Kowal brings the culture into play with a seamless grace that produces a “well, of course that had to change” which occasionally leaves a residue of embarrassment. And while it offers plenty of science and rocket-geek delight, it is also a story of challenging culture and social norms and overcoming personal difficulties in the face of all that the 1950s-our 1950s-was about to be. Which kicks the space program into high gear in the early 1950s. For Elma, Nathaniel, the Acting President it means one thing: humanity has got to get off the planet. In fact, this is a very well thought-out scenario. So do the politics, the culture, the economics. The science has the resonance of reality. In 50 or 60 years, the Earth will be too hot for survival. She crunches the numbers and discovers to her shock and dismay that this was an extinction-level event. While the pieces are being picked up and some kind of order restored, Elma is asked to calculate the size of the meteor so her husband can go into the meetings with the paranoid military and convince them this was nothing to do with the Soviets.

The only surviving member of the Cabinet is the Secretary of Agriculture, who becomes Acting President until an election can be held. CalculatingStars_comp_v7_final-220x338 Quickly, the government scrambles to get up and running.

There they learn the extent of the immediate losses. Elma and Nathaniel manage to get out and to her plane and west until a fighter squardon challenges them, learns who they are, and escorts them to Wright-Patterson Air Base, the only fully operational military base within range. and wreaks havoc up and down the seaboard. In the midst of their idyllic vacation, a meteor slams into the Atlantic just off the east coast. She is also a former WASP pilot, which fact figures prominently in all that follows. Nathaniel is the chief engineer and has a reputation for putting up America’s first satellites. They both work for the newly-formed National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Elma York and her husband, Nathaniel, are on vacation in the Poconos. Let me get straight to the point: Mary Robinette Kowal’s new novel, The Calculating Stars, is one of the best alternate histories I have read since… It is 1952.

The calculating stars series