Scattered thoughts on The Calculating Stars
It’s a good book and I liked it
Here’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, the first book in the Lady Astronaut series published in 2018. It’s alternate history hard science fiction about the early space race. Dr Elma York is a wannabe astronaut who flew with the Women Airforce Service Pilots—or WASPs—in the second world war, ferrying military aircraft to the front lines, and now she and her husband Nathaniel work in the fledgeling space program at NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). In early 1952 an asteroid destroys the East coast of the United States making the colonisation of space an international priority.
This is not really a review, on account of me being bad at those, I just have some brief thoughts (which became “scattered” rather than brief after I discovered I had like forty things to talk about and had to start trimming the ramble). I think if you’re interested in the premise you’ll enjoy the book, and don’t need me to recommend it. Instead, once I finished I found myself with a few things to think about, and I’ve been trying to do more of that thinking before rushing on to the next book in a series.
This will be… not spoilerific, but also not caring about spoilers. I don’t think this book has a whole lot of twists personally, and is more about the journey, but if that bothers you this isn’t the not-review for you. If it doesn’t though, here are an arbitrary eight themes and story beats I thought were interesting.
The opening is truly chilling. I read the first few chapters of this book sitting out in the sun on a warm late-spring afternoon, and it felt like I was taking a dip in ice-water. Sure, meteors get to me, but the impact (ha ha) of the description of Elma and Nathaniel’s escape was much more than I normally expect when I’m not reading a novel as an audiobook (which, for whatever reason, get to me emotionally much more than the printed word).
Everyone assumes it’s an atomic bomb at first, and so Elma and Nathaniel first have to work out what’s going on, and then get away as fast as possible ahead of the shockwave. It’s an incredible opener and you could come to be disappointed by comparable lack of action in the rest of the book, but I think it works.
The Lady Astronaut. Cards on the table, I’ve be aware of this book for a while1 but neglected to read it because I had come to entirely the wrong impression about it based largely on the name of the series.
I think The Lady Astronaut might have originally sounded to me like a regency romance in space. To be clear I love me a romance novel, but for some reason tend to avoid regency romances that aren’t literally by Jane Austen2 and so whatever I had constructed in my head didn’t appeal. This is unfair, not least because authors don’t always get to choose the names of their books or series, but also because the figure of “The Lady Astronaut” (particularly as opposed to Elma herself) is a very interesting one in the story.
As an additional irony is that The Calculating Stars is kind of an anti-romance novel. Not that there isn’t any romance, or that the relationship between Elma and Nathaniel goes south, but because they begin the novel in something like the end-state of many romance books I would read and enjoy. By the beginning of March 1952 Elma has already fought many battles both figuratively against society’s expectations for women in the first half of the 20th century, and also literally against Messerschmitts. She’s found a handsome and charismatic man with compatible interests who has a senior position in a scientific field at a young age, and she has her own job in the same organisation that plays to her strengths and lets her help Nathaniel in his work in a way that doesn’t violate HR policies about relationships in the workplace. And now they’re taking a holiday after the success of a project they both worked on, to a cabin in the woods he inherited and to which they travelled in a plane she flew.
I’ve read and enjoyed this book, or some that fit this pattern, set in the 21st century and called feminist. There’s nothing wrong with being a helpmeet but there is a problem when you’re limited to that role. What separates Elma’s story from those comfort reads is the way she strives for more, and tries (sometimes) to bring others with her.
The clock of destiny. In today’s world the 1950s is an aesthetic more than a historical decade that really happened, and generally not a good one. As it happens most of the stuff I was taught in school about this period was in the context of the American Civil Rights Movement, and that not enough to have a real chronology in my head. One thing this book does for colour is to start chapters with real headlines, altered as little as possible to fit in the World of the Meteor. For example, for Chapter 31:
DR. KING TO LEAD ANTI-BIAS TREK
15,000 Southern Negroes Going to Capital to Observe 4th Year of School Decree
MONTGOMERY, AL, May 18, 1957—Next week, a young Negro minister will lead a pilgrimage to the Meteor Memorial in Kansas City to mark the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation order.
