Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest exquisitely crafted and meticulously researched Lady Astronaut novel, The Martian Contingency, continues her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning series set in an alternate 20th century. It’s 1970, and Drs. Elma and Nathaniel York are among the second wave of spacefarers building a permanent home for humankind on Mars. Years earlier, a meteor strike obliterated Washington, D.C. and set off an extinction-level series of climate catastrophes. Like other writers documenting humanity’s often hubristic, Ozymandian response to such existential threats, Kowal contends with whether the disparate and all too dissonant components of Earthbound society will unite to survive. But in so doing, she probes more intimate questions: What would it be like to live your life on that precipice? And how would a society built in one reality adjust to a wholly unrecognizable one?
In The Martian Contingency, Kowal emphasizes this sense of alienation through the calendar. Our celebrations and rituals are so firmly tied to the rhythms and cycles of the Earth and the moon that it is surprisingly difficult to translate them offworld. How will the Jewish Elma and Nathaniel mark Rosh Hashanah on a planet with a year of a different length, two moons and no tidal cycles? When is Christmas, Diwali or Eid al-Fitr? What do those holidays mean, anyway? Watching the piecemeal emergence of a unique spacefaring culture is both fascinating and inspiring.
The moments when the old rules fail to translate drive Kowal’s plot, which revolves around Elma’s investigation into a cover-up of a horrible event during the first wave of Martian exploration. The Martian Contingency is no Roddenberry-esque utopia; rather, it is riddled with the brutal legacies of our worst demons. From the entrenched racism of apartheid-era South Africa or politicization of pregnancy and childbirth to the casual postwar sexism of phrases like “keep the home fires burning” or the connotations of referring to the Mars base as a colony or settlement, Kowal’s Martian pioneers cannot escape the myriad traumas we humans have inflicted on each other over the years. The result is a deeply personal novel about whether the human race will survive and, if it does, what it will be.
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