Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series sprawls across the years from 1952 to 1970 and beyond. The saga takes shape in four novels and several shorter stories (which have yet to be collected in a single volume). Kowal guides us through the career of the remarkable Dr. Elma York, a child prodigy who matures into a prodigious mathematician. Eventually, she joins the astronaut corps for voyages to the Moon and Mars. The series comprises an alternate history in which the United States leads the world into a costly and controversial effort beginning in the 1950s to colonize the solar system. And in The Martian Contingency, the fourth Lady Astronaut novel, the program is far along. The famous Lady Astronaut, Elma York, and her engineer husband, Nathaniel, have joined the Second Mars Expedition to help build a permanent new home for the human race on the Red Planet.
The Second Expedition discovers something went badly wrong on the First
Over the course of a year and a half, Elma, Nathaniel, and their colleagues among the 100-person expedition live their lives in orbit and on the surface of Mars. Their task is to add a second dome to the habitat built by the First Expedition. But, as Elma discovers early in her time on the planet, something went badly wrong then. And no one who was there before is talking about it. Only very gradually does it become clear what transpired then—and what dire consequences it will have for Elma, Nathaniel, and their fellow astronauts. It’s one source among many that bedevil them through crisis after crisis as the months go by.
The Martian Contingency (Lady Astronaut #4) by Mary Robinette Kowal (2025) 384 pages ★★★★☆
A latter-day classic of the genre
Kowal is an exceptionally adept writer. She demonstrates great skill in building characters who struggle before our eyes. Unlike most other science fiction authors, she portrays the astronauts on Mars as people with the quirks, foibles, fears, vulnerabilities, prejudices, and distinctive personalities that make them fully human. They love, hate, have sex, practice religion, and play politics. They’re a wildly diverse lot, representing nations and cultures from all over Earth. And if the human race ever does manage to establish an outpost on Mars, a large asteroid, or one of the gas giants’ moons, the colonists are likely to look very much like the men and women of Kowal’s Second Mars Expedition.
The Lady Astronaut series is a triumph of the genre. Surely, we’ll find it many years from now listed among the classics of the field. As alternate history, too, this series ranks among the best I’ve read.
About the author
Mary Robinette Kowal won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for the second novel in the Lady Astronaut series, The Calculating Stars. She has won the Hugo a total of four times and served as president of SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. But Wikipedia also describes the multi-talented author as a “translator, art director, and puppeteer.” (She worked on puppetry for Jim Henson Productions and others.) She is also a voice actor and has recorded audiobooks for other authors.
Kowal was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1969. She received a degree from East Carolina University in art education with a minor in theater and began work as a professional puppeteer in 1989. She published the first of her dozen novels to date in 2010.
For related reading
I’ve reviewed all three of the preceding novels in this series:
- The Fated Sky (An astonishingly good science fiction novel about the first manned mission to Mars)
- The Calculating Stars (This novel shows just how good hard science fiction can be)
- The Relentless Moon (The third Lady Astronaut novel doesn’t live up to the promise of the first two)
I’ve included Mary Robinette Kowal on my list of Ten new science fiction authors worth reading now.
This is one of the 10 best alternate history novels and Good books about space travel,
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