The Relentless Moon

It's amazingly hard to mix crime fiction with science fiction. The Relentless Moon manages to create a mystery that works in space. This takess place is an alternate history where a meteor hit Earth in the 1950s and humanity tries to settle Mars in the 1960s to save itself from massive global warming. While the Lady Astronaut Elma York heads to Mars in The Fated Sky, fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin heads to the moon for visit to ferry colonists to the base that will be used for staging future trips to Mars. However, while there things start going wrong, and it's quickly apparent that the subversive Earth First organization has a mole in the space program on the Moon. Things get worse. The subversive plot reads as something that could happen. No weird coincidences. Bad guys that make sense psychologically. Our hero is both competent and flawed.

I listened to the author perform the audiobook version of the story. Kowal is a top-notch performer. Don't miss out. About the only drawback is the cast of characters is large, and I find it difficult to follow who's who and remember who did what. The emotional immediacy of the story in audio form more than makes up for the flaw.

… you know Mary Robinette Kowal is expanding her Lady Astronaut universe. This instalment is the first not focussed on “the” Lady Astronaut, Dr. Elma York, still on her way to Mars (the timeline parallels The Fated Sky, with the latter’s plot a background thread). It is also notably darker than its predecessors, with the casual misogyny of the early sixties, which sees Nicole Wargin, an overachieving, hypercompetent colleague of Elma York relegated to supporting roles again and again by the conceited men who consider themselves her betters, meeting the screaming stupidity of a terrorist movement that thinks their God has decreed humanity needs to perish with its planet – when they acknowledge the planet is perishing at all. In this, as in many things, the novel feels painfully close to our time, albeit nominally playing in 1963, and that quality makes it punch way above the weight of its “counterterrorism on the Moon” plot, which Kowal pulls off with her usual talent.

This is the third book in a series based on the premise that a meteor hit the U.S. in the 1950s.  It is starting a climate change event that will make the Earth eventually uninhabitable.  Using the technology available at the time, will humanity be able to evacuate the planet?When I read the previous books last year I was annoyed by the segment of the population in the books that were denying the existence of a crisis.   This year.... OMG.... I started reading this book over lunch one day.  By the end of the first chapter I was almost shaking.  I wanted to go fight some imaginary fictional characters.  The existence of science deniers in a book was pushing some buttons for me.  I guess a global pandemic will do that to a person.This one started slow for me.  I was looking at the page count and thinking, "Over 500 pages?  This is going to be a slog."  These books are so detailed that sometimes they do slow down to descriptions of the mundane things in life.  Sure, it is life on the moon but still.  Once this one started going though I was hooked.  I carried it around all day and finished it quickly.Nicole was a secondary character in the previous books.  She was sort of looked on as suspect because she was a white, rich woman who was married to a politician and people thought (probably correctly) that she was promoted ahead of women of color because of her image.  It was interesting to see this book from her perspective.  Now it is several years later.  She's 50.  (You know how I love older female protagonists!)  She's the most senior female astronaut on the moon.  She has equal seniority to only one other male astronaut.  She's watching younger male pilots that she helped train get to fly bigger rockets because women are still considered unqualified.  She overhears male bureaucrats dismiss her as old.  She's not ready to be put out to pasture.She's also dealing with a very long distance marriage to an ambitious politician.  It was interesting to watch her cycle back and forth from accomplished astronaut to supportive wife who stands in the background and just smiles.Now there are accidents in the space program.  It is getting to be too many to just be accidents.  Nicole is tasked with trying to find the traitor on the moon while balancing everything else going on in her life.This book deals a lot with anorexia nervosa.  Nicole has dealt with it all her life.  As her stress level starts to spiral out of control she relapses.  I think the book handled it well.  There is no miraculous cure.  This is a disease that she has been living with for years and will continue to have to manage.  Her coping mechanisms are well defined and the narrative shows how she needs to keep working her plan no matter what is going on around her.On top of being a thriller, this is a good look at the demands of a woman caught literally between multiple worlds and expectations who knows that no matter what she achieves that the newspapers will always call her Mrs. Kenneth T. Wargin and report what she was wearing.This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story

The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal, is the third book of the Lady Astronaut series, describing an alternate reality in which a meteor struck the Earth in the early 1950s, accelerating and changing the constraints of the space race. While the first two books focused on the story of Elma York, The Relentless Moon follows Nicole Wargin, also an astronaut, and wife of the governor of Kansas. Nicole gets sent to the Moon base, but things do not go as expected: there’s multiple suspicions of sabotage, and a lot of ways thing can go awry in a small base in a very dangerous external environment.

I was very happy to be selected for the NetGalley of this book, because I had loved the previous ones, and I was absolutely looking forward to the third installment. I really like the setting and how the alternate history is fleshed out, and I love how believable is the whole space program.

I was a bit disappointed to not get the story from the point of view of Elma (the main character of the first two books), but the social group is still very similar, and I came to love Nicole as well. Nicole, like Elma, has her own set of personal struggles, and she’s very likable, competent and has a unique set of skills that is delightful to read about.

The plot felt maybe too eventful (are these people, that I start liking, going to catch a break at any point, PRETTY PLEASE?), but my perception of this may have more to do with my own state of mind than with the plot itself.

All in all, this was a thrilling and engrossing read – and Lady Astronaut #4 is currently planned for 2022, it’s going to be a long wait!