After the first two novels in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series centred on the titular lady astronaut Elma York, the third book features her friend and fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin as protagonist while Elma is on a three year mission to Mars. Nicole is trying to balance the demands of her own career as an astronaut with her role as the wife of a politician running for president. And while the IAC is trying to side-line her because, at over 50 years old, they consider her too old to be a woman in space, and she is trying to prove her worth and value as an astronaut, her husband needs a suitable first lady and even though he supports her career, the two things are not that compatible and putting an intense strain on her. Add to that the sabotage of Earth First, a violent group that opposes the idea of space colonialization, and suddenly there is more on the line than ever before.

I have to admit that I did not connect as much with Nicole as I did with Elma. But then again that is somewhat the point of her character. Like Elma Nicole comes from a very privileged background but still has to deal with so much trauma and in her this resulted, among other things, in her compartmentalizing so much that she doesn’t let anyone get close to her, ever. And this in some ways applies to the reader as well, even though we spent the entirety of the story inside her head. On the one hand, this means there is always this kind of barrier that keeps you from really connecting with the character but on the other hand, it really underlines how she deals with everything that has been happening to her in the last 50 years.

To be honest, despite not fully connecting with Nicole, I enjoyed The Relentless Moon a bit more than The Fated Sky – though not quite as much as The Calculating Stars. It is intense, delving deeper into not only the political landscape of this alternate history US but also the technical sides of the moon colony while also essentially being a spy/murder mystery with Nicole trying to get ahead of the sabotage attempts that threaten the colonists and the entire space program. There are so many layers to the struggles faced by the lady astronauts and Mary Robinette Kowal does such a stellar job in bringing across the urgency and intensity of the situation (and adding a whole lot of parallels to very current real world issues) while never losing that hopeful note.

I also very much enjoyed the relationship dynamics we get to see in The Relentless Moon, between Nicole and the other people on the colony but especially those of the married couples – while Elma doesn’t feature prominently in this novel, we get a look at her husband Nathaniel from a different perspective, and obviously Nicole’s own husband Kenneth plays an integral role in the protagonist’s life and thus the story. Also, the Lindholm’s, Myrtle and Eugene, are now settled firmly on the moon and are integral to the going-ons there.

All in all, The Relentless Moon was another stunning novel by Mary Robinette Kowal, an amazing addition to her Lady Astronaut series and just overall a great book. The story is intense and relevant, with amazing characters whose struggles, losses and wins feel so very realistic and relatable even when I couldn’t fully connect to the protagonist. And as always it is obviously that a lot of careful research went into the technological problems, historically appropriate politics and such. I am already eagerly awaiting The Martian Contingency, which will once more feature Elma and centre around the establishing of the new Mars colony.

This was a wonderful addition to an already fantastic series by a brilliant author.

Mary Robinette Kowal is absolutely brilliant author, and I will read anything that she writes from now on.

Elma York is on her way to Mars, but the moon colony is still be created. This title takes place at this time focused on Elma's friend Nicole Wargin, and the establishment of the moon colony. Even with a different main character, this story still has the same feel as the first two titles in this series. Meticulously researched, and with a great understanding of the female experience at this time (regardless of eminent extinction), I can feel like I am with these women. While at times difficult to read, it's so easy to fall in love with these characters.

Plus, espionage in space!

Highly recommend to everyone. I hope Mary Robinette Kowal continues this series.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the free arc. All opinions are my own.

Just a fantastic story, I've love this series but Kowal is a brilliant author. It's crazy how this series just keeps getting better as it goes on. Not a lot of stories have the ability to get better, especially three books in - but this one definitely does.

Highly recommended

Believable future history that is well researched and plausible, with excellent plot tension and a memorable main character.

Elma York (from The Lady Astronaut, The Calculating Stars, and The Fated Sky) is now on her way to Mars, but the drama closer to home is anything but over. Fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin tries to balance her dreams of joining the colony on the Moon with her duties as the wife of Kansas governor, a likely candidate for president. Like Elma, Nicole wrestles with mental illness, in her case anorexia. She’s had it a long time and has solid coping strategies. But when sabotage cuts the Moon off from Earth and a polio epidemic rages through the colony, and she is one of the few members capable of discovering the saboteurs and stopping them, not to mention keeping everyone alive, she finds herself at risk of a serious relapse.

Like its predecessors, The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky, The Relentless Moon pairs hard-science thriller excitement with sensitive characters and a sweet, enduring love story.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series launched with a single novelette (“The Lady Astronaut of Mars“), and the eponymous Lady Astronaut Elma York has in turn inspired other women to go to space in this punch-card-punk alternate history.

