My life in books

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars takes place in an world that was much like our own, until a massive catastrophe - the fall to earth off the coast of the US of a meteorite last enough to precipitate an extinction level event (ELE) - changes everything. In this iteration of our world, the calculations that show the inevitable changes in climate that will make the planet uninhabitable within decades are accepted as scientific fact by the world’s political leaders, who decide upon a two-pronged approach - to try to ameliorate the effects of the catastrophe to save life in earth, and to colonise the solar system so that if necessary, humanity will have another home.

It’s lucky, in a way, that this catastrophe falls during the early post-war period, when science was respected and economies were still capable of being mobilised to meet goals. If Kowal had chosen to set such a novel today, I suspect no such response to a global catastrophe would have seemed realistic - but this was still the era of potential.

The narrative is focused on Elma Wexler, a former WASP - one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who, as civilian pilots attached to the military, ferried airplanes wherever needed, including to the front, during the Second World War. Elma, now retired, and her husband, Nathaniel York, a scientist with the Manhattan Project during the war, and later with the fledgling American space program, survived the concussive wave that destroyed most of the east coast, and Nathaniel’s colleagues at Langley, by accident - they were on vacation in the Poconos, having flown out in Elma’s little Cessna - and were able to fly west out of the circle of destruction to reach an air force base that would temporarily become the centre of the immediate response to the meteorite fall.

It is Elma, who is not only a pilot but a calculator - one of the women whose mathematical skills enabled the pre-computer space program to determine how to get an object into orbit and bring it home, whose calculations prove that humanity is facing an ELE. Both Nathaniel and Elma become part of the international effort to reach space, but Elma has a secret goal - to be one of the astronauts that goes into space.

If you’ve read the original novelette that sparked the series, Lady Astronaut of Mars, you know what happens, in the broadest of strokes, in both the race to colonise the system and Elma’s personal quest to become an astronaut. But that doesn’t change the reader’s absorption in the details of the process here, told over the years as it happens.

But while Kowal tells us the story of a successful space program, and the frustrations of a fully qualified woman locked out of her dream of going into space, Kowal also gives us a look at the society of 1950s America that does not flinch from uncomfortable truths. Elma and her husband Nathaniel are Jewish; there are hints of anti-semitism, and echoes, in the deaths surrounding the fall of the meteor, of the devastating losses of the Holocaust. There is ample evidence of the high degree of segregation and the entrenched racism of the time, in everything from the choices made during the post-cataclysmic evacuation not to look for survivors in black neighbourhoods, to the bitterness of black women pilots, who can’t even hope, as Elma does, that they could get anywhere near the astronaut training program. Kowal does not forget the dynamics of the society she’s chosen to place her break in history within.

The novel also deals sensitively with disability. Elma has an anxiety disorder, brought on by the highly pressured and misogynistic atmosphere she faced as an early entrant - and a female ine at that - into a prestigious math and physics program at university. The disorder surfaces when she must take on public relations tasks as a part of her quest to open the astronaut corps to women, and she begins taking sedatives to deal with it - a choice that will jeopardise her position when women are ultimately allowed into astronaut training and she is one of the successful candidates.

The second of Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” novels, The Fated Sky, takes up a few years after the first novel ends. Having made it to the Moon, and established the beginnings of a colony there, the next goal in the space program is Mars. The extreme climate changes triggered by the Meteor fall are beginning to have demonstrable effects - the temperature is rising, the cloud cover remains thick, adding to the greenhouse effect, and while it is possible that not all the earth will become uninhabitable, still, the need to provide a ew home for humanity is very real, and the Moon is not an ideal location for a self-sustaining colony. But not everyone is convinced that the space program is necessary, and protest is growing, especially among marginalised populations - specifically, in America, black people, who know that if the earth is left behind, they will be too.

Elma has been spending half her time piloting shuttle rockets between colonies on the moon, and half her time on Earth. On one of Elma’s return trips, the rocket is highjacked on landing by a group of black activists protesting the money spent on space that could be better spent on improving conditions on earth. Elma, using her celebrity status as the “lady astronaut” - even though there are a number of female astronauts by now - persuades the activists to release all the other hostages, who are suffering from gravity sickness, which she manages to pass off to the activists as potentially infectious ‘space germs.’ Once again, the lady astronaut makes the news.

To counteract adverse publicity and shore up faltering financial support, Elma is asked to join the the first Mars mission. She accepts, not realising that another astronaut who has been training for the mission with the other crew fir months is being pulled to make room for her. The atmosphere of the mission is compromised from the minute she arrives, and it dies not get any better when the government, suspecting a conspiracy behind the recent highjacking, places pressure on the two black member of the Mars crew, one of whom had been, like Elma, on the rocket when it was taken.

As the novel progresses, we begin to see more and more clearly that Elma, who we are primed by literary traditions to see as the hero, is actually a very flawed character, naive and thoughtless, the perfect example of the white liberal who wants to do the right things, but never actually thinks from any point of view save her own, and ends up making matters worse until she learns to sit back and let those most directly affected by the injustices that anger her take the lead in strategising. She has no idea of how she appears to others, being wrapped up in her own view of herself as both victim and saviour. But the stresses of the journey to Mars become a journey to maturity for her, and by the end of the novel, when she and a handful of other colonists stand on Mars, we feel that she has become something even more important than a hero - a woman who has fulfilled her dreams, and come to know herself in the process.

