The Calculating Stars: A Woman's Fight To Be An Astronaut in an Alternate Timeline

I'm seriously interested in woman aviators.  The very first post on this blog was a review of a novel dealing with Russian WWII ace Lydia Litvyak which appeared here.   My most recent post on this blog dealing with a woman pilot was a review of The Lost Pilots which I wrote about a year ago. It can be found here. I'm also fascinated by woman astronauts.

It's these enthusiasms that made me such a fan of Mary Robinette Kowal's  Lady Astronaut series which she began with a succession of several short stories that I read first.  They can be found in Kowal's anthology, Word Puppets.  Though I have just learned that there is a more recent Lady Astronaut story that I haven't yet read called "Articulated Restraint" that takes place between the first two Lady Astronaut novels.  I immediately purchased it from Amazon.

My only problem with reading the first Lady Astronaut novel, The Calculating Stars, was setting aside the time to do it when I have so many review commitments.  A buddy read on a Goodreads group gave me an excuse to shoehorn it in between a background book for a July blog tour novel, and an ARC I won  that I'm supposed to be tweeting about this month.  I'm just glad that I finally got to The Calculating Stars.

                           

The protagonist, Elma York, was a Women's Airforce  Service Pilot (WASP) in WWII.  I'm a WASP afficionado too.  On this blog,  I wrote a review of  Marge Piercy's  Gone To Soldiers which contained a character who was a WASP.  You can read that review here. 

 Elma also had a strong background in mathematics and physics which qualified her to be a computer.   Before the existence of machines called computers, humans known as computers did calculations.  Many readers will have learned about them from the movie called Hidden Figures about African-American women who were computers for the American space program.

In the Lady Astronaut series the American space program was launched under different circumstances.  It takes place in an alternate timeline in which a meteor fell on Washington D.C. in 1952, killed a great many people and altered Earth's climate.  It was decided that finding a new home for humanity should be an urgent priority.   Although I was pleased to see that the space program was regarded as vitally important, I wondered why there wasn't any serious consideration being given to the possibility of interventions that would prevent severe climate change.      

I also have a small quibble over Elma's Jewish background.  Her ancestors were apparently Yiddish speaking Ashkenazis like mine.  Yet she says that they settled in Charleston, South Carolina in the 18th century.  The Jews that arrived in Charleston during that period were Sephardic.  Sephardic Jews were originally from Spain.  They spoke a Spanish derived language called Ladino rather than Yiddish.   According to  the Jewish Virtual Library's page about Charleston's Jewish history here, there was no Ashkenazi synagogue in Charleston until 1854. 

Yet I was so inspired by Elma's struggle to open the space  program to women who were pilots.  So I'd definitely give this novel five stars.