While The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky both traced Elma’s paths from Earth to the Moon and then to Mars, Kowal has expanded the scope of her series by focusing on a new “astronette” for the third installment: ambitious, brilliant senator’s wife and WASP pilot Nicole Wargin, whose adventure on the lunar colony in The Relentless Moon runs parallel to the events of The Fated Sky. In doing so, Kowal reminds readers that humanity has a long way to go to settle the Moon, and that no two Lady Astronauts are alike.

At the same time that Elma is on a history-making three-year mission to Mars, her dear friend and fellow astronette Nicole grapples with present unrest on Earth. It’s been over a decade since the Meteor wiped out most of the Eastern Seaboard, transplanting the seat of government to Kansas City—where Nicole’s husband Kenneth is senator—and refocusing the world’s priority to escaping the increasing effects of climate change. But while the International Aerospace Coalition (IAC) works to establish and expand the lunar colony with new influxes of civilians and astronauts, the growing Earth First movement resists the narrative of leaving their planet… especially because it is clear that not every single human can afford (money- or health-wise) to go to the stars.

While past Lady Astronaut novels have explored the political challenges of resettling the human race, The Relentless Moon best embodies these obstacles in the tenacious Nicole, who would rather be showing people how to float-walk in zero-G but instead squeezes herself into high heels and grounds herself with Earth’s gravity in order to meet her peers where they’re at. Despite having the cachet and her own minor celebrity of being in the first class of Lady Astronauts, that aspect of her identity mostly makes her an oddity to the people in her Earth social circles. They can better stomach her when she’s Mrs. Kenneth Wargin, with her flattering laugh and undying support for her senator husband’s ambitions for the presidency. Seemingly the only characteristic that carries over between her two lives is her penchant for striking red lipstick-as-armor.

The IAC’s semi-regular Moon missions, the next one of which Nicole is on, suffer setbacks in the form of increasingly suspicious accidents that further weaken public support of the IAC’s colonization plan. Paired with growing opposition and riots from Earth Firsters, it is a politically fraught atmosphere in which Nicole is planning to leave her husband behind for her next mission. Yet none of that will deter her from going to where she is at her best, both as a public figure and a pilot—even if higher-ups in the IAC are starting to murmur behind her back about the fifty-something astronette being “old hat,” and even if they aren’t giving her as many opportunities to prove herself as her younger, male colleagues.

A reader will likely empathize with Nicole’s impatience to get to the Moon already. The first third of the novel proceeds at a frustratingly slow pace, setting up the necessary conflict on Earth as well as the idiosyncracies of lunar living, albeit sometimes repetitively. It’s not until Nicole and her team are settled on the Moon, with a few hiccups, that the book’s action truly picks up—with sabotage. Leaving Earth doesn’t mean that you leave its problems behind.

Because what is at the heart of each Lady Astronaut story is the concept of distance and disconnection: between Earth and the Moon, or the Moon and Mars. When mysteriously-timed blackouts chip away at the colony’s calm, and a single incident of supposed food poisoning transforms into something much more sinister, what truly amps up the astronauts’ anxiety is the fact that they have to solve these issues on their own. Mission Control and their loved ones are just faraway voices with a 1.3-second delay, and they are still living (albeit with church services and bridge club) on a rock that could kill them in instants if their oxygen gets knocked out.

Part of the story’s slow pace is due to Nicole herself, a vexing (in the best way) enigma of a protagonist. While the in-universe news reports at the start of each chapter document the increasing tension on Earth, so much of the early scenes are filled with the same empty chatter without much action—because we’re witnessing them through the eyes of Nicole-the-politician’s-wife, who can only watch as her husband tries to manage the Earth First threat. Even after she’s back on the Moon, facing the potent cocktail of sexism and ageism from the IAC, she retains much of this making-nice persona—stubbornly digging her booted heels in, killing them with kindness. For someone so eager and accommodating to show off her various facets, Mrs. Wargin actually plays things very close to the chest.

The reward of reading, then, is sticking with Nicole until she unclenches enough to reveal the parts of herself that are not immediately apparent: the anorexia that lets her squeeze into gala gowns and exert control when so much agency is taken from her, that becomes unintentional self-sabotage just as the colony’s glitches shift from inconvenience to true danger. But as things get increasingly personal, Nicole also reveals another facet of herself, answering some questions of how she is so good with people, and it is spectacular.

