I clamber into the Esther to make certain everything is locked down. She stands silent and empty around me. This is her first trip, but I’ll be flying her up and down at least five more times to get everyone to the surface. I rest my hand on the pilot’s seat with a sappy grin still on my face.
Patting the seat, as if I were saying good night to my aunt, I head toward the hatch. An astronaut is standing on the surface of Mars waiting for me. The sun has vanished beneath the horizon and I can’t see his face, but I recognize Nathaniel’s posture.
Eager as I am, I take my time dogging the hatch in place, following procedure to the letter. Five pumps of the handle to seat all fifteen latches. Wait for the delta pressure gauge to indicate a good seal. Only then do I let myself down the three rungs and set foot on Mars again.
On Mars. At some point, I will stop recognizing the wonder of where I am, but not today. I am on Mars.
We are on Mars. Nathaniel holds out both hands. I take them, still grinning, and lean in as if I were going to kiss him, but just tap my helmet against his. “I love you.”
Yes, we could use the suit radios, but then anyone who wanted could hear us.
“I love you, too.” His cheeks are streaked with tears. “Have you looked up yet?”
“No, I—” I glance up, and my words drop away.
Stars.
Above the undulating horizon of Mars, the night sky twinkles. The stars do not blaze in crystalline perfection the way they did in space. They sparkle through the atmosphere. Blue and red, silver and gold, dance against a deep purple. Across that dancing backdrop, the blinking light of the Goddard traces an arc across the heavens. “Oh dear God, I hadn’t…” I hadn’t seen the stars from the surface of a planet since March 3rd, 1952.
Do you remember where you were when the stars came out? I was with my husband, on Mars.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, thank you to Mom and Dad, who woke me up and set me in front of the television in 1969 so that I could say that I watched when the first human set foot on the Moon. I was six months old. I don’t remember it, but the narrative of the fact that I did watch it is something that my parents have always reminded me of. I think that it sparked an early love for space and space travel.
Since then, I’ve watched footage of those early flights. I’ve seen a shuttle launch in person. I’ve gone to NASA every chance I get and so I would be remiss if I did not thank NASA and all the people who work there. Everyone I’ve talked with at NASA, from the folks at #NASAsocial to suit techs to astronauts to accountants, have been the nicest people. All of them seem to know that they have one of the coolest jobs in the world and are excited to share that wonder with you. Specifically, I need to thank Benjamin Hewitt, Tom Marshburn, Kjell Lindgren, and the staff of the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. Their help runs all through this book.
Robin Fergason is a scientist who studies the surface of Mars. She’s helped select the landing sites for the Phoenix lander, the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, the InSight lander, and the Mars 2020 rover. Her dataset and interpretations are required to certify landing sites for Mars—and she helped me with getting Elma and her team down to Mars. She also provided really useful information about finding water on Mars to give me better ideas of what Leonard would be doing.
Derek “Wizard” Benkoski kept my characters seated in air-force mentality. He’s a fighter pilot and was great about giving me insights into characterization for his namesake and for Parker.
Stephen Granade is a real rocket scientist. He kept the science of navigating through space as accurate as he could and often wound up playing orbital mechanics Mad Libs. I would send him things like, “I registered Alkaid and Spica spun down to sight on Earth and presto-chango, I had the coordinates I needed to confirm our state vector. ‘[Jargon]’”
And then he would send back, “What if she rattles off the state vector like the Apollo astronauts gave numbers: no decimal points or units? ‘Plus 0771145, plus 2085346, minus 0116167, minus 15115, plus 04514, minus 19587.’” For the record, those were the x/y/z position in feet and x-dot/y-dot/z-dot velocity in feet per second, with the precision limited, from the ISS’s state M50 Cartesian vector on the day I asked the question.
Sheyna Gifford is my flight surgeon AND she also spent a year in a simulated Mars habitat. She gave me the vector for the illness with loads of delightfully graphic details. You can thank her for the floating spheres of diarrhea, although thank may not be the right word.… She also gave me details about life on “Mars” that I stole liberally, including the raisin wine experiment and what it’s like to have an argument on a twenty-minute delay.
Kjell Lindgren not only arranged for me to watch a full run of a simulated spacewalk at the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, he and Cady Coleman also helped me dramatically rework the NBL scene and the spacewalk scenes. They are astronauts. Which, you know, is kind of a cool job. Kjell has actually done an ammonia repair on the ISS and I had watched video of that when I was working on the book before we met. But there’s a big difference between watching a video and actually doing the thing. If not for him I would not have known that the lines are rigid when under pressure or that the tether pulls you slightly toward the ship in space. Cady gave me all the amazing details about the air bubble that occurs when you’re in a spacesuit built for a larger person. Both of them were endlessly patient and generous with their time. All the cool stuff is theirs. The mistakes are mine.
