Entries tagged 'Lady Astronaut'

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal is the latest in the Lady Astronaut series. I guess I started reading this series while I wasn’t blogging my little notes like this. It is an alternate-history/science-fiction series where a meteor strikes the East Coast of the United States, which spurs space exploration. It shares a tiny bit of DNA with For All Mankind, re-casting the end of the space race as if had continued with the same sense of urgency that it had started with instead of fizzling off into what it has become.

They are enjoyable novels, but I find myself simultaneously appreciating how it is exploring gender and race relations in this context, and people tackling with mental health issues, and annoyed at how clunky it can be.

I find myself also annoyed at the whole premise of colonizing Mars when the leading proponent of that right now is a vainglorious white supremacist fascist. It is an implausible scenario to begin with, and it is harder to suspend my disbelief to enjoy the fiction of science fiction when it is tied up in that.