The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette KowalMy rating: ★★★★
I am loving this series from Mary Robinette Kowal. It pushes all of my buttons as a boomer child of the space age, telling stories of an alternate, sped up space race pitted against nature, rather than Russia. Mary Robinette has done her research and it shows, without getting too pedantic. After spending the previous novel looking into developments at Artemis Base on the moon with Nicole Wargin, this book returns to Elma York and her work on Mars getting things settled in at Earth's new habitat (not colony) there.
Of course, things do not go smoothly. Elma senses something is wrong from the minute she lands with the second expedition and finds certain details mysteriously out of place. But the members of the first expedition are united in their silence about what might have happened on their first trip. The mysteries are set aside while more urgent threats to the mission are addressed. Yet even those situations spark more questions about the first expedition.
A couple of things kept this from being a five star experience for me. The biggest was the repetitiveness of Elma's passive ponderings about the first expedition's problems. I kept wanting her to be the badass she was in her first two novels and get to the bottom of things. She did exhibit great agency when it came to piloting tasks. But it seemed to take forever for her to grab hold of the reigns of command and drive the mission. This bogged things down for me.
On the whole, the storytelling is top notch, even with a bunch of technobabble and cultural conflict. The reader is always rooting for everyone to stay safe, stay happy and be successful in mixing and matching cultures and build a new society on a new planet.
Disclosure: Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Books for allowing me to preview this book.
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