Oh, Mary Robinette Kowal, you brilliant wonderful writer! With every instalment in the Lady Astronaut series, I am more and more convinced that Kowal has found her “thing”. Writing hard sci-fi about humanity exploring the solar system, but with a social angle and deeply human characters that one can’t help but root for. I am so happy that next year (hopefully) we’ll get the fourth volume titled The Martian Contingency. I really wouldn’t mind if this series kept going for a long, long time.
THE RELENTLESS MOON
by Mary Robinette Kowal
Published: Tor, 2020
eBook: 538 pages
Series: Lady Astronaut #3
My rating: 8.25/10
Opening line: How many places do you call home?
Mary Robinette Kowal continues her award-winning Lady Astronaut series, which began with The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky, with The Relentless Moon.
The Earth is coming to the boiling point as the climate disaster of the Meteor strike becomes more and more clear, but the political situation is already overheated. Riots and sabotage plague the space program. The IAC’s goal of getting as many people as possible off Earth before it becomes uninhabitable is being threatened.
Elma York is on her way to Mars, but the Moon colony is still being established. Her friend and fellow Lady Astronaut Nicole Wargin is thrilled to be one of those pioneer settlers, using her considerable flight and political skills to keep the program on track. But she is less happy that her husband, the Governor of Kansas, is considering a run for President.
Did you ever wonder, while reading The Fated Sky and following Elma York and Stetson Parker on their way to Mars, what exactly has been going on on Earth and the Moon colony in the meantime? Well here’s your answer because Nicole Wargin, Lady Astronaut and wife of the governor of Kansas, lets us follow her during her everyday life which is… let’s just say slightly more exciting than the average person’s.
I admit I had a hard time adjusting to this new protagonist, the new voice, and the new circumstances presented in this book. I had really grown to like Elma and after two books, I felt like I knew her. Her work, her marriage, her anxiety, opening the book always felt like meeting an old friend. Now suddenly I’m supposed to care about one of Elma’s old friends and fellow astronette Nicole Wargin? Was she even that important in the first book? I barely remembered her at all. So although I swear I went into this book open-minded, I needed a while before I really found my way into this story and learned to enjoy Nicole’s narration.
The beginning is a tad slow and not just because Kowal has to set up Nicole as her new protagonist, but also because the book starts on Earth. But worry not, Nicole goes to the Moon soon enough, as is her job, and that’s when shit really starts hitting the fan. In The Relentless Moon, the plot revolves mostly around sabotage of the IAC and the mission to get humanity off Earth. You know, because the planet is dying and all that. What starts with riots by Earth Firsters soon turns even more dangerous as rockets misfire, various systems on the Moon colony have hiccups, and things go more and more wrong over time. Nicole’s job on this particular visit to the Moon is as much to do her usual job as working to find out who the saboteur(s) might be. While keeping what little she knows top secret, of course.
What follows is an exciting mix of everything that Kowal has done before, but still somehow new and interesting. We’ve spent time with Elma working hard for women’s rights to even be astronauts, we’ve accompanied her on the first ever mission to Mars and got to know the joys of toilets on space ships. We’ve actually been on the Moon in this series as well, but not like this. Nicole is a senior astronaut and really knows her way around both space ships and the Moon colony. And there is so much cool stuff to explore! Whether it’s the way every system has a safety net, there are redundancies for everything, sayings like “Slow is fast” (because doing anything in 1/6 Earth gravity takes practice), or how they’ve set up a little museum on the Moon to make it less about pure survival and more about living – it’s a joy simply walking around with Nicole as a guide.
Then again, we decidedly don’t just walk around because there is a saboteur on the loose and nobody knows when something so awful will happen that the 300 odd people currently on the Moon may not survive. Mary Robinette Kowal does such a great job at pacing her story, mixing more action-packed scenes with quieter ones, showing us the characters excelling at being sciency as well as their more vulnerable, emotional sides. It all comes together beautifully and in no time at all, I found myself not just rooting for but really caring about our brave and smart Moon residents.
Kowal also makes sure these people feel real by including discussions of mental health, in this case anorexia nervosa. The way it is talked about and presented in this book was incredibly refreshing. That sounds terrible – of course, the anorexia itself isn’t refreshing but it’s usually depicted as something that’s always triggered by the wish to look thinner for beauty reasons. And even though we know it has little to do with aesthetics and much more with control, pop culture still depicts anorexia in one particular way. Usually that’s a young girl wanting to be pretty. Nicole is a middle-aged woman and she really doesn’t care if other people think she’s skinny enough. I’m truly grateful for this nuanced depiction and Kowal even mentions in the afterword that she made sure not to include behaviours or triggers that people suffering from anorexia might use as “thinspiration”.
I was even more taken with the characters and their development overall. That’s right, the ones I wanted to get away from so I could be with Elma instead. It was lovely to watch Helen kick ass on the Moon, seeing as she got bumped off the Mars mission in order to make space for Elma. Myrtle and Eugene’s relationship, although they are side characters, truly shone and made me believe even more firmly that Mary Robinette Kowal must have a great marriage herself. Seriously, she writes the best married couples (Elma and Nathaniel’s embarrassing rocket metaphors aside). There’s also some development in terms of the blatant racism of the first book. It’s still there, to some degree, but you can see things changing. Slowly, oh so slowly, but still.
And then there’s Nicole, this brilliant astronaut and politician’s wife, who knows how to fly as well as how to manipulate a conversation in a desired direction, who loves her husband and their ancient cat but who also loves the Moon. Who almost forgets to take care of herself because she is spreading herself so thin and trying to solve every problem at once. It’s not often that I develop this kind of respect for a fictional character but, damn, do I want to shake Nicole’s hand. And then hug her really tight and cry on her shoulder because she is so amazing.
I cried during several occasions in this book, none of which I’m going to spoil here (and it’s not all sad occasions, mind you). The way grief is described, as this thing that you can almost push away only for it to hit you unexpectedly and even harder, felt incredibly real to me. But then, I also cry when humanity gets its act together in order to solve a problem, forgetting their differences and instead working as a unit. The ending of this book both made me cry and smile delightedly. So far, every book in this series has been brilliant, but the way it all comes together makes it clear that the series is so much more than the sum of its parts. I wholeheartedly recommend every science fiction fan pick it up!
MY RATING: 8.25/10 – Truly excellent!
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