home when a meteorite lands in Chesapeake Bay and vapourises the Eastern Seaboard. Being a talented engineer/scientist that worked for NASA she quickly realises that this is game-over for the human race as climate change will make Earth uninhabitable in about 50 years. So she and her husband make their way west at the spearhead of a deluge of refugees, link up with the military, and start a new kind of space-race.
Eh. I really don't want to go to the effort of reviewing this one, but that would be taking the easy way out. The novel really started going downhill when the protagonist rejoins the military and is put back under her previous commander, the womanising sort that would rather let the world burn than let a woman do a man's job of flying an aeroplane. I acknowledge that in the 1950's sexism was a massive issue and that makes this a historically accurate novel.
But I just don't enjoy reading about overt sexism. I was annoyed and angry that the officer wouldn't pick the best person for the job of saving the Earth, regardless of what gender that person happens to be. I wanted to read about what humanity was doing to save itself from this catastrophe, what I was actually reading about was how unfair it was that a woman couldn't be an astronaut as easily as a man. Historically accurate, but not the kind of story I'm interested in.
Unfortunately it wasn't just that. The book also included plenty of historically accurate racism too. Our protagonist was, of course, entirely aware of, and sympathetic to, the racism against people of colour going on at the time. All women and black people being oppressed equally by the mighty white man eh? Even at the literal end of the world.
Well, I didn't finish the book, maybe all the white men got their just desserts by the end of the story. However I just don't like reading about never-ending petty small-mindedness in my free time. In belated hindsight I'm wondering if Emla suffered from being a bit of a Mary-Sue character as well. She was an ace pilot, engineer, champion of black people, humble and selfless to a tee, and I'm having trouble thinking of any character flaws.
All in all I find this a very difficult book to recommend to anyone. If you're interested in an alternate history from the perspective of an unfairly discriminated again woman, then yeah, this would be ideal. However I found the book far too preachy and unsubtle in its agenda to enjoy the exploration of the idea of what would happen if mankind were forced to accelerate their colonisation of space.1/5