Review: The Martian Contingency

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The first book in this series, The Calculating Stars, won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. I loved it, and thought it was one of the best books I read that year. There have been two more books since, The Fated Sky and The Relentless Moon, and I rated both of them highly. Now this fourth book in the series focuses on the Second Mars Expedition, twenty years after the events of the first book.

This alternate history takes place in a world where an asteroid strike in 1952 wipes out much of the east coast of the U.S. and sets the world on a path of accelerated climate change (although many of the little news stories at the beginning of each chapter, with their various natural disasters, sound like they were ripped from today's headlines, which is a horribly depressing thought). After a brief change of protagonists in the last book--The Relentless Moon focused on Nicole Wargin, one of the best friends of Elma York, the hero of the first two books; Nicole is now the US President--we are back with Elma and her husband Nathaniel, twenty years older. They are on Mars, trying to build the settlement that will allow as many people as possible to live offworld, and having to solve a nasty mystery that strikes at the heart of the racism and sexism still prevalent in this alternate timeline, as it is in our own.

Elma and Nathaniel's mature relationship takes center stage here, as it did in the first two books featuring them. They are older and perhaps more fragile than they once were, attempting to reconcile themselves to making Mars their home. For a time, Elma becomes the commander of the Goddard, the spaceship orbiting Mars, and has to wrestle with her own feelings of inadequacy regarding leadership, even as she makes a momentous decision to allow one of the Martian crewmembers to obtain an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy. (The idea of Earth, hundreds of millions of miles away, trying to control this woman's body and life, is even more enraging, if possible, than our current US politicians doing it.) She also has to face the fact of Nathaniel's health problems, which causes a strain on their relationship that has to be worked through.

As always, the amount of research the author puts into these stories is incredible (just wait till you get to the "fruit pull-up repair"). The contrasts between the Earth and Martian calendars, and the Earth day and Martian sol, also play a big part in the plot. At the end, both Elma and Nathaniel realize Mars is their home.

This series brings back the "sensawunda" of classic science fiction, while providing a stark warning of what we're doing to our planet in this timeline. It is one of the best ongoing series of recent years and well worth reading.

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