This is another mid-apocalyptic sci-fi story where the Earth is in trouble and a group of astronauts is trying to save the day. Except it was written in 2020, and the author is taking some of the real life atrocities and pushing it out to the worst possible conclusions, and reading it in 2022, it seems all too plausible. There are multiple plagues and thousands of refugees as climate change makes vast swaths of the planet unlivable. The president is a fundamentalist wingnut, abortion has been outlawed, and women have been pushed out of the workforce. Humanity as a whole has stuck its head in the sand, refusing to believe that everything is awful and that the Earth has about 30 years left before it becomes completely uninhabitable.
Naomi has been training her whole life to become an astronaut, passing all the NASA tests and getting close enough to taste it before women stop being welcome. Valerie, the super-rich scientist who had taken her in when her parents died, hatches a plan. She recruits a small team of women to steal a spaceship, and they head out to Mars to test the new ring technology that will help them bend time and space and reach Cavendish, a planet in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone that should be able to sustain human life.
It all sounds very exciting, and it was very well written. You get a real sense of the sacrifices these women are making, knowing that they can’t ever return home and that the government will likely send people after them. They spend their non-work time on the ship dreaming about utopias and trying to plan how to set things up on the new world. There are unexpected twists and reveals as it turns out that the mission may be more than they expected, and that not everyone on board can be trusted.
It would’ve been great if it wasn’t so depressing. Lam’s despair comes through loud and clear, and I feel bad not enjoying it more, because I think she absolutely achieved what she set out to do. Naomi is all of us, hoping for the best but not quite seeing how we can get there.
