Review: The Calculating Stars

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Alternate history stories always bug me, because I want to know everything when it comes to how different the world is. In The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, we have a world that is driven to the psychological and physical brink of extinction and then proceeds to fall right back into old habits, despite one literal earth-shattering event.

It all begins when a large meteorite plummets to Earth and destroys most of the east coast of the United States in 1952. This ignites a global...