I was going back and forth on whether to review this as a good work of diamond-hard science fiction or as a powerful intersectional feminist story. It is all of those things, and it is awesome, so I’m not going to worry about it and just talk about what it was like to read the book.
The premise is that there’s a major asteroid strike off the East Coast of the US in the 1950s. While the tsunami and the pressure wave and the firestorm are all devastating, the long real problem is the effect on the climate. There’s going to be a few years of very cold weather, owing to all the dust kicked up by the strike, but once the dust (literally) settles, there’s going to be a bigger problem: the asteroid through enough stuff into the atmosphere to start a runaway greenhouse effect, one that will leave Earth uninhabitable in the not-too-distant future. World governments generally accept this warning from scientists (in a perfect world this shouldn't be the most unbelievable part of a science fiction story, but here we are) and begin an ambitious space program with the goal of establishing colonies so that humanity won’t go extinct.
What follows is something very close to the real-world Apollo program, but a few years earlier and greatly accelerated. I assume the sequels will move beyond that - this book stops before there’s a manned lunar mission.
The book is told from the perspective of a woman named Elma, wife of a rocket engineer in the fictional version of NASA. In her own right she’s got PhDs in math and physics, is an accomplished pilot, and is capable of incredible calculations in her head. In other words, she’d make a great astronaut … too bad she’s a woman.
The focusing story for the book is Elma’s efforts to get women accepted as astronauts, and it’s a damned powerful story of sexism (and racism and anti-Semitism). I don’t really feel like there’s much I can or should say about it, because as a straight white dude this is all so far outside of my experience. I will say, however, that when I was about 75% through the book I told the friend that recommended the book to me that “if at least one of these women doesn’t lose her shit over all the bullshit they’re being put through, I’m going to lose mine.”
One thing that I wish Mary Robinette Kowal had addressed more explicitly was the effect of the asteroid so soon after the Holocaust. Those who have read the book might be surprised to see me say this, because Elma and her husband are both Jewish. In the aftermath of the Holocaust they embraced their Jewish identity. And Elma’s family mostly lived in Charleston, and are presumed to have been killed when the tsunami hit. So soon after all the deaths of more distant relations in Europe, this hits Elma hard. The one point I wish Kowal had touched on: the Holocaust killed roughly 6 million Jews, which was about one out of every three Jews on the planet. In the 1950s there were more than 2 million Jews living in New York alone, plus substantial Jewish communities in other cities on the East Coast. I’m married to a literal Holocaust scholar, so I know more about all this than most, but I immediately thought about how substantial a percentage of the surviving Jews would have been wiped out by the asteroid. It’s not a small number.