Reviews and Comments

It's amazingly hard to mix crime fiction with science fiction. The Relentless Moon manages to create a mystery that works in space. This takess place is an alternate history where a meteor hit Earth in the 1950s and humanity tries to settle Mars in the 1960s to save itself from massive global warming. While the Lady Astronaut Elma York heads to Mars in The Fated Sky, fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin heads to the moon for visit to ferry colonists to the base that will be used for staging future trips to Mars. However, while there things start going wrong, and it's quickly apparent that the subversive Earth First organization has a mole in the space program on the Moon. Things get worse. The subversive plot reads as something that could happen. No weird coincidences. Bad guys that make sense psychologically. Our hero is both competent and flawed.

I listened to the author perform the audiobook version of the story. Kowal is a top-notch performer. Don't miss out. About the only drawback is the cast of characters is large, and I find it difficult to follow who's who and remember who did what. The emotional immediacy of the story in audio form more than makes up for the flaw.

I don't often talk about my feminism because it's usually pretty sus when dudes talk about being a feminist, but this is the book that made me think about how implicit biases impacted me. Not because this book is a good example, but rather the opposite.

While I read the book, I started to notice that the defining characteristic of all the major female characters was that they had been used for sex to fill out their backstory. Sex slaves and that sort of thing. This was at the height of grimdark fantasy. It was no great revelation, but I wasn't being coached about that trope. Just that something finally broke through my wall of cluelessness.

I wrote about my realization about the book on my book blog at the time. Author Joe Abercrombie noticed it. And wrote his own blog post that acknowledged what I noticed. More than one of his fans ended up commenting at my blog that I was just wrong, and how dare you, though most of the commenters at Abercrombie's blog were less confrontational. Anyway, the comments at my blog were also eye-opening.

I did like the book though!

That was 16 years ago this week. I make no claim to any kind of great feminism, just that I try to be intentional these days. This book was the start.