Review:
The Martian Contingency, by Mary Robinette Kowal
| Series: |
Lady Astronaut #4 |
| Publisher: |
Tor |
| Copyright: |
2025 |
| ISBN: |
1-250-23703-3 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
390 |
The Martian Contingency is the fourth book of the mostly-realistic
science fiction alternate history series that began with the novelette
"The Lady Astronaut of Mars" and the
novel
The Calculating Stars. It returns
to Elma York as the main character, covering her second trip to Mars after
the events of
The Fated Sky. It's
helpful to remember the events of the previous two books to follow some of
the plot.
Elma is back on Mars, this time as second in command. The immediate goal
of the second Mars mission is to open more domes and land additional crew
currently in orbit, creating the first permanent human settlement on Mars.
The long-term goal is to set up Mars as a refuge in case the greenhouse
effect caused by the meteor strike in
The Calculating Stars
continues to spiral out of control. Elma is anxious and not looking
forward to being partly in charge, particularly since her position is
partly due to her fame with the public (and connection with the American
president). She'd rather just be a pilot. But she'll do what the mission
needs from her, and at least this time her husband is with her on Mars.
As one might expect from earlier installments of this series,
The
Martian Contingency starts with the details and rhythms of life in a
dangerous, highly technical, and mission-driven scientific environment:
hard science fiction of the type most closely modeled on NASA and real
space missions. Given that this is aimed at permanent Mars colonies that
would theoretically have to be independent of Earth, it requires a huge
amount of suspension of disbelief for the premise, but Kowal at least
tries for verisimilitude in the small details. I am not an expert in early
space program technology (Kowal's alternate history diverges into a
greatly accelerated space program in the 1950s and, for example, uses
female mathematicians for most calculations), so I don't know how
successful this is, but it feels crunchy and believable.
As with the previous books, though, this is not just a day in the life of
an astronaut. There's something wrong, something that happened during the
first Mars expedition while Elma was in orbit and left odd physical clues,
and no one is willing to talk about it. Elma is just starting to poke
around before the politics at home go off the rails (again), exacerbated
by a cringe-worthy social error by Elma herself, and she once again has to
navigate egregious sexism and political meddling in a highly dangerous
environment a long way from home.
It is a little surprising that I like this series as much as I do. I don't
particularly care for pseudo-realistic science fiction, although I admit
there is something deeply satisfying about reading about people following
checklists properly. The idea of permanent Mars colonies as an escape from
a doomed Earth is unbelievable and deeply silly, but Kowal locked herself
into that alternate future with "The Lady Astronaut of Mars," which is
still set in the future of all of the books so far. A primary conflict in
each of the books comes from the egregious sexism and racism of a culture
based on 1950s American attitudes towards both, and the amount of progress
Elma can make against either is limited, contingent, and constantly
compromised.
And yet. At its best, this series is excellent competence porn, both in
the spirit of the
Apollo 13 movie and for the navigation of social
and political obstacles and idiocy. Elma is highly competent in a
believable and sympathetic way, with strengths, weaknesses, and an ongoing
struggle with anxiety. There is something rewarding in watching people
solve problems and eventually triumph by being professional, careful,
principled, and creative. It's enough to make a good book, even if I am
not that interested in the setting and technology.
As with the rest of the series, this will not be for everyone. You have to
be up for reading about a lot of truly awful sexism and racism without the
payoff of a complete triumph. This is a system that Elma navigates, not
overthrows, and that's not going to be enough for some readers. You also
have to accept the premise of a Mars colony, which in an otherwise hard
science fiction novel is a bit much despite Kowal's attempts to
acknowledge some of the difficulties. But if you don't mind that
drawbacks, this series continues to be an opportunity to read about people
being quietly and professionally competent.
This is not my favorite entry, mostly because Elma makes a rather
humiliating mistake that's central to the plot and has a lot of
after-effects (and therefore a lot of time in the spotlight), and because
there is rather a lot of discussion of sexuality that felt childish to me.
The intent was to try to capture the way people in the 1950s talked about
sex, and perhaps Kowal was successful in that, but I didn't enjoy the
experience. But I still found myself pulled into the plot and happily
rooting for the characters, even though a reader of "The Lady Astronaut of
Mars" has a pretty good idea of how everything will turn out.
If you liked the series so far, recommended, although I doubt it will be
the favorite entry for most readers. If you did not like the earlier books
of the series, this one will not change your mind.
Content notes: Way, way too much detailed discussion of an injury to a
fingernail than I wanted to read, as well as some other rather explicit
description of physical injury. Reproductive health care through the lens
of the 1950s, so, uh, yeah. A whole lot of sexism, racism, and other forms
of discrimination that is mostly worked around rather than confronted.
Rating: 7 out of 10
I was reading a post on Alex Chan's
website1 that referenced the concept of
digital gardens,
a concept/analogy for organising information which dates back to the 90s.
This old concept is getting new traction today by contrasting the approach
with "endless stream" as used and abused by social media, but also how blogs
are typically presented.
This site, my homepage, has a blog, and that's the bit that most people who
interact with the site will experience. Partly, because it's the bit that gets
syndicated out: via feeds; on Planet
Debian and downstream from it; once upon a time on
Twitter; nowadays on the Fediverse.
However there's more to my homepage than that. The rest of it may be of little
interest to anyone beside me, but it's useful to me, at least. So I may switch
focus a little bit from mainly writing blog posts, and tend to the rest of the
garden a bit more.
Some recent seeding and pruning:
Recently my guest status at Newcastle University came up for renewal, so I
wrote down my goals in the Historic Computing Committee for the next year or
so, and put them here: nuhcc. I've also been pondering what I'm up to in
Debian at the moment, so took some time to add my current projects to
that page.
Huge. Huge. Amazing. It did crash as soon as I tried to actually use the
radio, but after fixing a few dangling bugs in the API surface (and some
assumptions I think some underlying gnuradio driver may be making that I need
to double check in the code), I was able to get a super solid stream of
broadcast fm radio, with gqrx being none the wiser. It thought it was
just talking to the device it knows as 
Nice. I can t wait to try this with the rest of the rtl-sdr based tools I like
having around using my 
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indicating who wrote it. Author tags give a surface level indication, 
Linux kernel security modules provide a good additional layer of security around individual programs by restricting what they are allowed to do, and at best block and detect zero-day security vulnerabilities as soon as anyone tries to exploit them, long before they are widely known and reported. However, the challenge is how to create these security profiles without accidentally also blocking legitimate actions. For MariaDB in Debian and Ubuntu, a new AppArmor profile was recently created by leveraging the extensive test suite with 7000+ tests, giving good confidence that AppArmor is unlikely to yield false positive alerts with it.
Between July and November 2025, the 
The Debian LTS Team, funded by [Freexian s Debian LTS offering]
(
Figuring out which of these failures are new (and thus worth
investigating) has been a manual process in Debusine until now.
We have just completed the basic functionality of the
This is determined by looking at recent task history for each task in
the 
On our way to Austria last week, on March 6th, we left my daughter's laptop on a train: ICE 1201 (Hamburg-Harburg to Bludenz).
The laptop is a 
