The worst tendencies of white feminism—in space.
A female physicist journeys further into space in Kowal’s (The Calculating Stars, 2018, etc.) sequel, set in an alternate version of the 1960s.
In 1961, Dr. Elma York is about to finish her three-month stint on the moon. In Kowal’s last book, set a decade earlier, a meteor smashed into the East Coast, destroying many cities, including Washington, D.C. The U.S. government believed that this was the beginning of the end for our planet, so an international effort to colonize space began with pilot and physicist Elma at the forefront. Now, having reached the moon, the space program sets its sights on Mars. Elma desperately wants to go there, but the round trip will take three years, taking her away from her infallibly supportive husband, Nathaniel, and any possibility of starting a family. The story is loaded with historically accurate science, and while Kowal is striving toward hard sci-fi, the analytical readers that this genre attracts are likely to have questions. For example, would an international coalition really need South Africa’s support so desperately they would agree to include a virulent racist on a racially integrated mission? Why is there not even a single mention of the Soviet Union or its cosmonauts? And the biggest question: Are we supposed to like Elma York? She’s irritatingly quirky, repeatedly using rocket metaphors as euphemisms for sex (“I slid my hand down to his trousers to see if launch conditions had been met”). She’s also morally reprehensible in one key scene. FBI agents ask her about two of her colleagues, and she realizes that they’re doing so because those fellow astronauts are black. She’s about to do the right thing and walk out—but when the feds threaten her program’s funding, she sits right back down and tells them everything they want to know. Later, when Elma is finally castigated for her racial cluelessness by an astronaut of color (“For the love of God, stop talking….I cannot take the protestations of a well-meaning white woman”), readers will find themselves nodding in agreement.
The worst tendencies of white feminism—in space.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9894-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Vast, riveting far-future saga involving evil gods, interstellar war, and manipulative aliens, from the author of The Peace War and the splendid Marooned in Realtime. An unknown being or force has partitioned the universe into ``zones of thought'': at the bottom is the Slow Zone, where intelligence is modest and the speed of light a limiting factor; in the Beyond, where multi-light-speed ultradrive travel is possible, thousands of smart races flourish; and the Transcend is inhabited by godlike Powers, to which state many races of the Beyond aspire. A human colony of the High Beyond, the Straumli Realm, experiments with an ancient database, thereby unwittingly unleashing an unstoppable, enslaving predator, the Blight. The civilizations of the High Beyond realize their peril when even transcendent Powers prove no match for the Blight. One ship alone survives the Straumli disaster; fleeing into the Low Beyond, the ship crash-lands on a planet inhabited by Tines, multi-bodied, pack-minded aliens with a warlike medieval culture. Two human children, Johanna and Jefri, survive—only to become pawns in a Tine power struggle. Up in the Middle Beyond, meanwhile, the realization grows that the escaped Straumli ship may contain something that will help defeat the Blight. So a multi-species rescue mission is launched, led by human researcher Ravni and by Pham, a construct once part of a Power now eaten by the Blight; close behind the rescuers come the forces of the Blight. No summary can do justice to the depth and conviction of Vinge's ideas. The overall concept astonishes; the aliens are developed with memorable skill and insight; the plot twists and turns with unputdownable tension. A masterpiece of universe- building.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-85152-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From the author of God’s Fires (1997), etc., an epistolary novel whose action takes place between March 2 and December 23, 1916. Former Harvard medical student Travis Lee Stanhope, now a private in the British army, is his company’s crack sharpshooter. From his dugout in the cold, wet, muddy Flanders trenches, he describes his appalling day-to-day experiences in letters to his younger brother, Bobby, back home in Harper, Texas. In his brief replies, Bobby reminds Stanhope of a family life he’d prefer to forget. A lover of poetry, Stanhope is befriended by an officer, Captain Miller, whose double handicap is that he’s both Jewish and homosexual. Stanhope’s companion on patrol is the French-Canadian Pierre LeBlanc, a terrifying assassin who delights in creeping through the dark to slit enemy throats. The authorities come to suspect Stanhope of the rape/murder of a young French girl; his alibi is watertight—he was spying on Miller in a clinch with another officer—but he can’t betray Miller by saying so. Stanhope finds peace only in dreams, which take him to a graveyard where his dead companions in glass-topped graves, watched over by a calico girl in a mausoleum with a blue glass ceiling. Mesmerizing stuff, highly textured and brimming with insight. Why is it science fiction? Well, it isn’t; and attempting to market it as such helps this frustratingly underappreciated author not at all: Science fiction’s loss would be the literary mainstream’s gain.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-441-00528-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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