I, a fool, assumed when reading that this was a reference to the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was of course the scene for the delivery of I Have a Dream, but in actuality that was in 1963 and instead the ‘Meteor Memorial’ is subbing in for the Lincoln Memorial in the earlier Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, commemorating the 3rd anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.
There’s plenty more going on in this period—and in this book—that I have very little knowledge about. The existence of Black mechanics, airclubs, and airshows are all particularly important to the narrative but I wasn’t aware of these at all. At times Elma has duelling tendencies to be a white saviour and also to ignore the struggles of Black men and women in favour of her own interests; she gets better but it’s a big part of her character arc.
The premise is boiling. The post-meteor space program is driven by climate change. They calculate from the beginning that the impact will cause a few years of global cooling followed by accelerating global warming, driven by increased water vapour in the atmosphere, ultimately to the point of the end of all human life on earth.
It would be hard to not to interpret this in the context of global warming in the real world. Some people want us to go to space to escape right now, when the warming is our fault, and doing something about it would be vastly easier.
I’m not sure what I make of, after the time jump, the lack of urgency from some characters. We have a societal problem in the here and now that we can’t focus on a crisis3 and some of that exists in this alternate 1950s. I like to think that this is primarily a modern issue, but I could well be deluding myself here.
What’s in a Computer? Elma, along with many of the other female characters in the book, works as a Computer—literally a person who computes, by hand, professionally. That’s not a job that exists anymore, because we have the machines we know as computers today, but the 1950s was a transitional period where the new was only beginning to replace the old. Reference is made to an IBM ‘mechanical’ computer that keeps overheating and needing its work checked; I’m not sure exactly what kind of machine this is referring to, as we’re also in the transition between analog and electromechanical computers and digital but largely vacuum-tube computers.
By the way if you’re at all interested in the latter kind from this era I heartily recommend the Usagi Electric Bendix G-15 restoration youtube series; as I’m writing this section I’m listening to this 1956 fridge-sized machine play Silent Night in the latest video.
Surprise Nazi warning. In my notes was a comment on not seeing a lot of Wernher Von Braun, the (in)famous German rocket scientist who was brought to the US as part of Operation Paperclip. He is mentioned briefly by Elma as a (presumed) survivor in the immediate aftermath of the meteor, but is dismissed out of hand even by the novel’s primary antagonist, Stetson Parker:
“You’re the top scientist in rocketry right now.”
Neither of us needed a reminder of how many people at the NACA were likely dead. I rested my hand on Nathaniel’s knee, to steady him as he had steadied me. The NACA, however, was not the only rocketry program. “Not to undervalue my husband’s work, but Wernher von Braun is at the Sunflower Project in Kansas.”
Parker snorted and gave me a pained smile. He’d hated being polite to me during the war, when he had to because of my father; and now he hated being polite to Dr. York’s wife. “Ma’am, it’s nice that you want to help, but I hope you understand that I can’t involve a former Nazi like von Braun in questions of national security.” And then he was looking at Nathaniel again, ignoring me completely.
He is then blessedly absent for about half the book, until the chapter right after I made that aforementioned note.
Now, I maintain that surprise von Braun should unsettle anyone—his presence as von Kerman in Kerbal Space Program is my only real problem with that game, and I put this book down for a week4—but our protagonist is a Jewish woman who fought in the second world war and gives us a concise summary of why. But part of this book is about being forced to make compromises due to a lack of power, and so Elma can’t say it out loud.
I took a breath and stood to join Parker behind Clemons. I kept both of them between me and von Braun. Not because I thought he was going to pick me up and haul me off, but because it sickened me that people forgave him for what he’d done simply because he was a brilliant rocket scientist. A “nice” man. A “gentleman.”
Luckily, this scene is the only in-person appearance of von Braun in the book, but I suspect it’s not the last in this series.
