The third book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “A Lady Astronaut” series is up for a Hugo award this year, and it’s an absolute cracker.
Book One told the story of a world-ending disaster and humanity reaching for the stars from the point of view of the women fighting for their place aboard the spaceships.
Book Two was a Space Adventure, with the adventurers having to overcome many of civilization’s worst aspects while trying to accomplish the impossible task of landing on planet hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth.
Book Three is a story of intrigue, sabotage, and murder. On the moon. The inhabitants of the Lunar colony are being threatened by a faction on Earth who have decided that if the entire human race can’t escape to the stars, no one should.
“…after eleven years, we are no longer content to wait. Our pleas have fallen on infertile ground and so now we act. This serves as notice that the lives of the astronauts and astronettes who started us on this fatal path are forfeit…”
After getting two books narrated by the Lady Astronaut Elma York, it was a little startling to have her fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin take the reins in Book 3. As the wife of the Governor of Kansas, Nicole occupies a slightly higher point in society, but she still has to deal with some of the same irritants that plague all of the women in the space program. Men are assumed to be better at everything. Women are considered “too old” much earlier than men. Unlike women, men are allowed to have families and take on dangerous missions. And when interviewing a women in the middle of a scientific mission that’s vital to the future of humanity it’s of the upmost importance for the interviewer to comment on what she’s wearing.
Fortunately Nicole has none of Elma York’s social anxiety. She’s an astronaut, a graduate of the best finishing schools, and has both wartime and high-society experience. She’s perfectly capable of sciencing the shit out of a problem and using her position as a lever, all while her own brand of weaponized charm convinces powerful men that her solution was really their idea.
She soon needs every one of these skills because this book takes place at the same time as Book 2 and…remember how the International Aerospace Coalition decided to keep some of the information about the attacks of the Earth First group from reaching the Mars mission? Well change that “some” to “pretty much all”. At least one illness mentioned in the second book ended up being something a lot more sinister.
“Have you any idea how he might have ingested rat poison?”
Almost a quarter of the book goes by before we have a successful launch to the moon base. Most of that time is taken up by the growing sense that the Earth First movement has moved past manifestos, but there’s also the relationship between Nicole and her husband. Kenneth Wargin isn’t quite at the Nathaniel York level of supportive husband, but that’s only because he has reasons to be scared for his wife’s safety, and he and Nicole have to be constantly aware of how things look to the public. If the wife of a governor who’s possibly going to run for president is away from the planet for months doing what everyone assumes is a man’s job, well, that doesn’t look so great, does it?
Aside from a couple of rather bitter arguments though, Kenneth is still Nicole’s biggest cheerleader, able to push for her to do the work he knows she’s capable of, and still be the person who can stand firm against her own worst impulses.
(I don’t know if this needs a trigger warning or not, but Nicole suffers from anorexia, and it’s a big part of the book. Kowal has to do a balancing act between showing how damaging this condition is, and how much it could affect everyone around Nicole, while still showing how any of it can make sense from Nicole’s point view. It echos other instances of characters causing damage to themselves, knowing that’s what they’re doing, but continuing to do it anyway because it’s a way to claw back one tiny bit of control in a universe that’s completely out of control.)
The rising number of attacks and “accidents” means it makes sense for Nicole to travel to the moon with a group of colonists so she can stop being a target to Earth Firsters. But it’s on the moon that the story really kicks off. First a botched landing, then a sudden contagion, it looks like someone has found a way to sabotage the lunar colony from Earth…
….and then something else goes wrong. And then something else. The power, the air, even the level of humidity, every malfunction you can imagine and a bunch you probably haven’t. It’s too much to be happening remotely, is has to be someone who’s on the Moon with them.
There were already concerns on Earth about security, with the government trying to figure out who was infiltrating the IAC while simultaneously keeping anyone – inside and outside the organization – from learning that anything was going on. (We finally find out who discovered Elma and Nathaniel’s secret code from the last book, and why it was such a great big deal.) On the Moon it’s worse, because your life depends on being able to trust everyone else when you’re in a tiny space surrounded by an environment that can kill you at a moment’s notice.
This is where the spy-thriller aspect comes in, with a space-age (60’s-era) twist. So much of the mystery depends on scheduling: who went where, for what reason, and why? There’s no slipping out a back door and walking to a different part of the base; vacuum suits and rovers have to be logged in and out of storage after a whole team has checked to make sure nothing will spring a leak. A quarantine tightens things up even more; if the different sections of the Lunar Base are closed off to keep a virus out, how much harder is it for a human being to sneak through?
Nicole and the few people she can trust are trying to figure out which of the other people on the Moon that they’re supposed to be able to trust is working against them. At the same time they have to fix problems that have been deliberately caused; eventually they’re having to come up with a list of all the ways that someone could sabotage the base so they can try to fix things before they go wrong.
And all of this is taking place in an environment that, say it with me, can kill you at a moment’s notice.
Meanwhile the chapter headings are mostly about how the weather on Earth is getting worse, famines, riots, you name it. There are poisonings, reports of tragedies on the Mars mission, then tragedies on Earth, then a big tragedy on Earth. The “Relentless” in the title becomes more and more apt, I kept having to put the book down to take a breather before diving back in.
Kowal writes Nicole as damaged, resourceful, and funny (example: all the different “injuries” she comes up with to answer “how did you hurt yourself”, because she’s a smart-ass). She’s also all around impressive as hell, whether she’s collecting signatures on a cast to try to match the handwriting on a scrawled code, rallying the troops when one of the “troops” is actually the enemy, tamping down her utter fury and rage at one more tragedy, or crawling across the floor to try to find a flashlight during a total blackout. On the moon.
Just like the previous two books, Kowal has done her homework on the science and history involved. It’s all still 60’s era technology and a few celebrity cameos (Ella Fitzgerald playing for a Presidential Ball, excellent choice!), and she’s dreamed up quite a few interesting facets of life on the Moon (the lunar base’s impromptu art gallery has a beautiful sculpture – made from the surface of the moon itself – which by its very nature would never survive a trip to Earth), as well as all the many ways it’s possible to get injured or killed there. (It’s worth it to read the Acknowledgements where she talks about all the people who helped with the science, especially the bit where real-life astronaut Kjell Lindgren helped with all her re-writes of a moon crash-landing.)
I’d hand it to him and he’d shake his head. “Everyone is dead.” I’d try again, incorporating notes. “Still dead.” Again. “The rocket is in one piece but how are they still breathing?” Again. “They’re alive, but now it’s…boring.”
Amazon has this listed as a 3-book series, but fortunately for all of us Kowal does have a fourth book set to be released in 2022. This is excellent news, since we’ve yet to see the full story of Elma And Nathaniel York On Mars. But also, with the Earth crumbling under the effects of the Meteor, and the fact that not everyone on the planet has the ability to leave, Kowal has an unavoidably terrifying endgame, and I’m very curious to see how she handles it.