The Martian Contingency
by Mary Robinette Kowal
14 May 2025
I really enjoyed the previous three books in this series, and so I was really pleased to see Mary Robinette Kowal was writing another installment and also a bit worried in case it wasn’t up to the standard of the others. It’s great though!
The thing about this series is that it didn’t start with the first volume, The Calculating Stars, but originated in a short story, The Lady Astronaut of Mars, and that short story happens after all the later published stories. Elma York is the “Lady Astronaut” and the short story shows her in her sixties and the other stories go back and fill in how she got there as well as generally rounding out the story universe. Rereading the short story after reading The Martian Contingency lets you see how the author is putting in place all the pieces of the story for the future. It gives the series a destination and that has anchored the rest of the stories. And I really liked that. And aside from that the plotting is excellent, there’s no easy get outs and essential space related details are seeded long before they are relied on.
I like that the science seems mostly good, I’m sure things are simplified for fictional purposes (otherwise we’d have people living on Mars I guess) but that’s fine. Throughout the whole series it’s felt like the author has been trying to base the series in reality rather than just hand waving “space science stuff” and I really appreciate that. The heart of the book is in the relationships and in the ways that this version of the universe might have got people to Mars but people are still people. Racism and sexism are still major issues to be addressed in this book as they have been in previous ones.
I’d happily read another entry in this series, but I’m not sure it needs one. This very much feels like it completes things. I can see pages on the internet that claim to represent “Lady Astronaut Book 5” but none of them seem very official. What I do like is that having a quick search for that has shown me a handful more short stories and I’m off to read those now!
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