Mary Robinette Kowal won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards this year for her novel The Calculating Stars, taking home the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus prizes for the year’s best novel. (The Hugo’s list of nominees included six titles, five written by women, which I think is a record.) The book seems destined to hit the screen somewhere, given its popularity, themes of feminism/misogyny, racism, and climate change. It’s also utterly awful, a bit of trite juvenilia, easily one of the worst Hugo winners I’ve read, with silly plotting, stock characters, and prose befitting a first-time author. How this book won any of those awards, let alone all three, is totally beyond me, because, while I finished it since it’s an easy read, it is treacly nonsense.
Elma is the protagonist, and as the novel opens, she’s on a hillside north of DC with her husband, where they’ve flown in a private plane to get away for a little sexytime, only to have their reverie interrupted by a massive explosion somewhere to the south. After their initial fears that the Soviets have launched a nuclear missile appear to be unfounded, they realize it was a massive meteorite strike into the ocean, which they learn shortly afterwards has vaporized the mid-Atlantic coast, killing millions, and will eventually lead to runaway global warming because of all of the water vapor the impact sent into the atmosphere.
Elma and her husband Nat both work in aerospace, she as a computer (a term that used to refer to people, not machines), he as an engineer, and both are immediately involved in the international effort to race into space to try to get off this planet before it boils. Elma is also an experienced pilot, having worked as a WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, although I’m sure Kowal intended the wordplay around calling Elma, a somewhat observant Jew, a WASP) during World War II, and she seethes when she realizes that NACA (the actual predecessor of NASA) is only considering men as astronauts, even though colonizing the moon or Mars or anywhere else would obviously require women. (Actually, it only requires women; you can send the male contribution to reproduction to space in a test tube.) The bulk of the book covers her quest to become an astronaut, to change hearts and minds, to fight a little garden-variety racism, and to overcome her anxiety disorder enough to get a seat on the rocket.
There’s so much wrong with The Calculating Stars, but nothing is worse than how incredibly obvious the whole book is. Of course Elma is going to be an astronaut. Of course she’s going to fight racism and win. Of course everything she does is going to work out, because this is a children’s book – well, it would be, were it not for the frequent and very awkwardly written sex scenes, although even those are written as they might be in a young adult novel. Elma is ridiculously perfect as a person; the calculations she can do in her head defy credibility, and if there are people who can do what she does there couldn’t be more than ten in the United States. (Her obsession with prime numbers, however, is completely credible, and one of the only things about her character to which I related.) She nearly always has the right words, the right responses, and when she doesn’t, Nate does. It makes Kowal’s hamhanded attempts at cliffhangers fall totally flat, because they always work out within a few paragraphs in some ordinary fashion.
The science also feels incredibly dicey to me. Kowal refers to colonizing Venus, which scientists already suspect was inhospitable to life by this time period, as Rupert Wildt theorized that the surface temperature of Venus was above the boiling point of water due to all of the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. She later creates a sort of cold fusion mechanism in a chapter heading, where “a catalyst” allows rockets to combine atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere into O2, releasing substantial quantities of energy for free. Even throwing those small points aside, Kowal has 1950s science building and successfully launching an orbiting space station and planning a lunar colony several years before the MOSFET transistor, without which modern computing would not exist, was even invented. It’s a fantasy, and it detracts from the realism Kowal is trying to infuse in the cli-fi aspects of her story.
That’s without even getting into how weak the characters are; most are more memorable for their names than anything about their personalities. Elma and Nathaniel are themselves just too good; he’s certainly a dream husband for the era, progressive and willing to stand up for what he thinks is right. People are flawed, even the best people, and protagonists like these two don’t really appear in adult novels, not in 2019, certainly not in novels that deserve consideration for major awards.
It’d be hard to be worse than the second Hugo winner, They’d Rather Be Right, which isn’t really even a proper novel, but The Calculating Stars comes close. After the Broken Earth trilogy won the last three Hugos – and while I had issues with those novels, especially the third, they are way better written and more intelligently plotted than this novel – Kowal’s book is a huge letdown. I need to read some of the other nominees because there is no way there wasn’t at least one sci-fi novel better than this one in 2019.
Next up: B. Catling’s The Cloven, the conclusion to his Vorrh trilogy.