Yes! We have Miltown! An important part of the story is the “happy pill” Meprobamate, brandname Miltown in Elma’s world and ours. This is an early anti-anxiety medication that was extremely popular in the late 1950s before being supplanted by slightly more modern pharmaceuticals in the following decade.
We have a stereotype of 1950s housewives as being over-medicated on primitive psychoactive drugs to deal with intense social isolation and other issues of the period prior to the emergence of the second wave of feminism. It’s fascinating to have a character who exists in this context—though who very much is not a housewife—who has to battle with her own pride viz taking medication and also the stigma surrounding relying on it.
There is an aspect to the mental health of everyone in this story that I think would be more salient in real life: they talk about the stars, but I think it’s much more important that by the end of the book, nobody has seen the sun in years.
“To space.” I clinked my glass against his and sipped it, bubbles rising up to bring flavors of apricot and flint along the top of my palate. “Do you think they’ll remember what the stars looked like?”
He shook his head. “Rachel doesn’t.”
My breath caught in my throat. Of course. She’d only been five when the Meteor hit. By the time the dust settled, there was enough steam in the air to give us near constant cloud cover.
Look, I liked cloudy wintry days as a kid, but mostly only because that meant I could stay indoors and read books or play videogames if I wanted; as an adult I have a keen appreciation of how much of a downer they can be. What would five years of overcast weather with no sign of letup do to society? Would we become completely obsessed with seeing the sun again? Or would we be too depressed to do anything about it before we steamed in our own juices? I’m not sure how well this could actually integrate into the story, especially if the answer is the latter, but at the same time it’s the one largely unaddressed5 aspect that breaks my immersion in the story.
Dewey Defeats Truman. The obvious question in any alternate historical fiction is about the point of divergence: who died, failed to steal secret documents, didn’t die, was never born etc,6 to set the ball rolling on the fictional history. But unless earth politics can affect orbital mechanics this story needs at least two: the 1952 meteor itself and the US election of 1948.
Thomas Dewey, the idea seems to be, was a more bellicose president than second-term Harry Truman, and so accelerated the US space program in the late 1940s and early 50s; the result of this is that by the opening scene the Americans have launched three satellites more than five years before the real-world Sputnik 1. Is this realistic? Possibly, but historical note suggests that (sigh) we also need some more von Braun shenanigans even earlier.
The point being that if people had thrown money at him in 1945, von Braun had a plan to get people to Mars. So I put a president in power who would throw money at him, and then I dropped an asteroid on D.C.
Did one of these changes affect the rest? I’m not sure Dewey nudged any rocks, and the book isn’t terribly interested in the politics anyway. Overall I’m prepared to just not know in this instance.
There is a purist argument to be made that alternative fiction shouldn’t have more than one point of difference driving the plot. I’m sympathetic to that idea but I think this story still works, which is by far the more important thing.
I had other things (Dr York vs Mrs Dr York, what makes a disaster scary to me, the history of artificial gravity, the way trauma scabs over memories, etcetera) but in the interest of not copying out and annotating the entire novel the above 2000-odd words will have to do. Now over Christmas I’ll read the sequel, which was the actual reason I finally picked this one up, and probably the original short story that this book is a prequel to. Here’s to good books.
Apparently I’ve actually had a copy since it was in the Tor Bookclub back in 2020, and didn’t realise that until after I’d bought it.↩︎
I’ve been recommended Georgette Heyer a few times, I need to give her a go.↩︎
This book came out before COVID, for the record.↩︎
There were other reasons for not reading for so long, being sick for one, but a surprise Nazi after thinking this book might be free of them does require thought.↩︎
Elma does have this reaction when she first sees the sun post-impact from a fighter jet: “It had been so long since I had seen clear blue … It ached, that blue. The unobscured sun flared across the clouds and brought tears to my eyes, even with my visor.” But wouldn’t everyone be clamouring for the same experience? The de Havilland Comet was already flying by this point, and should get you well above he clouds in a purely civilian capacity, but conversely it would also increase the desire for true spaceflight.↩︎
It’s usually one of those—the genre may have a problem, or at least a special interest.↩︎