The Martian Contingency

, #4

english language

Published March 18, 2025

ISBN:
978-1-250-23703-3
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Goodreads:
211332081
(4 reviews)

3 editions

reviewed The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal (Lady Astronaut, #4)

The Martian Contingency

This is the final book in the Lady Astronaut series, with Elma York landing on Mars to help establish a base. This book has the mix of space stuff, politics, relationships, and technical trouble that you would expect from the rest of series, but fundamentally, this book is about Elma learning to be a leader and it's a good capstone on her emotional and professional journey.

Unfortunately, most of the action in this book takes place off page. Early on Elma realizes people are covering something up, but that event has already happened. There's some feint that maybe more problems from Earth First terrorists could happen, but this does not materialize. And sure, there are some real consequences from the coverup, but the majority of them also happen off page. It is not as if I am reading the Lady Astronaut series for action and adventure, but it's hard not …

None

Another thoughtful, incisive, empathetic, culturally rich, character-driven instalment of the Lady Astronaut series, in which Elma York draws on her hard-won confidence and self-assuredness not just to steer the second Mars expedition, but to forge a path for the future of humanity on Mars - Martianity?

I'm constantly in awe of the level of technical detail, the painstaking industrial research and plausibility of Mary Robinette Kowal's alternate history, and The Martian Contingency does not disappoint. She has created a form of research method with this series that I'm terming "speculative ethnography", where her imagination, coupled with a meticulous grasp of astro-geology, astro-audionics and astro-mathematics, yields rich, nuanced, deeply immersive world-building.

A case in point is the way planetary temporality is contrasted between Earth and Mars - the differing lengths of day and new names for months provide a distancing mechanism from an Earthen identity and the adolescence of a Martian …

Elma York finally makes it to Mars

The concluding book of the Lady Astronaut series starts off with Elma York finally getting to land on Mars. The 2nd Mars Expedition's mission is to establish a base on Mars for later Earth escapees. Only… of course stuff goes wrong, because space is hard. Prior to landing humans, Earth send a series of unstaffed rockets to Mars that dropped supplies. Only when Elma arrives at the drop site to pick up the supplies, which includes the atmosphere scrubber for the second dome, they find it has crash-landed and everything is a loss. The Martians can replace it by cannibalizing one of the engines of their ship, if everything works out all right. There's politics. Intrigue. Gee whiz exploration of Mars. Relationships & emotion. 60s & 70s style colonization tropes with 2020s sensibility & quality of writing. And if you get the audiobook, Kowal narrates the story herself and she …