Storytelling & Space Settlement: The Lady Astronaut Series
Post-Meteor space ethics
In this month’s installment of my series on fictional space settlements, I’m covering the Lady Astronaut book series by Mary Robinette Kowal. The series includes four novels, a novella, and an upcoming short story collection. A quick warning that I really should be remembering to put on all these posts: This newsletter will include spoilers for all four Lady Astronaut novels, including the latest book, The Martian Contingency, which just came out a couple of months ago.
An Alternate History of Human Space Exploration
The alternate history/scifi series begins with a meteor hitting the Chesapeake Bay in the early 1950s, wiping out Washington, DC, killing millions of people, and ejecting so much water and debris into the atmosphere that scientists quickly realize that the Earth may become uninhabitable for humans within a century. This not only increases public interest in the burgeoning space program, but also means that women are included in the early missions to the Moon, as it’s expected that humanity will need to establish sustainable (read: reproducing) outposts in space in order to survive. The novels follow the first sixteen years of this process, through the establishment of bases on the Moon and Mars by married couples, but the last book concludes just before any children arrive.
The whole series is an easy and enjoyable read, following the characters’ fight against sexism and racism in the space program (which don’t magically go away in the face of an existential threat), as well as their efforts to explore, build, and survive in space. The character arcs incorporate excellent portrayals of mental illness, healthy romantic conflicts, and female friendships alongside the overarching, world-saving plots. Like Andy Weir and The Martian, Kowal clearly did the research to accurately represent the technology and mathematics of mid-century space travel, but she also captures the historical context and conflicts well.
Medical Ethics, Governance, and Culture in Space
But what about space ethics in the Lady Astronaut series? If you’ve read Off-Earth (or have just been reading this newsletter for a while), you’ll recognize many of the issues faced by the characters in these novel as topics also covered in my book.
The Lady Astronaut characters grapple several medical emergencies and related ethical debates. There are disease outbreaks among the space settlers in The Fated Sky (E. coli) and The Relentless Moon (polio). The polio outbreak plot line is especially interesting, because in this alternate history, it takes place after the building of a lunar base but before polio vaccines are universally available. And as in real life, a fraction of the polio patients experience life-changing disabilities from the disease, which threaten their continued participation in the mission. The Martian Contingency also touches very slightly on chronic disability and illness in space— including carbon monoxide-induced brain damage, degenerative neuropathy, menopause, and pregnancy— but unfortunately doesn’t have time to explore the long-term consequences.
There are also some interesting subplots in which the characters argue that they should be able to make decisions independently from Earth, especially in the established Mars settlement in The Martian Contingency. At one point, the Mars residents “go on strike,” refusing to respond to Mission Control over the radio, a plot point reminiscent of the real-life Skylab 4 incident and the way it was spun in the press as a “mutiny.” Some of the characters have to decide how to handle a request for an abortion by one of the inhabitants of the Martian settlement, given that only some of the crew members are from nations with legalized abortion. The Martian Contingency also raises the possibility of an unofficial “prison” built on Mars— a topic I’m especially fascinated by— but the circumstances take place just before the book begins and are only vaguely referenced.
This series is especially good at exploring how human cultural practices will need to be adapted in the space environment. The Fated Sky includes a harrowing depiction of the characters’ efforts to figure out how to dispose of the remains of a deceased crew member mid-spaceflight— a plot point I cited specifically in Off-Earth. In the more-established Martian settlement in The Martian Contingency, the characters must constantly juggle the differences between Earth and Mars clocks and calendars, trying to correctly schedule holidays and dealing with interplanetary communication delays. (The latter leads to a really fun scene in which a character participates in two overlapping arguments at the same time). The Martian Contingency also spends time exploring the challenges of sharing religious rituals and celebrations in an multicultural community and adapting them for a space habitat. Jewish characters ship Purim cookies from Earth to be shared inside a rover on Mars, Hindi characters use paint sponges rather than colored powder to celebrate Holi, and an Easter egg hunt inside a spacecraft takes place in the background of an important spacewalk repair mission.
It’s not all happy intercultural cooperation, of course. The main character is Jewish and deals with antisemitism throughout the series, but she’s also a well-meaning but naive white woman who goes through multiple cycles of realizing that her friends and colleagues are dealing with racial discrimination and harassment, trying to help and making things worse, and learning to listen to people of color when they tell her what they need. The final book includes a conversation among several residents of Mars about the terms “colony,” “settlement,” and “habitat,” a debate that’s been going on for the last several years among real-life space settlement advocates, activists, and ethicists.
Despite these scenes, and despite the inclusion of global warming skeptics, political opponents, and Earth First terrorists back on Earth, the rapid embrace of international and intercultural harmony in these novels feels unrealistically optimistic, even to me. But sometimes unrealistic optimism is exactly what we need in our science fiction (that’s why I love Star Trek). My bottom line for this post: If you liked Off-Earth, especially if you liked the little fictionalized vignettes at the beginning of each chapter, you’ll find a lot to like about this story-shaped exploration of the same questions. And if you’d like to read more of Mary Robinette Kowal’s writing about space, she also contributed a wonderful nonfiction chapter on “The Language in Space” to my co-edited volume, Reclaiming Space: Progressive and Multicultural Visions of Space Exploration.