This book continues more of what I expected from The Calculating Stars: a wonderful, flawed, and very human protagonist, diamond-hard science fiction, and a satisfying-yet-unfinished conclusion.
This is set something like a decade after The Calculating Stars. Humanity is established on the Moon, and is getting ready to launch the first expedition to Mars. But resistance to the space program is growing; with the recovery from the meteor strike unfinished, and climate change disasters growing both worse and more frequent, a great many people think the money going to the space program will be better spent helping people survive.
What we get in this is similar to what we got in The Calculating Stars. We have a mix of technical and engineering problems to solve, interpersonal conflicts, and characters pushing against barriers of gender and race.
One of the more interesting/infuriating aspects of this book is the addition of a White South African to the mix of astronauts Elma is working with. He goes beyond the “normal” racism we saw in the first book: he’s an unapologetic true believer in Apartheid.
And like the first book, this book doesn’t end as such. They achieve great things, but it’s just another step in the chain. Looking forward to book 3.
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