A Fan's Playground

This is a murder mystery novel set in space in the future, but among other things the sheer quantity of classic cocktails all the characters drink made me wonder what was going on with its vibes, and the answer appears to be that the book is based on a 1960's movie. Which explains a lot, tbh.

It felt to me like it was trying to have 1960's mystery vibes while also updating its general social consciousness, but for me personally, the way this particular book did the mashup did not work. It gave me the feeling that it simultaneously wanted to be like, "I understand about prejudice and oppression and intersectionality!" and also "this is an unexamined power fantasy about being rich!" and the two did not mesh nicely with each other.

also..... the heroine is a tech billionaire named Tesla travelling to Mars. I couldn't help being reminded of a certain other billionaire in the news a lot these days.

Anyway, I didn't feel the worldbuilding was strong, and I didn't particularly like or care about any of the characters, and I wasn't intrigued by the murder mystery, so all together there wasn't a lot for me in this book.

Some readers may appreciate though that the main character is someone who lives with disabling chronic pain and PTSD, which are regularly kept at the forefront of her experience of life. However, she also has a service dog for her PTSD and the sheer quantity of time she spent releasing the dog to say hi to other people and get petted.... I think the dog spent more of the book off-duty than on. Not at all, from my understanding, the usual priorities of people with service dogs.

Overall, I expected better from this author given the other things I've read from her, and I'm not sure what happened here. Hopefully this is just an off book and not the beginning of a trend for her!

The thing about this series that has been nagging at me from the first book, but haven't been able to articulate to myself until now, is that it is simultaneously too hopeful and not hopeful enough. It makes it hard to believe in the hopeful future the books are clearly trying to work towards. ( cut for spoilers for the end of this book ) And one of the the other effects of this hope/hopelessness is it also kind of makes me feel like the efforts at diversity are asking for an ally cookie instead of feeling like what would actually happen in the version of history posited by the series. Given how sexist/racist/homophobic/etc the powers that be are, would they really be letting all these people into space? Even given the dire urgency caused by the asteroid? Bigoted people will shoot themselves in their own foot facilitate their continued bigotry tbh!!

I rated the previous books in this series highly and wrote positive reviews, but I had a sense of unease all along that I just ignored because I couldn't figure out what I was reacting to. I'm still not sure I'm able to fully explain my position here, but. The above at least points towards it.

Anyway, let me talk more about this book specifically! This book focuses on a different female astronaut than the Lady Astronaut herself. The hero of this book is Nicole Wargin, caught between her professional ambitions and her role as a political spouse to support her husband. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story. But the main driving plot of the book is: there's one or more saboteurs on the moon, endangering everyone in the nascent colony there! And this was EXTREMELY STRESSFUL for me to read about, which made the whole book super hard for me to actually read. I nearly gave up on it several times.

This was made harder by the fact that I was reading it while away in a provincial park on a canoe trip with no internet access, so I couldn't google for spoilers to lower my stress levels as I otherwise would have!

I also was not a fan of the fact that ( spoilers! )

Anyway I do overall still like this series, but not as much as I once did.

This was a really good book!

It's a prequel to a novelette available for free online, The Lady Astronaut of Mars, when the protagonist of the series, Elma York, is an old woman.

The Calculating Stars takes place in Elma's younger days. The basic premise: in the 1950's, after a major meteorite impact, humanity makes a rather more concerted effort to colonize space than in our history because it suddenly seems kinda urgent to get off-planet. Elma, a pilot, wants to be one of the first astronauts, despite the rampant sexism of the era working against her.

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