Monday, October 25, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

 


The Relentless Moon is the third novel in Mary Robinette Kowal's "Lady Astronaut" series, which began with her short story "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" before expanding into a Hugo Award winning series of novels with The Calculating Stars (My review here).  The series features an alternate history in which a meteor hits the Atlantic Ocean in 1952, causing mass destruction and resulting in the slowly-encroaching doom of the Earth....and resulting in the US and its allies putting all their efforts into a bigger space program, as settling people off world is the only hope of humanity's survival.  And the story features, as you could imagine from the title, not just the typical white male astronauts, but the women who fight for their rights to go into space, as well as the people of color who also must fight.  

I have a weird relationship with the series - I really liked the first book, although not as much as others, and attempted to continue on immediately with book 2 - The Fated Sky.  But I wound up DNFing The Fated Sky, not because it was bad, but because it felt like just more of the same: a book about a white woman ally doing her best to both strive for acceptance due to her gender and for acceptance of the people of color also fighting for space...in the 1960s, where segregation and racism are of course still rampant.  Protagonist Elma York was easy to root for and likable, but she felt almost too perfect, and book 2 just felt too much like the same book all over again, so I dropped it and wasn't going to continue forward, until this third book was nominated for the Hugo.  

And The Relentless Moon, which takes place at the same time as book 2, was certainly enjoyable, especially once it got past the first act.  The story switches protagonists to a more flawed protagonist in Nicole Wargin, and becomes essentially a spy/mystery/thriller set on the moon, as Nicole has to deal not just with the politics involved with her marriage, but terrorists with understandable motives willing to do anything to make a point.  The prose didn't fully work for me still, but the story picks up momentum and is hard to put down, and I get why others really liked this, even if it won't be at the top of my ballot.  

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------------
Nicole Wargin loves to fly most of all, and wishes her role as one of the first Lady Astronauts gave her more credibility with the men in charge to get into the pilot's seat on one of the shuttles heading up to colony on the Moon.  But she's also the wife of the Governor of Kansas, a man with aims on becoming President of a United States beset by unrest - particularly by those waving the banner of "Earth First" to suggest the space program is being supported at the cost of those left on Earth...even if said Earth is doomed to extinction.  But the Earth First protestors are getting more and more desperate, even as they gain more political support, and are becoming more willing to resort to dangerous measures, such as outright terrorism, which puts both Nicole and her husband at risk. 

And when that terrorism takes the form of dangerous sabotage of the space system, Nicole is asked to help try and track down who's responsible....until she is sent to the Moon, which should be safe from the attacks.  Yet when the sabotage continues to occur on the moon colony, it soon becomes apparent that the saboteur is among them....and if Nicole can't figure out who they are and what they're planning, humanity's hopes for survival through the moon colony might become numbered..... 
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The Relentless Moon is a book that begins very much like The Calculating Stars - with the space program and governmental leaders being prejudiced towards Nicole and the people of color in the program, with Earth First protestors decrying what they see as not just a waste of resources (like how many saw the real space program) but also as a method for eugenics against those who aren't White, pretty and perfectly healthy.  And so Nicole fighting for herself and her friends in all that, while she is on Earth, feels very familiar, and really didn't interest me too much, and I suspected I was going to DNF this as well.  

Thankfully a few things changed my mind.   First,  Nicole is a much more flawed protagonist than Elma - she might be a former spy from WW2 and thus underestimated, but she struggles with anorexia and stress reactions that cause her to react in ways negatively towards her own health.  She also wants to fight for her own right to go forward, but her insecurities and mental illness often arise in ways that threaten to make women everywhere in the program look bad....something she and her friends know absolutely cannot happen, no matter how unfair it is.  Nicole's struggles with her mental illness, her trauma, and more make her far more relatable than Elma ever was.  

Secondly, once the story gets to the Moon, it becomes a spy/mystery thriller as the Nicole tries to figure out who she can trust, and who might secretly be trying to sabotage the moon colony project...and what their objectives might be.  The mystery features a number of decent possible suspects, even as there are a lot of characters who make no impression and thus don't ever fit among them, the suspense is really well done, and the methods of terrorism and threats are particularly made interesting by the moon setting.  The antagonists' goals are understandable, even as they obviously go too far, and Nicole's attempts to balance her paranoia, her spy skills, and her own mental illness make for really riveting reading. 

That said, it's hardly incredibly special or unique reading at this point, and this book is REALLY long, definitely longer than it has to be.  The result is a novel that I think is good and enjoyable, and if you liked the prior two novels in this series, you'll almost certainly like this one.  So yeah I don't have much more to say on this one.   

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