Wrote this review and while the stronger comparison is to the first
I watched Hidden Figures (again) earlier in the day that I It isn't about spoiling the ending, the beauty of The Fated Sky is in the journey.
We know how the progression of Elma's story, where she ends up.
Each of the two books are tagged as "Lady Astronaut" novels and Mary Robinette Kowal won a Hugo Award for her story " The Lady Astronaut of Mars". There is a fledgling base and colony on the moon, regular round trip missions from the earth to the moon, and the IAC (International Aerospace Coalition) is planning for its first Mars mission. The Fated Sky picks up a few years after the end of The Calculating Stars. It's a lot to live up to, but the near perfection of The Calculating Stars only serves to whet the appetite for The Fated Sky. The Calculating Stars was a masterful novel that will surely find a place on many Year's Best lists and a number of awards ballots. Well, at the very least, Kowal acknowledges this breach of etiquette in the author's note, and I sincerely hope that she does better going forward."Do you remember where you were when the stars came out? I was with my husband, on Mars."Īfter reading The Calculating Stars ( my review) earlier this year, I wrote about how Mary Robinette Kowal did more than achieve a sense of wonder, she brought the dream of spaceflight beyond the page and directly into readers hearts. I think that might be the only real reason why I found myself taking off a star on this book - especially since such misgendering in the prerelease copy led to the delay of The Madness Blooms. There's even some subtle inclusion of LGBTQ+ issues as well - though Kowal acknowledges that one character, Kam, is transgender but hasn't quite figured himself out well enough to come out publicly, meaning that Elma, as narrator, unintentionally misgenders him through the entire novel. In these new 1960s, there's already an Artemis Base on the Moon (tip of the cap to Andy Weir there?), but the fight for racial and gender equality continues to brew both on the Moon and on Earth, forcing all our favorite Lady Astronauts to constantly side-step interfering government trouts and separatist forces of varying stripes. Nearly a decade after the meteorite impact that kick-started this whole story in The Calculating Stars, Elma York and all her fellow Lady Astronauts are fighting for their rights and recognition against a backdrop of not only the Civil Rights Movement, but also an accelerated Space Race. The alternate timeline, now moved up to 1961 and beyond. The sequel to this year's Hugo winner for Best Novel, The Fated Sky is, according to Mary Robinette Kowal, the second half of a duology - but it's not the end of the Lady Astronaut series, because Kowal has at least two more companion novels planned, at least one of which is meant to be roughly concurrent with this book in the timeline.
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