These are fascinating books, both for their examination of a path to the stars that we might once have followed, and for their uncompromising look at the deep flaws in our society which really have not changed much since the days in which the book is set. We’ve lost the stars, but at the same time, we’ve done little to fix what we have here on earth. It’s this that makes these books a poignant illustration of what might have been.

But at the same time, these are inspiring novels about women in science, and women in space, and my God, I needed to read something like this just now.

Mary Robinette Kowal's Ghost Talkers is a book that crosses genres with impudence and verve. It's a World War I historical romance, with a spunky red-headed heroine and a dashing military officer. It's a wartime spy thriller, with traitors and murders and secret codes. And it's a historical fantasy in which the British make use of a distinctly paranormal source of intelligence - the ghosts of soldiers killed in combat.

In Kowal's slightly alternate world, mediums are real, and the war effort has recruited them to interview the souls of those lost in battle for information about enemy weapon placements, troop movements, anything the revenant remembers about the circumstances of his death. And in turn, the mediums record their final messages for those they leave behind.

Ginger Stuyvesant is one of the mediums of the "London branch" of the Spirit Corps - so named to hide its true location in Le Havre - and her fiancé, Ben Harford, is an officer in British Intelligence. She, like all the other mediums, spends her days talking to the dead, reliving their last moments with them, and then dismissing them to the next plane. And then everything changes, when one of the ghosts reporting in is an officer she knows, stationed in Le Havre, who tells her that he thinks he was murdered - and the last thing he remembers is overhearing is a discussion between two spies that could mean the Germans are planning on targeting the Spirit Corps.

What follows is a fast-paced story of spy vs. spy as Ginger hunts clues to the identity of the spies across war-torn France. There are plenty of red herrings and false leads, dead ends and desperate plots. And of course, a love story.

What gives the narrative extra depth is Kowal's focus on the women (the mediums employed by the war department are mostly women, but the war also relied on the services of nurses, female couriers and other support personnel) and people of colour who were part of the war but are so rarely seen in fictional accounts of The Great War.

Sexism abounds. When Ginger attends a staff meeting as the acting head of the Spirit Corps, she's asked to make coffee. Her reports on the murder and subsequent related events are downplayed because she is a woman. The work that the mediums do - soul-wrenching and potentially deadly should the medium fail to disengage from the departing ghost - is dismissed as "sitting around," in a way that recollects the minimalising of the value of so much women's work. Not even Ginger's beloved Ben, who has learned to acknowledge her value and strength, is completely free of overprotectiveness disguised as gallantry.

Racism abounds as well. The strongest and most experienced medium is Helen, a woman of colour - but not only is she unable to take her natural position as leader of of Spirit Corps, she and other black mediums can't even fraternise with their white colleagues. At the same time, skilled and experienced soldiers from the Indian colonies are sidelined as drivers, and are excluded from the conditioning given to all white soldiers that ensures that they will report after death - then be mercifully dismissed, rather than left to wander the fields they died in.

Kowal's narrative moves swiftly, capturing both the horrors of war (she makes effective use of Rupert Brooke's war poems) and the "whistling in the dark" kind of humour so often found side by side with death and the constant pressure of being in a war zone. In a book which deals so powerfully with darkness, separation, sacrifice and death, she reminds us that there is also love and courage, and that after the dead have passed, life goes on.

"Harvestfruit," J. Y. Yang, july 2014, Crossed Genres
http://crossedgenres.com/magazine/019--harvestfruit/

In this chilling piece of flash fiction, Yang explores the responses of people traumatised by capture and forced integration into a society where they live only to satisfy the needs of others.



"So, You Must Talk to the Woman Who Is Wearing Headphones," Alexandra Petri, August 30, 2016, The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2016/08/30/so-you-must-talk-to-the-woman-who-is-wearing-headphones/?utm_term=.608e14c2aac8

A powerful and very pertinent piece 'inspired' by the public conversation about the inappropriate demands for attention men make on women who clearly do not want to be disturbed.


"The Lady Astronaut of Mars," Mary Robinette Kowal, electronic publication September 11, 2013, Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2013/09/11/the-lady-astronaut-of-mars/

A moving novelette about an aging former astronaut called back in for a final mission that she is uniquely suited to perform, and the emotional costs of deciding between the desire to return to space and the responsibilities that arise from love.


"The Curse of Giants," Jose Pablo Iriarte, March 7, 2016, Daily Science Fiction
http://dailysciencefiction.com/hither-and-yon/magic-realism/jose-pablo-iriarte/the-curse-of-giants

Some stories give you all the clues you need to figure out what's happening, but nevertheless kick you in the gut at the final reveal. This is one of those stories. Some people might debate whether it's really science fiction, or magic realism, or something else, but it's powerful and it's both comment and critique on the world we live in, and the nature of courage.


"Between Dragons and Their Wrath," An Owomoyela and Rachel Swirsky, February 2016, Clarkesworld
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/owomoyela_swirsky_02_16/

Domei and hir friend Hano live in a country that lies between two nations at war, a country ravaged and poisoned by dragons used as weapons of destruction. This story focuses on how the terrible aftermath of war and global exploitation affects innocent people trying to live their lives in the midst of destruction they neither caused nor understand. It is a story of despair, resignation, and faint, distorted hope, and it wracks the soul.