The Martian Contingency

Another thoughtful, incisive, empathetic, culturally rich, character-driven instalment of the Lady Astronaut series, in which Elma York draws on her hard-won confidence and self-assuredness not just to steer the second Mars expedition, but to forge a path for the future of humanity on Mars - Martianity?

I'm constantly in awe of the level of technical detail, the painstaking industrial research and plausibility of Mary Robinette Kowal's alternate history, and The Martian Contingency does not disappoint. She has created a form of research method with this series that I'm terming "speculative ethnography", where her imagination, coupled with a meticulous grasp of astro-geology, astro-audionics and astro-mathematics, yields rich, nuanced, deeply immersive world-building.

A case in point is the way planetary temporality is contrasted between Earth and Mars - the differing lengths of day and new names for months provide a distancing mechanism from an Earthen identity and the adolescence of a Martian one - reinforced by the creation of new rituals and ways of being - and deliberate choices about what to leave behind on a dying planet - and what to intentionally carry forward to a new.

Throughout this series, Kowal has played with Elma York's ambiguous relationship with motherhood and non-motherhood; a deliberate choice not to have children with Nathaniel provides a key plot point in this book. This is nimbly set against a broader view of Elma York as a consummate mother figure; guiding, growing, nurturing those in her command and care, and parenting a habitat, a civilisation, a planet?

I remember tears streaming down my face when reading the very first Lady Astronaut short story, where an aged Elma is caring for a dying Nathaniel and faces a heart-wrenching choice: Kowal spends time deftly fore-shadowing the degenerative illness that eventually weakens Nathaniel, all the while demonstrating their tenderly tensile tethering.

Five stars.

The concluding book of the Lady Astronaut series starts off with Elma York finally getting to land on Mars. The 2nd Mars Expedition's mission is to establish a base on Mars for later Earth escapees. Only… of course stuff goes wrong, because space is hard. Prior to landing humans, Earth send a series of unstaffed rockets to Mars that dropped supplies. Only when Elma arrives at the drop site to pick up the supplies, which includes the atmosphere scrubber for the second dome, they find it has crash-landed and everything is a loss. The Martians can replace it by cannibalizing one of the engines of their ship, if everything works out all right. There's politics. Intrigue. Gee whiz exploration of Mars. Relationships & emotion. 60s & 70s style colonization tropes with 2020s sensibility & quality of writing. And if you get the audiobook, Kowal narrates the story herself and she is one of the best audiobook narrators ever. Easily 5 stars.