“Dr. York. What does the upturn on that chart represent?”
“That…that is when the oceans begin to boil.”
Mary Robinette Kowal’s Hugo-nominated novel starts in a 1952 America that’s just slightly different from ours. Thomas E. Dewey defeated Harry S. Truman, and then gave famous rocket scientist (and former Nazi) Wernher von Braun the leeway to start the space race years earlier than it happened in our timeline. Kowal explains the difference in her afterward: “…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.”
The Calculating Stars is a set on an Earth that will soon be completely unlivable. Humanity has to get off-world in order to survive, and by the time the meteorite wipes out the Eastern seaboard they hadn’t even gotten a man into orbit yet. The women of the International Aerospace Coalition (skilled mathematicians and many of them former WWII pilots) are vitally important to the project, even if the rest of the world still thinks that outer space is “no place for a woman”. Elma York and her fellow computers (don’t call them “computeresses”) are determined to prove them wrong.
The story begins with Elma and her husband Nathanial witnessing the effects of the asteroid strike from their vacation cabin. And even though the disaster is the driving event of the whole book, this does not end up being a post-apocalyptic disaster story. Not really. Hundreds of thousands of people are killed in the impact, but the rest of the world is still up and running, so you get to see the people of of 1952 slowly realize that, after a few years of nuclear winter, the dust that’s now permanently blocking the stars will trap enough greenhouse gasses to cook the planet alive.
(Some of them never do accept this. Cue the inevitable “the weathermen can’t even predict the weather for the next weekend” and “it’s snowing in LA and you’re trying to tell me it’s going to get hotter”, and “do we really need to waste money on a space program when my district needs funds for recovery”, and most importantly “Are we sure the Russians didn’t have anything to do with this?”)
Reading this book is an immersive trip back to the 1950’s, the styles, the celebrities (Hey there, Mr. Wizard!) and of course the attitudes that we only wish we’d left behind in the last century. The author takes a gentle hand with this when she needs to, so it mostly come across as the background noise of everyday prejudice (“Funny, you don’t look Jewish…”). That noise gets louder when it comes to things like the initial rescue planes only going to white neighborhoods and only bringing back white refugees, and it gets positively deafening when it comes to women of any race trying to join the space program.
The pushback against women becoming astronauts is constant, relentless, and everywhere. Sometimes it’s that supremely annoying “well-meaning” sexism of not wanting delicate females to risk being hurt. Every now and then it comes across as an ugly irritation against women who are trying to muscle into men’s territory, and it turns into a barely suppressed rage when they manage to do just that. Our narrator Elma dealt with years of abuse from professors and fellow students for being better at math than them, and she’s developed a full-blown anxiety that literally puts her on the floor at the idea of public speaking. Imagine a situation where your options are either to give up, to repeatedly fail when the rules are deliberately made harder to follow, or to succeed and be punished for that as well. And medication for anxiety? Well obviously that means you’re not qualified for anything, what on Earth were you thinking?
(If all of this sounds way too stressful to read, I’ll give you one plot element for free: Elma’s husband Nathanial is a candidate for my Best Husband in Fiction award. He’s endlessly supportive, a true partner, willing to tell her what she needs to hear about needing to get treatment for anxieties that are making her too ill to do the work he knows she’s capable of. And he never says “No wife of mine is going to risk her life going to space”, or anything that even comes close to that. Not once. You’re welcome.)
Having the story set from Elma’s point of view keeps things interesting, as she goes back and forth between terror and self-doubt to grim determination. She’s not trying to change reality, she’s trying to get the people in charge to recognize the reality that already exists. There are skilled women pilots, ones who risked their lives in the war even though they were officially kept from being combat pilots. The female computers are essential for the space program, with a grasp of mathematics that sometimes rivals the male engineers. The female body can withstand G-forces as good if not better than the male body can, and the women of the IAC are perfectly capable of keeping calm and not flying into hysterics during a disaster.
This is more than a bra-burning tirade against the patriarchy though. Elma isn’t just trying to become an astronaut because of some kind of female agenda, she loves her job. She loves the math, the science, the ever evolving technology, even the constant work to meticulously map out how every one of the hundreds of thousands of separate pieces of a space ship can fail, and how to fix it in seconds (with all the tiny details that make 1950’s technology fascinating). Elma runs through the digits of Pi to soothe her nerves, practically dances at the chance to pilot a new plane, and is a woman from the South who’s more than a stereotype (I love that she knows the correct usage of “Bless your heart” to mean “You’re just asking to be set on fire.”)
Most of all she will stand with her colleagues – all of them – and do what it takes to give the stars back to humanity.