The Calculating Stars

[jsburbidge]

This was the 2019 Hugo Best Novel Winner.

I wish I could say something more enthusiastic than that it's an entirely reasonable Best Novel Winner, based in the past run of winners.

Technically, it is reminiscent of a first-person Heinlein novel, like The Puppet Masters or If This Goes On, especially as the period in which it is set corresponds to Heinlein's core period - the early 1950’s. (It's an AH 1950s, diverging in the late 1940s, but - critically for the novel - still socially close to ours.) There's a fairly unproblematic first-person narrator, with some blind spots but no obvious unreliability. The narrator is also Heinleinian in excelling along multiple axes - doctorate in Physics, lightning-fast mental arithmetic, skilled and experienced military pilot. As with the Heinlein novels of the period, the prose aims at transparency, in this case with a small overlay of period traits to contextualize it.

Thematically, it's a long way from Heinlein. Heinlein might sneak in a protagonist with darker skin from time to time, but his novels of the 1950s can be easily read as taking the social norms for granted and simply foregrounding the story. (When his later novels provide alternative models, they're actually even more accepting of inborn differentiation based on birth.) Kowal's thematic content circles about the social and professional barriers thrown up by discrimination on the basis of gender, race, and religion.

It's an engaging read; even though the overall shape of the narrative is fixed by its being a prequel to Kowal's "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" the minor incidents and challenges combine to make it a page-turner.

It's better than some Hugo winners and comparable to many more. So why is my gut reaction so lukewarm?

Probably because it pushes no boundaries. Consider, in contrast, Nick Harkaway's Gnomon. (This was published in the UK in 2017, but its US publication date is January 2018, making it eligible for this year's Hugos. It does not appear on the long nomination list released after the ceremony.) Harkaway's novel has a complex and intriguing structure, an intricate interweaving of themes, and demonstrates entire mastery of prose as a medium. Or consider Rosewater, which won the Clarke, with its flashback / present alternations and its problematic narrator.

This moves us into the (pre-Puppies) standard complaint about Hugo nominees: that the award, as a fan-award, rewards fan-pleasingness rather than more general quality. (This is not the same thing as popularity. If popularity were the Hugo criterion Brandon Sanderson would have won last year, and probably Scalzi this year.) Hugo voters do evaluate in terms of better and worse, but it skews towards familiarity and accessibility.

The Calculating Stars benefits from accessible prose, a straightforward structure and a protagonist with whom it is easy for the modern reader to identify. This doesn't make it in any way worse than if it had Joycean prose, Miltonic structure, and an antihero as a protagonist. The way in which those characteristics assist in the Hugo process does, however, make the Hugos a little less interesting.