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New tales from the Lady Astronaut

Andrew Liptak -

One of my favorite series of books in recent years has been Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut novels: The Calculating Stars, The Fated Sky, and The Restless Moon. A fourth novel is coming in 2025, The Martian Contingency, which I'm very excited about, but Robinette Kowal just announced another book in the works: Silent Spaces: Short Stories from the Lady Astronaut Universe, which she's now funding on Kickstarter. You can read my reviews for the books here and here.)

Kowal's Kickstarter is aiming for a $30,000 goal, and as of right now, it's just shy of the halfway point it's fully funded, with a month to go. According her website, the book will contain nine stories:

  • "We Interrupt This Broadcast" (The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius, 2013)
  • "In the Moon’s House"
  • "Articulated Restraint" (Tor.com, February 6, 2019)
  • "Still as Bright", (Life Beyond Us, 2023)
  • "The Phobos Experience" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July-August 2018)
  • "Amara’s Giraffe" (Self-published, 2018)
  • "Rocket’s Red" (Word Puppets, 2015)
  • "Silent Spaces"
  • "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" (Rip-Off!, 2012)
Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal
A couple of years ago, Mary Robinette Kowal published a pair of books that utterly blew me away [https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/22/17698510/the-lady-astronaut-calculating-stars-fated-sky-mary-robinette-kowal-science-fiction-book-review] : the first two installments of her Lady Astronaut series: The Calculating Stars [https://bookshop.org/a/6134/9780765378385] and The Fated Sky [https:
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The Kickstarter has a variety of tiers: $10 will get you a digital copy of the collection, $30 will include the paperback and digital copy, $55 will include a hardcover edition plus patches and notecards, and other tiers (up to $3,000) will include a bunch of other goodies, including a hardcover edition of The Martian Contingency.

With the Kickstarter now funded, Kowal is starting to add some stretch goals: there's a new piece of interior art coming, and now that it's passed the $40k mark, she'll be recording an audiobook edition. At the $45k mark, there'll be some additional patches.

It's a good lineup and collection for fans of the series, who'd otherwise have to track down a bunch of different books and websites to find all of these. They really help to flesh out the world that surrounds these novels, and the ones that I've read are all excellent.

On top of all that, we finally have a cover and details about The Martian Contingency:

Years after a meteorite strike obliterated Washington, D.C.—triggering an extinction-level global warming event—Earth’s survivors have started an international effort to establish homes on space stations and the Moon.

The next step – Mars.

Elma York, the Lady Astronaut, lands on the Red Planet, optimistic about preparing for the first true wave of inhabitants. The mission objective is more than just building the infrastructure of a habitat – they are trying to preserve the many cultures and nuances of life on Earth without importing the hate.

But from the moment she arrives, something is off.

Disturbing signs hint at a hidden disaster during the First Mars Expedition that never made it into the official transcript. As Elma and her crew try to investigate, they face a wall of silence and obfuscation. Their attempts to build a thriving Martian community grind to a halt.

What you don’t know CAN harm you. And if the truth doesn’t come to light, the ripple effects could leave humanity stranded on a dying Earth…

The book will hit stores on March 18th, 2025, and I already can't wait to dig into it.