Review: The Lady Astronaut of Mars

The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I follow the author's blog, and when I saw that this was on the Hugo ballot, and could be read online at Tor.com, I thought I'd take a look.

It moved me. It was well-structured, all the ends tucked in and callbacks in the right places. It used symbolism and literary reference and pointed to issues of the human condition at large, like career versus family. All of this would usually add up to five stars from me, particularly since the author has as beautiful a voice on the page as she does when she speaks. It's the kind of strongly written, human story that wins Hugos, and it reminded me Mike Resnick's "The Homecoming", also Hugo-nominated (though that one didn't win).

But it's one of those stories that bombards the characters with pain and just doesn't let up on them. Now, that's a legitimate way to write a powerful story, and this is a powerful story, but... it somehow felt like a trick to me, a way to build empathy quickly in a short compass which didn't allow for a slower growth of identification through the actions the characters take. Instead, we come to empathise with them because of bad things that the author has happen to them and difficult decisions that they're faced with because of the bad things. As I say, a legitimate way to write a story, but I still felt that my emotions were being deliberately manipulated by someone who knew exactly what she was doing - ironically enough, in exactly the way that the main character's emotions were being manipulated by one of the other characters, something she resented.

The retrofuturistic setting leads to a couple of moments of near-infodump, too, and places it in an earlier age of SF. Again like the Resnick story, it could have been written 50 years ago, technologically speaking, and while this is also a legitimate thing to do, I do like my SF to look forward from today, not from 50 years ago.

Very skilled, very powerful, but I was left with reservations.



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