… 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.