Kari Love is a spacesuit designer and she spotted some errors as well as giving me all sorts of insight into construction choices. Broadly paraphrasing, spacesuit design is influenced by past disasters, so the American suits are focused on being fire resistant, while the Russian ones tend to focus on avoiding punctures.
I got some help on Portuguese from Amorena Noblis, and Robin and Eric Quakenbush. Yung-Chiu Wang and Vicky Hsu (and her parents) helped me with a number of things relating to Taiwan. My brother, Dr. Stephen K. Harrison—or as I like to call him, Apeface—helped with reshaping the post-Meteor global landscape.
Chanie Beckman helped me with many things related to Judaism and celebrating Passover in space. She also went above and beyond to record the Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic for me to use as reference for the audiobook.
My Writing Excuses cohort, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler, are stunningly supportive. My assistant, Alyshondra Meacham, is also a NASA Solar System Ambassador, and spotted a ton of errors on her own. My editor, Liz Gorinsky, and my agent, Jennifer Jackson, helped shape these books structurally to make them much better.
Of course, my beta readers who do yeoman’s work: Alyshondra Meacham, Catherine Brennan, Chanie Beckman, Derek Benkoski, Kier Salmon, Stephen Granade, and Tracy V. Wilson.
And my husband, Robert, who does dishes, makes cocktails, and, when I am travelling, provides the balance wheel to my sidereal gyrations.
ABOUT THE HISTORY
I steal liberally from real history and you wouldn’t think I could do that much with a book about going to Mars in 1963. And yet … the Soviets launched Mars 2MV-3 No.1 in 1962. The rocket failed during launch and the satellite wound up in low Earth orbit, which eventually decayed and crashed. But they had the technology to send it, in the real world.
The opening scene in which Elma is listening to the broadcast of the probe landing on Mars is based on the Viking 1 spacecraft, which launched to Mars in 1975. There were other efforts during those thirteen years, and a lot of explosions. That is probably the biggest thing that I get wrong in this alternate history—there would have been a lot more failures. Getting out of the gravity well is hard.
There are a number of places in the novel where I referenced historic transcripts of different Apollo-era missions. I say “referenced,” and what I really mean is that when the First Mars Expedition is leaving Earth, I pasted in the transcript of Apollo 8, and wrote description to go around it with very minimal tweaking. I will be honest that I’m still hazy about what
“plus Y, plus Z-direction” means. Then I handed the scene to two fighter pilots, some rocket scientists, and a couple of astronauts and told them to let me know where my edits made no sense. There were … a lot of notes.
The astronaut kibble, by the way, really was proposed by a nutritionist who was really a veterinarian.
Also in the horrifying-and-real category, “the bag” that Elma and Kam use with Ruby is really under development, although in the modern world, it comes with a robotic arm to handle the shaking.
The Flash Gordon episode that the crew performs is the actual pilot episode. I used to work in radio theater and that explosion technique, with the balloon and rice, is a real thing and surprisingly effective. Great fun!
The Tonight Show in Jack Paar’s run was a very different experience to today’s. The set has a Mod Squad sort of feel and I almost expect a Bond girl to wander through it in go-go boots. If you are curious, hit YouTube, look for “Jack Paar Tonight Show,” and watch the episode with Judy Garland.
It is easy to forget, in the twenty-first century, how prevalent polio was before vaccines. The World Health Organization estimates that there are 10 to 20 million polio survivors alive today. As recently as 1988 there were 350,000 new cases of polio. In 2016, there were only 37. Thanks to vaccines, it is entirely possible that this disease will be completely eradicated. But in the 1950s and ’60s, when these books are set, polio was a common and dreaded disease. There is no cure for polio. The best that one can do is address the symptoms. It strikes people differently, with some people having no more than a mild fever. At the other end of the spectrum is the iron lung. There are a handful of people alive today who have been in iron lungs since the Apollo era. These machines use a negative pressure ventilator to suck air into their lungs. There are no parts available for the machines. On YouTube, search for “iron lung interview 1956” to watch an interview with Betty Grant, a housewife with polio.
