Interesting book on the life of an astronaut in training. In 1980, NASA is a male dominated place with the door just beginning to open to the ladies. Sometimes this inclusion feels very modern, with non-gender-specific spewing in zero gravity, sometimes it is fraught with the same old-fashioned misogyny that made the 1980s a confusing time to be a woman. During training, both physical and academic, Joan Goodwin excels. She also fails to fall for the many handsome and smart male astronauts who try to pick her up, and discovers (with surprise, having never thought of this before) that her inclinations lie elsewhere. She falls in love with a fellow astronaut. Vanessa. For reasons that seems unfathomable to us now, this is unacceptable on the programme and wider world and, if discovered, might end her career.
The space story part of this book is terrific. Joan and her fellows train together on all aspects of a mission – in this case a fictional STS-LR9 voyage destined to go off in 1984. It’s loosely based, I understand, on an 1983 ten-day mission which carried the first Spacelab module into orbit. From the pool of trainees, all a brainy bunch of rocket scientists, the crew will be selected, and the others will perform other roles. All feel they are destined for the stars. For an outsider to all this stuff, I found the mission preparation and training fascinating.
The selection process is cut throat and hugely competitive. This sets the scene for fierce interaction between characters, however the characters here are all cut from such a similar cloth it’s hard telling them apart. The dynamic between Joan and Vanessa is the main focus and while this illustrates the difficulties of being gay in this era, sneaking around and hiding their love in this very highly charged environment, it does have the feeling of a sub-plot added to give the story an additional complication. Sometimes, rather than serve the character development, I feel it merely dilutes the plot. The story really has the legs to stand on its own.
There is another sub-plot, almost as if Joan needs more emotional filling out than can be achieved merely by being gay and also one of the first women to be shot into space and all that entails. She is given a wayward sister, who is as ditsy as Joan is brilliant and the sister has a daughter called Frances. Joan, who feels that she will never have a child of her own, takes her niece under her wing and gives her everything it appears her mother can’t: intellectual stimulation, stability, love. For an egg-head, Joan is surprisingly empathetic. Frances offers Joan someone who needs her on the ground and her needs add conflict to Joan’s career and romantic life.
Usually, as I read a novel, I mark up passages I love, or hate, or that I want to spend a bit more time unpicking to understand the nuance. A book I have enjoyed may have dozens of tags. Atmosphere, not one. Which indicates that while the plot rolls forward at quite a clip, and the subject offers lots of new ideas and knowledge, there is nothing particularly interesting in the writing of it.
All that said, I do recommend this if you have a gap in your reading list and feel like a bit of plot over lit. A woman in NASA in 1980, despite all the sub-plot diversions, is an interesting story and Joan is a good character to walk us through it.
Cristina Sanders' blog 