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The Calculating Stars
- A Lady Astronaut Novel
- Narrated by: Mary Robinette Kowal
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
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The Calculating Stars
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Summary
Mary Robinette Kowal's science fiction debut, The Calculating Stars, explores the premise behind her award-winning Lady Astronaut of Mars.
Den of Geek - Best Science Fiction Books of June 2018
Omnivoracious - Fifteen Highly Anticipated SFF Reads for Summer 2018
On a cold spring night in 1952, a huge meteorite fell to earth and obliterated much of the East Coast of the US, including Washington, DC. The ensuing climate cataclysm will soon render the Earth inhospitable for humanity, as the last such meteorite did for the dinosaurs.
This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated effort to colonize space and requires a much-larger share of humanity to take part in the process.
Elma York’s experience as a WASP pilot and mathematician earns her a place in the International Aerospace Coalition’s attempts to put man on the moon, as a calculator. But with so many skilled and experienced women pilots and scientists involved with the program, it doesn’t take long before Elma begins to wonder why they can’t go into space, too.
Elma’s drive to become the first lady astronaut is so strong that even the most dearly held conventions of society may not stand a chance against her.
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What listeners say about The Calculating Stars
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Sah
- 27-02-20
Interesting idea shame about the execution
The concept of an alternative history of space exploration and the fact that it is based in the 1950s and explores racism and the treatment of women in science and engineering had there been an global astronaut programme is intriguing. However, in this audiobook the author’s somewhat feeble attempts at narration and, in particular, her diabolical attempts at French or British accents somewhat detracts from the story itself. At times it has more if a flavour if Mills and Boon about it than Jules Verne. I know it’s about space but sex scenes that refer, euphemistically refer to rocketry is somewhat crass. Hire an actress, Audible, and re-record it.
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12 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Margarida Neto Coelho
- 21-02-20
What a waste of time!
Cringeworthy and embarrassingly bad sex talk, shallow, implausible characters and serious social issues that are reduced to backdrop or scenery.
The fact that this novel was given the Nebula Award is a mistery to me.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Paul Joseph Walsh
- 28-09-19
Disappointing
Full of good intentions, climate change, equality and so forth but was more a book on social commentary than true science fiction.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Brian - UK
- 04-09-19
Strong lead character...
... but too often is weaker than projected. Although I get it, the discontinuity detracts. Ultimately worthy but unsatisfactory. Great depth and study, but somehow on its head. Alas, I shan’t be listening to more.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Ruth de Haas
- 19-02-19
Made me cry a lot in public. Super embarrassing.
MRK makes her book come to life such that I was having panic attacks with Elma, sad crying whenever anything bad happened, happy crying whenever anything good happened... basically this book left me a complete mess.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- M. Atkinson
- 08-09-18
Uplifting (pun intended)
Following Dr Elma York from the day she escapes the impact of an extinction-level meteorite, through her time as a computer at the now-international NASA, and her fight to allow women and POC to become astronauts. I normally like my heroines to be infallible, but Dr York is humanised by Southern-feminine style self-effacement (we only find out halfway through the book that she holds two doctorates) and a crippling social anxiety. A very enjoyable and uplifting listen.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Nick R
- 23-07-23
Tedious
Tedious book. I know it won awards but I just don't get how. It read like a cute western more than sci-fi and a lot of the content was so, well, domestic. I ended up skimming to see if I was missing much but I wasn't. I just couldn't finish it Sorry Mary.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- AJM
- 07-02-21
Bad performance
Read a lot of good things about this book. Unfortunayely the performance (by the author) is so bad it's distracting.
Everyone, bar the main character, has a ridiculous sounding, forced voice, especially the 'Men' and 'Black People'. it's quite cringey at times.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- R. Maines
- 28-09-19
Great!
I’m a sucker for an alternative history story and this one grabbed me. It set in the past, but it also feels like an old fashioned story from the golden age of science fiction.