The Jewish population in Charleston is one of the oldest in North America. Much of the early population fled the Spanish Inquisition, to London and the Netherlands. From there, they migrated to the United States, and Charleston, in particular, was welcoming since the 1669 Carolina Charter expressly granted liberty of conscience to “Jews, heathens, and dissenters.” Charleston resident Francis Salvador was the first Jew elected to public office in America. He was elected in 1774 and 1775 to the Provincial Congress and served until his death in 1776 in the Revolutionary War. Charleston remained the city with largest Jewish population until the mid-1800s. Elma’s family would have come over in the 1780s with an influx of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany.
One of the things that gets really interesting is the intersection between traditional Southern and traditional Jewish cooking. I recommend the cookbook Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South by Marcie Cohen Ferris. That said, the sour cream pound cake that Elma contemplates making is a recipe of my mother’s. If you visit my website, the recipe is waiting for you. Just search for “MRK’s mom’s pound cake recipe.”
When Elma says that she doesn’t really speak Yiddish, she’s downplaying her fluency because it is a language she only used with her family. This is, by the way, why I chose not to italicize it in the text but did italicize the languages that other characters speak. It is a heart language for her, so as familiar to her as English. That said, as happens with many bilingual people who don’t speak the language outside the home, her sentence structure and vocabulary is still that of her childhood. I based her background on a friend from Chattanooga, whose grandparents spoke Yiddish in the home with a Southern accent.
The majority of the newspaper articles are real and often from the date that is shown in the paper. I’ve adjusted them for the post-Meteor timeline, but the riots, the tornadoes, and the social concerns were real. I did move one significant event though, and that’s Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Nobel Prize. In our timeline, he does not win that until 1964. My rationale for moving it two years earlier is that his March on Washington—or in this case, his March on Kansas—also takes place two years earlier because of the Meteor. He received it, in both timelines, for his nonviolent campaign against racism.
Sometimes trying to maintain the feel of a time period provides opportunities, but there’s also the danger of reinforcing problems from that era. I’ve done that with Kam Shamoun. The first transgender organizations were begun in the 1950s and 1960s. The Cooper Do-nuts Riot in May 1959 was one of the first LGBT uprisings in the United States. Kam would have been aware of these events and … being in the military and wanting to go into space would not have been able to pursue that dream had he come out. It wasn’t a conversation I could see him having with Elma, or really anyone on the mission, and so I am misgendering Kam all the way through the novel. But the afterword isn’t in Elma’s voice, so I can correctly refer to Kam as he and him here. So can you.
I want to close by talking about Miltown. It was introduced to the market in 1955 and was the first widely popular psychotropic drug in American history. By 1957, over 36 million prescriptions had been filled, just in the United States, and a third of all prescriptions written were for Miltown. It was billed as a mild tranquilizer with “miraculous effects.” By 1960, 1 in 20 Americans had tried Miltown. It was the first time that Americans felt like it was okay to talk about anxiety and to medicate for it. For more information about Miltown, I recommend reading The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers by Andrea Tone.
But I would like to ask this of you: The conversation that Elma has with her doctor in The Calculating Stars is the same one I had with my doctor when I went in to discuss depression. I went in because I had begun to recognize myself in descriptions of depression in books or when friends discussed their own difficulties. I don’t have the social anxiety disorder that Elma struggles with, but I have plenty of friends who do. If you recognize yourself in Elma’s symptoms and have not yet talked to someone, please do. Please ask for help. It’s hard to escape the gravity well on your own.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
Collins, Michael. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Hadfield, Chris. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything. New York: Back Bay Books, 2015.
Hardesty, Von. Black Wings: Courageous Stories of African Americans in Aviation and Space History. New York: Smithsonian, 2008.
Holt, Nathalia. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. New York: Back Bay Books, 2017.
Nolen, Stephanie. Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Scott, David Meerman and Jurek, Richard. Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014.
Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016.
Sobel, Dava. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.
Teitel, Amy Shira. Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA. New York: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016.
von Braun, Dr. Wernher. Project MARS: A Technical Tale. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide Publishing, Inc., 2006.
TOR BOOKS BY MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
THE GLAMOURIST HISTORIES
Shades of Milk and Honey
Glamour in Glassss
Without a Summer
Valour and Vanity
Of Noble Family
Ghost Talkers
THE LADY ASTRONAUT SERIES
The Calculating Stars
The Fated Sky
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the historical fantasy novel Ghost Talkers and the five books in the Glamourist Histories series. She is also a multiple Hugo Award winner. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Tor.com, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Kowal, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago with her husband, Robert, and more than a dozen manual typewriters. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Fated Sky Page 32