Although it is physically impossible for Elma to be in the novel, bound as she is for Mars, her presence is keenly felt through glimpses of correspondence between her and her husband Nathaniel, waiting patiently on Earth for the years she’ll be gone. Their tender dynamic, the beating heart of the prior books, inspires Nicole and Kenneth on how to cope with their own long-distance relationship.

Yet the Wargins only work as well as they do because theirs is already a reassuring partnership of equals, especially for the time and for his position. Each anticipates the other’s needs, whether it’s a surprise Caesar salad (the ultimate declaration of love) or saying the right thing at the right party. If anything, their greatest source of tension—their future home—feels at times under-explored. Nicole clearly lives for her Moon stays, while Kenneth is gearing up to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. Even though the plan is to get as many Americans as possible to a new home off Earth, he has his reasons for staying on terra firma. This potentially marriage-altering dilemma gets a bit lost as the lunar sabotage ramps up.

On the Moon, Lady Astronaut Myrtle Lindholm and her husband Eugene see their own marriage tested: she with the daily dangers of investigating terrorist attacks on their home, he in struggling to rally the colonists and astronauts under the authority of a Black man. While the Lindholms seem to start the novel as merely supporting characters, Nicole’s crises create the space to bring them to the forefront as competent, courageous leaders. Really, every relationship in this series is impressively equipped to navigate an asteroid field of personal and professional barrages and come out the other side.

That’s the triumph of the Lady Astronaut books: exploring the dissonance of space travel, but also delighting in the moments of connection. The stories are strongest when they’re about two individuals, or two groups of humans, overcoming the expanse between them and working together toward some (physical or figurative) common ground.

Absolutely loved this and such a great addition to one of my favorite series. It is such a great 3rd book to the series and loved that we got some new perspectives and main POVs.

Kowal continues her excellent Lady Astronaut Series in this third volume focused on fellow astronaut Nicole Wargin. Wargin is one of the original six female astronauts and the wife of the governor of Kansas. The action in this volume is moon and earth based as Elma York and the Mars mission fade into the background. As in the previous volumes, Kowal deftly intertwines political intrigue, engineering geek era, and very human characters to weave an engaging story that made me consider whether I needed to be on time at work each evening as I read. Highly recommended! I read this as an eArc provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I look forward to COVID being over and purchasing the hard cover volumes and tracking the author down at a convention for signatures.

Thank you to Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. I was not able to read the previous two books in the series and that hurt me in understanding fully what was going on in this book. Set in the early sixties after a meteor stike destroyed much of the East Coast this book was both an alternate history and futuristic extrapolation. Here ther are astronauts headed to Mars but they do not figure much in this story. I would have like greater details of the technical aspects of what was going on but did not get them. It is a good but not great story.

The third in the Lady Astronauts series changes protagonists as we switch from Elma, focus of books one and two, to Nicole. The political situation on earth is heating up as support for the space program is waning; as eleven years after the meteor strike, the urgency is no longer apparent to most people. The Earth First movement is getting more violent in its protests and is gaining support as many areas affected by the meteor strike are still without basic necessities and it is increasingly obvious that there will be many people left behind on earth when it becomes uninhabitable. On other fronts there is organized opposition to having blacks or other non-whites involved in the space program and attempts to label the NAACP a terrorist group.

Nicole is on a rotation, of time on the moon flying shuttles and time on earth where she both helps promote the International Aerospace Coalition as well as fulfill her duties as a politician’s wife. Rotating back to the moon early, the moon landing is marred by sabotage and a crash landing. The incidents of sabotage continue with a series of minor incidents that build in severity. When a polio epidemic strikes the colony, things get dangerous for everyone; and then, after a devastating incident on earth, the colony loses contact with earth and are truly on their own. They need to control the polio outbreak, find the saboteur and create solutions for survival in case they never regain contact with Earth.

Since the incidents in this book take place during the first year of the Mars expedition those who have read The Fated Sky will know immediately why the colony loses contact with earth but that does not lessen the tension surrounding the events on the moon. Nicole is fleshed out much more than in The Calculating Stars and is a much more complex person than is apparent even in the beginning of this book.

This is a wonderful series. The alternate history is recognizable with the issues of the “real” civil rights movement affecting this world just as much as the meteor strike and space program do. I really hope the series continues as the earth attempts to colonize Mars and perhaps a future book could focus on Myrtle and Eugene Lindholm, pioneering black members of the IAC.

