The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut Universe, #1)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

I smiled the best “bless your heart” smile I could.

I have never heard my brother sob before. Not even when he split his knee open to the bone.

“Even geniuses can be stupid when they’re scared.”

He had said “combat” as if that was a consideration for the space missions, but you wouldn’t need that on a colony.

that.” I left alone the assumption that all Jews must know each other and stirred the martinis, focusing on the chilling pitcher as if my life depended on it.

Those little girls thought I could do anything. They thought that women could go to the moon. And because of that, they thought that they could go to the moon, too. They were why I needed to continue, because when I was their age, I needed someone like me. A woman like me.

What Nicole was right about was that I shouldn’t have to get sick every time I addressed a group of people.

being human isn’t embarrassing. Well. Except maybe farting.”

“I never thought I would see such a thing. I didn’t know why you’d want to be an astronaut, or even really what one was, but now…” She looked up to the clouds, where all trace of the rocket had vanished. “You must.”

Did I tell you about the photo shoot last week in the T-33?” “Yes. But feel free to tell me again if it will help.” Nathaniel leaned an elbow on the edge of the narrow hatch.

“It’s all about the story that the IAC wants to tell.” Nicole shrugged and took a sip of her martini. “That’s what politics is. Stories.”

I was also weirdly relieved that it wasn’

me, because as the first woman in space, she would be subjected to a level of scrutiny that would break me.

We had hundreds of volumes of calculations for things that might go wrong en route to the moon. But needing to make a rendezvous in forty minutes with a leaking hatch? Nothing we had took that into account.

It is a strange thing, knowing that, in a little over a week, you will be strapped to a four-megaton bomb and hurled into airless space.