The sequel to The Calculating Stars, and most of what I said about that book remains true for this one. It's a fun alternate history of Earth, where a meteor impacting Chicago in the 50s galvanizes America into an earlier space race and realization of the urgency of addressing global warming and colonizing other planets. In the first book pilot Elma York becomes the first Lady Astronaut and humanity reaches Mars; in this sequel humanity is now aiming for Mars, trying to make the first trip there and establish an advance camp in order to prepare for colonization. Once again Elma is in the middle of things, both as an astronaut and mathematical savant, and also as before as one of the PR faces of the mission, making it look glamourous, safe, and palatable to the great unwashed masses.

In the setting of the 60s there are a lot of opportunities to address sexism and racism, and the author once again attempts to tackle these; in the first book the emphasis was more on sexism as Elma has to fight to even get women into space, while in this sequel the focus moves more onto racism as the mostly-white astronauts prompt concerns back home about whether space will become an escape for just the rich and white, leaving behind poorer folks from non-white communities on a dying planet. Protestors try to cancel the space program, arguing that the wealthy and white shouldn't just have an easy escape, but that we should fix the problems on Earth first. This causes some issues for the Mars mission, although nothing our intrepid crew can't overcome, of course.

I liked this book a little less than the first, I think. While the first was fun, this one seemed to be trying a little too hard to tackle serious issues of discrimination, but not quite getting it entirely right. Once again Elma is viewing everything from a position of what seems wilful ignorance - how could she possibly not be aware that adding her to a crew would require bumping someone else? She's a freaking mathematics genius, surely she can count crewmembers. The references to homosexuality are pretty awkward and end in a bad trope. The attempts to deal with racism seem well-intentioned but shallow; nothing is really dealt with, no fundamental lessons seem to be learned or changed. We end up with a happy ending but without the feeling of really having earned it. The most awful racist in the book seems to be covered up and never actually dealt with as he deserves. And once again a big deal is made about Elma being Jewish (and there being a Muslim crew member) but then nothing ever seems to really come out of that. It just feels as if there was a lot more potential to this setting that never really actualized, so while the story is fun, it all ends up feeling rather shallow, making it an entertaining read but a bit frustrating in the end.