Highly recommended ~~ Stephanie L Bannon

The Relentless Moon follows The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky as the third in Mary Robinette Kowal's feminist SF series, Lady Astronaut.

The series started with a meteorite strike that destroyed most of east coast U.S.A. in 1952 and initiated catastrophic climate change. Massive resources were spent on an accelerated space colonization program.

Earth First saboteurs have been attacking the space program. Lady Astronaut Nicole Wargin heads up to the fledgling moon colony, where she's assigned as personal secretary to the Lunar Colony Administrator, but is also briefed on threats to the colony.

Of course, the terrorists keep up their efforts - on Earth and in space.

Wonderful to read a series with strong female heroes who are engaged in science and politics and can hold their own with the men around them.

A really inventive mix of mystery, science fiction and alternative history. Kowal takes a risk in shifting protagonists, but it pays off because Nicole holds her own. She's an intriguing character with a fascinating back story, and yet she's also very realistically a woman fighting for her place in a man's world.

This is the third book in the Lady Astronaut series detailing the events from Nicole's point of view. Nicole is one of the original female astronauts, who is also the wife of Governor Wargin. She gives us a different perspective of how the space program is developing in this alternate history space opera. It would be advisable to read the first two books in the series, but the author has included enough background that this could be read alone. The story is suspenseful and the characters come to life. This is an enjoyable read and I look forward to future books in this series.

The latest entry in Mary Robinette Kowal's excellent alternate history series, THE RELENTLESS MOON, is a phenomenal addition to the genre. By turns hopeful and devastating, this great read will be a surefire hit with existing fans of the series.

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m a huge fan of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series, an alt history where the space race was accelerated when a meteor hit the earth and set in motion a climate crisis that would eventually make our world uninhabitable. While the last two books focused on astronaut Elma York, The Relentless Moon picks up with Nicole Wargin, astronaut and wife to a politician considering a run for president. When a terrorist group Earth First threatens to sabotage the moon colony, Nicole uses her spying and socialite skills to discover the person responsible before it’s too late, assisted by a set of reliable characters from the original duology, including Eugene and Myrtle Lindholm and Helen Carmouche.

My only criticism is nitpicky: I would have liked to see a little more digging into Earth First. Previous books have made it clear that climate change denial, civil rights protests, and stress of marginalized communities who won’t be able to escape earth, are all coming together to generate reasonable and nuanced resistance to the space program. These were overshadowed in this book by the terrorism and radical ideology of Earth First.

That said, this novel was yet another example of Kowal’s tremendous skill in characterization and alt history, in subtle historical nods thinking through how a world derailed by the meteor would look like compared to our own. Nicole is a strong main character struggling on and off with anorexia, a woman with boundless ambition in a loving marriage that’s struggling slightly under the power-couple weight of their individual careers. The twists of the novel were unexpected, well-written, and suspenseful, as a close and intelligent inner group of astronauts fights artful sabotage. The science was intricate, well-researched, and fun. I had little time to miss Elma when Nicole Wargin was such a pivotally strong, stubborn, and fierce protagonist. I look forward to what book 4 in this series will bring.

I really enjoyed it. I like Elma as a narrator but reading the different side of the story was amazing. I loved Nicole as a protagonist was great too. I loved her character very much. Mary Robinette wrote an amazing storyline for this book. The Relentless Moon was an amazing addition to this series.

Mary Robinette Kowal expands her Lady Astronaut series in The Relentless Moon returning us to the 1950/60s alternative history space effort to get humans to Mars before the Earth dies. She turns her focus to a different member of the original six Lady Astronauts, and I highly recommend it.
The Relentless Moon (A Lady Astronaut Novel) by Mary Robinette Kowal 07/14/2020 Macmillan-Tor/Forge

Elma York was the main character in the first two Lady Astronaut novels, set in the early 1950s after a meteor hit the Eastern Seabord with enough force to wipe out DC, and enough energy to vaporize so much water vapor that life on Earth would face extreme greenhouse conditions, including boiling seas. People look to Mars for a new home for humanity.

Elma had flown fighter transport during WWII and managed to get herself and six others into the fledgling astronaut corps forming in an international effort to establish a foothold on the Moon and colonize Mars. The Relentless Moon takes place while Elma is on her way to Mars in the second book, but that’s another story. Kowal has promised to tell some of the other Lady Astronaut’s stories, and here Nicole Wargin takes center stage. If you’re worried that she won’t live up to your expectations, you don’t know Nicole, a former WASP pilot and senator (now governor’s) wife who was instrumental in getting the women into the program.

