Sunday, March 13, 2022

The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal

I've enjoyed this series so far--fairly light reading but has good takes on serious topics, including climate change, women's rights and racism. The series is coming together as a world, centered on the United States, that has to grow up faster than they would want.

This entry in the series is pretty typical. We get the perspective of Nicole Wargin, astronaut and society woman married to an aspiring presidential candidate. She has a lot of difficult territory to navigate, including severe anorexia. The action is solid, though the villains are still mostly faceless.

For me it's a 3.5 rounded up. I have some misgivings. Mostly I think it's OK to gloss the science a bit in order to develop characters, but in this case the science on the challenges of living in space, particularly on the Moon, is pretty readily available. There's basically no way the early astronauts from 1968 on could have stayed on the moon any longer than they did. The dust got into their suits and equipment. The suits were leaking like sieves when they left. We aren't particularly close to figuring out how to have self-sustaining space colonies, and all that gets glossed in order to drive the plot on how to escape earth. With the technology demonstrated in this series so far, they couldn't save anyone.

For a fun and entertaining read that keeps up with current sensibilities this works just fine.

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