The Calculating Stars

The Calculating Stars is a science fiction novel by the American writer Mary Robinette Kowal, published in 2018. It is the first book of the Lady Astronaut series and a prequel to the short story The Lady Astronaut of Mars, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2019.

The disaster that opens the book is a meteorite impact on the eastern seaboard in 1952, which kills the president and much of the government and leaves the survivors to work out what comes next. Elma York, a former WASP pilot and a mathematician, and her husband Nathaniel, an engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project, calculate the consequences: a short period of cooling followed by a runaway greenhouse effect that will make the planet unable to support life.

Their answer is an accelerated programme to colonise space, and the novel follows Elma as she tries to take part in it. The International Aerospace Coalition does not select women, so she works as a computer while pressing publicly for the programme to open up, an argument that runs into assumptions about race and sex she meets in every other part of her life.