The author narrates her own book and does a great job apart from the English accent.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Frieda
- 10-11-23
Adorable
I really adored listening to this story. It was so well written that I felt the MC's emotions, her fears, and concerns. I wanted to give her a hug a few times. I didn't realise it was read by the author, very well done.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Richard Bruno
- 01-10-18
Never achieves lift off
So very disappointing. An interesting alternate history premise, but a deeply awkward and clunky execution. Infuriating, repetitive, formulaic. Every now and then there are whiffs of originality and creativity (like when, in listing a group of new astronauts, the familiar names of actual Mercury and Gemini astronauts are included, without calling any attention to the fact), but these moments are rare. And the obsessive and obligatory (but, of course, socially sanctioned) sex scenes between the protagonist and her husband are excruciating as they strive to call up every rocket launch innuendo that they can. Eew.
The author reads her own work, which doesn't help matters. Over the top narration and exaggerated characterizations.
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98 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Shykim
- 17-08-18
Wanted to love it
There is a difference between reading and narrating. The author is OK at reading, but a complete amateur as a narrator. Her attempts at accents are painful - and distracting.
The characters, with the exception of the protagonist, are stereotypical and one dimensional. The protagonist is also a stereotype. She is what medicine used to described as a female hysteric. And yet, she is supposed to be a brilliant mathematician with 2 advanced degrees from Stanford, a child prodigy, and an accomplished pilot. Finally, she comes across as helpless, whiny and immature.
I suspect that the author may be trying to set her main character up for growth and change in the next book in the series, if so she overplayed her hand.
This book might be better if you read it rather than listen. Between the amateurish delivery and the whiny, pathetic marin character, the audio version is just annoying.
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90 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Alex Levine
- 27-07-18
Close to perfect
I am a literary nit-picker. I can't really help it. When I read a historical novel, part of me is always hunting for inaccuracies, and when I read an alternate history novel, that same part is always hunting for premise-breaking implausibilities. For me to really, really enjoy an alternate history, it has to either be entirely free of such defects, or pretty damn amazing, so amazing that my nit-picking module shuts down. This book is pretty damn amazing.
The amazingness has many facets, of which I can only mention a few. The first is its timeliness, appearing as it does just two years after Margot Lee Shetterly's wonderful "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race," along with the movie it inspired. Shetterly's book helped bring overdue attention to the contributions Black woman mathematicians, employed as computers, made to the American space program, when the electronic digital computing revolution was in its infancy. In our timeline, their efforts were supplemented by electronic computers as the technology improved, and a state-of-the-art electronic computer traveled to the moon with Armstrong and Aldrin. It may not have worked very well, but it was ready in time to make the trip.
In the timeline of this book, the American space program gets its start ten years earlier than in ours, and vast investment spurs most of the necessary technologies to advance more over the course of the 1950s than ours did over the 1960s. The one exception is electronic digital computing, which appears to be no further along in the 1955 of this book than it was in our own 1955. Suppose space program managers realize that astronauts may need to solve unforeseen problems in orbital mechanics on the fly. Suppose, further, that the best way to obtain a quick, accurate solution to such problems is to consult a skilled human with paper, pencil, and slide rule. Finally, suppose that the most skilled such humans are women. We have a recipe for a narrative in which, rather than lagging well behind the rest of 20th Century American Society in its lurching, uneven progress toward gender equality, the space program leads the way.
Our heroine and first-personal protagonist is, as we would expect, an extraordinary individual. But she is NOT a "steely-eyed missile man" in drag. She has payed a serious, even crippling price for having succeeded in a string of male-dominated fields, and her struggle to shoulder that baggage is perhaps the most compelling aspect of her more general struggle. She is also a woman of her time and place, one who has developed her strategies for selectively ignoring numerous small injustices, and for coping with those she cannot ignore. This is NOT an idealized crusader for women and minorities anachronistically written back into a society that no time for such people. She is a completely believable person who has learned how to pick her battles. She is surrounded by an equally believable supporting cast.
I won't sully this review by rehearsing any of the small number of nits I have picked. Read the book, or better yet listen to it in the author's expert narration.
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88 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- sonja holmes
- 16-07-18
it's a nice story
"The calculating stars" is a nice story about an alternate history Space Program. The author does an excellent job of bringing life to the story, which is a good thing, because I think if I were to just read it, it would have been a little flat. This would be a fantastic story for a preteen or even a child, but it lacks drama. Now, not all stories need to be a daring space drama with horrible monsters and and heroic leaps of... heroism, but i kept eaiting for the other shoe to drop, and it never did. I see this story as the way the Space Program would have proceeded if everyone in the world were Canadian. A good read, but don't expect action.
