A review by flying_monkey
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal

adventurous emotional hopeful tense medium-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I enjoyed the first two volumes of what is now becoming the 'Lady Astronaut' series. The set-up is basically that a meteorite hits earth in the 1950s, not far from Washington DC, destroying the US capital and a lot of the military command and infrastructure too, and worse, the Earth is facing utter climatic destruction in the longer term. Governments are forced to accelerate space programs to develop long-term plans to get people to the Moon and Mars. This means that they need all the best pilots they can get and while the world remains highly conservation, female pilots (who let's not forget, did much of the testing and delivery of planes during WW2) end up as astronauts alongside the men (who are not always happy about this). However, despite the death and destruction caused by the initital impact and the obvious changes to the weather, a lot of people remain unconvinced about the prospects and oppose the space program, and some have formed a violent Christian-inspired terrorist organisation, Earth First. 

With Elma, the original Lady Astronaut, now en route to Mars, this novel focuses on the Nicole Wargin, another astronaut, who was a minor character in the first novels, who is also the wife of a senior politician, a possibility for next president. She was a spy in the war, but her other secrets are her her anorexia and anxiety, both of which she barely keeps under control. She's an important pilot and leader for the Moon colonization program, and this novel focuses on the threat to the colony posed by Earth First infiltrators who become increasingly dangerous in their attempts to make it fail. 

The novels are written with a deliberately 1950s feeling. They are melodramatic, almost Douglas Sirk-like in their sometimes over-the-top emotional tone. Despite the protagonist claiming to not believe in god, there is a strong Christian feel, which I guess in characteristic of the USA, and particularly the USA of the time, and the heterosexual married love and sex are ethusiastic and frankly annoying. By this novel, which is twice as long as either of the previous ones, this is all becoming a bit tiresome, and it really drags at this length. At least a third, perhaps half, of the novel is really just establishing the situation, which we really don't need. It does pick up in speed and plot in the last third but I don't think this salvages a relatively flabby book. And finally, for all its research, which the author is really keen to tell you about, compared with other recent Moon-set novels, in particular Ian McDonald's Luna sequence, this book really suffers in its portrayal of the Moon as an environment and moonbase life. Sure, McDonald's is a much more advanced society, but the dangers of the Moon seem far more real, the dust more everpresent, the contrasts starker. A disappointment.