Nicole didn’t make the Mars mission, but she’s headed for the lunar colony because she has a special skill set that she picked up at a very special Swiss boarding school during the war. Skills that will come in very handy tracking down the saboteur (or saboteurs) that are causing havoc on the Moon.

I worried that having Nicole, a white person of privilege, married to a Senator (now Governor) would obscure the issues that the author so deftly makes relevant in the book, but instead, she turns out to be a perfect lens, aware of the disparities in the world and leaning into the struggle in very genuine ways.

It’s a great story from all the standpoints SF can be great. It holds a mirror up to the here and now, it digs into hard science, and the characters, especially Nicole, are fully realized and challenged. Nicole’s personal struggles include ambition and anorexia nervosa, in addition to coping with the sort of chauvinism that we wish had disappeared into the past.

If you haven’t read the first two, this could use a paragraph or two of scene-setting, perhaps, but if you read this, you’re covered. I read this as an eBook, which is what most of my reading is these days, and I kept looking anxiously at the % remaining, hoping it would stop shrinking so fast. Highly Recommended.

Trigger Warning: Anorexia, grief, pandemic and suicidal thoughts

While Elma York, aka The Lady Astronaut, is away on a three-year mission to Mars, it's up to Nicole Wargin and the others to hold down the fort. Except something is rotten on the Earth, and the trail of sabotage is leading straight to the moon. Nicole is tasked to investigate, discreetly, of course.

This would be 4 stars except that epilogue. I am still crying a little.

Her vibrato sounds like she's using a jackhammer as a dildo.


Welp, if you were hoping for the delicate sensibilities of Elma York, and her aversion to all things sex and love of rocket euphemisms, you have come to the wrong book.

Nicole Wargin may be the perfect politician's wife on the outside, but on the inside she is ice cold, fiery hot and all sorts of bored. She's over fifty and despite being one of the most experienced astronauts in the solar system, has been consistently pushed aside because she is old hat. Determined to prove them otherwise, she's going push her mind and body to the limits.

Despite her forthright nature regarding sex and the ever-presence of the reader in her mind, I never felt like I had a sense of Nicole. It always felt like she was holding something back. Like she was blocking away everyone and everything and keeping the world (minus Kenneth) at arm's distance.

Which goes to show the nature that long-term trauma takes and how people cope to pressure, stress and trauma. Nicole survived the Meteor and World War II, and she also survived her high pressure childhood, which led her to compartmentalize everything.

Writing this kind of character is intensely difficult to pull off, and I'm just not sure that this was a success. Nicole wasn't a character you could connect with—she didn't do beyond the surface connections, even with friends—and she wasn't one you could really empathize with. She knew the calculations of the risks she took, and she did it.

However, what I did connect with was her grit. Nicole had a lot of it and she just. kept. going.

Until she couldn't.

And then she tried harder.

Even if we hadn't been observing quarantine procedures, there wasn't anywhere on the colony for all 326 of us to gather. So everyone gathered in the largest common space of the module they were in and listened to Eugene address the moon.


One of the things this book addressed that I loved was how marginalized people were held back because of their marginalizations—and when they were freed of their tethers (both of policy and of their own minds) they soared. Eugene and Myrtle are two of my favorite characters, mainly because Myrtle is fantastic and kind and has a sharp wit, and Eugene is just about the most competent and humble man who was ever a jet pilot turned astronaut. I loved them and their relationship, and I was so happy to see more of it—and to see Eugene take over as administrator of the Moon.

Another bit was on Nicole, and how women over a certain age are told to retire with grace and dignity or be gently shoved out an airlock. And how Nicole was like, fuck you, but no. Even with literally one arm tied behind her back and trying to get through a devastating loss, she still pushed.

Not marginalized but still a favorite character was Nathaniel. I loved reading more about him outside of Elma's POV, and he's just one of those utterly brilliant and utterly hopeless individuals. Which makes the events of The Lady Astronaut of Mars that much more heartbreaking.

The last bit that hit home was the pandemic.

Yep, that's in the trigger warnings. Due to the sabotage, there is a polio pandemic on the moon colony. And...a lot of it hit home really hard. The isolation. The pulling together while being apart. The complaints and the pain of the people most affected. The mental strain on those not affected. All combined with the fact that getting polio was the end of the line for many of these astronauts' careers, and it meant a death sentence when they returned to Earth (either because they would be hard pressed to survive a return journey or because it meant they would be forced to stay on a dying Earth).