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80 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Jim N
- 04-02-19
Fizzles After a Great Start
The Calculating Stars received a lot of praise in 2018 so when I saw it on sale at Audible, I decided to give it a chance, despite being a little put off by the series title, which sounded silly to me. The book justifies that title well enough and after listening to the riveting first few hours of the novel, I told a friend that my misgivings were unfounded. The book's opening sequence, in which a massive meteorite strike in 1952 sets off a sequence of cataclysmic events, is great. Unfortunately, after that, it slows down, following a predictable path and never truly regaining that early momentum. The remainder of the novel reads like a Hallmark Channel riff on Hidden Figures, co-produced by the SyFy Channel. There are few surprises, the drama is minimal and the plot crawls toward a conclusion that's both predictable and inevitable. There are, however, a number of cringe-worthy "romantic" scenes between Elma, the protagonist, and her husband, Nathaniel, complete with increasingly painful rocket and launch references. After such a promising start, I was very disappointed.
The issues above are complicated on audio by the author's reading which was fine except when reading some of the characters, which veered into exaggerated caricature when voiced.
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71 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Karen
- 16-10-18
Promising story, cringeworthy main character ...
This story had promise and if you like romance novels with an intellectual undertone this might be for you. (I'm not a fan of romance novels so I can't say for sure.) I found the main character way too whiny. While her issues were justifiably real and I appreciate that ... it was the method they were delivered that I disliked. I am curious whether I would have the same impression of the main character as whiny if I had read rather than listened to the book. It is possible that this is more a narration rather than a story issue ... so I'll give the book the benefit of the doubt there. The other possibility is that this is simply how women in the 1950s behaved and that this is a more accurate representation than other books. If so, I guess it is a good thing I was not around then. I probably would have gotten into a lot of trouble.
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71 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Admiral Jayneway
- 27-07-18
Super impressed
Wonderful attention to detail, phenomenal voice acting, and wonderful characters. My only quibble is that it does sag in the middle as the story turns from the meteor strike and space race to the main character dealing with her anxiety. It does pick up again and finishes with a bang. Highly recommended.
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71 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- sbsd13
- 25-09-18
awkward sex scenes ruin message
I didn't like this as much as Ghost Talkers. Mostly bc the character isn't as likeable and all she and her husband seem to do is exchange rocket ship sexual euphemisms before they bone. If I hear that "his engines were firing" one more time, I quit. (this was about 75% through).
But no, the “rockets firing” sex analogies didn’t quit. I did keep going though and read till the end. The women’s empowerment, mental illness, and racial equality storylines were cheapened by the foibles of the main character and the attempts to make Elma seem sexy and empowered by showing that she liked sex. How do we know she liked sex? Oh, because she talked about her husband’s genitals in rocket ship terminology. Of course! Completely accurate and representative. Best parts when the “lady astronaut” was actually doing things like flying a plane and solving flight trajectories, and I wish Kowal had made those parts the majority of the book.
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56 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Michelle Pogodzinski
- 12-10-18
I like the story but....
The narration makes the lead character sound so whiny. With the lead characters panic attacks, it made me not want her chosen for space. She made women look bad. No sense of the toughness many aspiring (female or male) astronauts need to make it up there. So the great story was made just “meh” for me.
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24 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Aubrey Reese
- 17-05-19
Had so much potential to be great-BUT
I was so excited to listen to this book. It had so much potential to hit many complicated and interesting topics but was ultimately very bland. It was chock full of simple annoying characters with no depth and loads of unrealistic scenarios. I kept catching myself thinking get it together b!&$#, the world is ending but we (the listeners) are stuck hearing you gripe about your stage fright and how hard growing up was with a powerful father and gifted mathematic abilities, poor thing! Not to mention, all the support needed to earn a PHD as a women during WW2. All in all I'd say life had been very kind to our lady astronaut but she still wines and complains at every opportunity and crumples when ever any person (man or woman) disrespects or disagrees with her-barf.
Lastly, why the heck is her husband so shocked she encounters sexism around every corner? It's 1952- it's everywhere and the norm. Realistically the shock should of been her drive to have more then the domestic life. Could of been so good but left much to be desired and with a urg to poke most of the main characters in the eye.
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19 people found this helpful