We grieved, but we carried on because that was what made us human.

A good chunk of this book deals with grief and loss, and how each person hands grief and loss differently.

I will not go further, because that's entering mild spoiler territory (it's revealed in The Fated Sky).

Anywho, things I wasn't so fond of in the book, my lack of connectively to Nicole (I understood her and her motivations, particularly with the big reveal of her background) aside, I felt like the plot was uneven. It went through spurts of excitement and then long lags of lull where it felt that very, very little happened. Which made it feel that the plotting was not paced as well as it could have been, which turned something that had a pretty exciting plot—lunar colony, space walks, poisonings, sabotage, eating disorders, spy hunting, assassination, and heists—into something of a slog at times.

Without that epilogue, this would be a solid 3.5 story because of how uneven and sloggy the pacing was.

However, that epilogue.

I can't wait for the next book in the series.

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

I loved this book! I was afraid I'd miss Elma (the narrator from the first two books in the series), but I enjoyed getting to know Nicole who is strong but vulnerable and very feisty. I love how the author writes about relationships, both romantic and friendship. And a mystery on the moon? What a story!

Mary Robinette Kowal continúa de forma brillante con su serie Lady Astronaut, esta vez cambiando de protagonista y de tono, pero continuando con la interesante ucronía que planteó en The Calculating Stars.

The Relentless Moon se sitúa temporalmente después de los hechos acaecidos en la primera entrega de la serie y transcurre en paralelo con The Fated Sky, pero la autora sabe separar convenientemente ambas narraciones para que se puedan leer de forma independiente.
En esta ocasión la protagonista es Nicole Wargin, astronauta y esposa del gobernador de Texas, estado en el que se encuentra la capital de Estados Unidos tras la caída del meteorito. Me gusta que Kowal haya decidido centrar esta vez la atención en otro personaje, ya que la historia de Elma comenzaba a dar signos de cansancio. Aunque existen particularidades en común entre ambas (ambas son pilotos, se encuentran felizmente casadas…) también hay diferencias importantes. Mientras que York debía luchar con su trastorno de ansiedad Wargin sufre anorexia nerviosa y esto puede poner en peligro su desempeño en la base lunar. La autora trata estos trastornos de manera exquisita, exponiendo los hechos, las posibles motivaciones y las consecuencias, pero sin cargar demasiado las tintas en ello.
Desde el principio, la novela se torna en un juego de espías con envenenamientos y sabotajes, en un clima conspiranoico que recuerda a la Guerra Fría que no tiene lugar en esta línea temporal, pero de la que la trama es claramente deudora. No hay demasiadas personas en la Luna entre astronautas y colonos, por lo que las sospechas desde el principio están bastante centradas en unos cuantos personajes, pero aún así no es fácil descubrir y probar todos los subterfugios que utilizan los infiltrados, poniendo en peligro la misión lunar. La autora maneja de forma muy hábil la creciente tensión y la sensación de peligro, aunque en algunas ocasiones los descubrimientos que llevan a estrechar el cerco que rodea a los culpables se deben más a casualidades que a los méritos del personal.
La labor de documentación que ha llevado a cabo la autora me parece admirable, haciendo accesible la tecnología que se utilizó al principio de la carrera espacial. Me gusta también que haga referencias a los primeros astronautas de nuestra línea temporal y que aparecen en la suya, como Armstrong y Aldrin. En este sentido, la novela tiene esos detalles que convierten la lectura es una pequeña búsqueda de huevos de pascua.
Otro tema que también aparece en el libro y que me parece importante destacar es la valía de los veteranos. A la protagonista se refieren despectivamente como «old hat», dando a entender que una mujer en la cincuentena ya tiene poco que ofrecer a la misión lunar y no hay nada más alejado de la realidad. Nadie se refiere en estos términos a los astronautas hombres, así que también tenemos presente la discriminación por sexos que ya aparecía en las anteriores novelas. También se tratan temas como el racismo, aunque quizá de una manera menos agresiva que en las novelas anteriores.
A todo esto, ni siquiera he mencionado el brote de polio que tiene lugar en la Luna y que será fundamental para el desarrollo de la novela. Leer términos como cuarentena, brote, tasa de mortalidad… en estos tiempos podría parecer premeditado y oportunista, pero la novela estaba acabada antes de que nos encontráramos en esta situación.
En definitiva, The Relentless Moon me parece una excelente incorporación a la saga y tengo interés por ver con qué nos sorprende la autora en la próxima ocasión.