Curtis Frye is also a tuckerization. It was supposed to be a throwaway in Fated Sky, before I knew I’d be writing Relentless Moon. In the real world, he’s one of my oldest friends. I’ve known him since college when we met at a debate tournament. The real Curt is a great guy and, thankfully, laughed when I told him what I’d done to his good name.
Astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Cady Coleman, and Jeanette Epps answered various and sundry questions. Cady flagged a ton of things that were specific to the experience of women astronauts as well as helping me with the escape sequence. As a shuttle astronaut, she trained to rappel out the side of the shuttle in a Mode V evacuation.
Kjell … Okay. Chapter 14 and 15? I rewrote that multiple times with his input. Not only is he an astronaut, but he has an innate sense of narrative. We were trying to balance the mechanics of the crash with the needs of the plot. I’d hand it to him and he’d shake his head. “Everyone is dead.” I’d try again, incorporating notes. “Still dead.” Again. “The rocket is in one piece, but how are they breathing?” Again. “They’re alive, but now it’s … boring.” Rockets are easy to crash, and hard to do without killing everyone.
I sometimes feel like that is also true of books in general.
ABOUT THE HISTORY
No matter how far we get from the Lady Astronaut Universe’s cusp point of the Meteor, there are things in the real world that continue to serve as models for the alternate LAU time line. I think they are rather fun to look at.
The actual Moon landings were scheduled to take place at dawn. Without an atmosphere, it was incredibly difficult to judge scale, so the long shadows of dawn helped with depth perception. The longer the shadow, the taller the object. It also meant that the surface had not had time to heat all the way up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. That didn’t affect the ability to land on the moon, but it did affect the length of time the astronauts could be on the surface. When we go back, those will still be considerations.
In the LAU, the preference is still to land at dawn, but they have ground control, visual markers, and satellites that help with the issues of knowing how far above the surface you are. As such, they can land or launch at any time. I’ll note that I took great pains to make sure that the time of day on the Moon was correct throughout the entire book.
This led me to the discovery that there would be an eclipse on the Moon and the further discovery that eclipses last for hours. I look forward to the day when a real person gets to view that, because it ought to be spectacular.
The plans for Artemis Base come from multiple sources. NASA, the Air Force, and the Soviet Union all had plans to settle on the Moon during the space race. Those plans continue through the present day with interesting iterations. The Lunex base that the Air Force proposed would have resulted in a shuttle-like vehicle and aimed to place a base on the Moon by 1967. My favorite of them was from NASA in 1989, which proposed inflatable domes with multiple floors. Until that point, I’d been thinking about the base as being a single buried level. Finding those plans gave me partially buried structures with the machine room on the bottom floor.
When writing these novels, I want the science to be as correct as possible, but there are times when I need to handwave past something. For instance, I know that they’ve solved radiation shielding in the LAU but, aside from the regolith, I don’t know the specifics. Generally speaking, if a character interacts directly with something, it is as right as I can make it. If it is a plot point, very much so. The radiation shielding is never, ever going to break down because I have no idea what it is. Currently.
The other fun thing about the lunar colony plans is that we know more about the Moon than people did in the 1960s in our world. NASA scientists knew about the Marius Hills. Those are volcanic domes in Oceanus Procellarum on the west of the near side of the Moon. They considered it as a landing site during the Apollo missions and it was a backup for Apollo 15.
But we know about the “Hole.” The hole was spotted in 2011 by the Japanese SELenological and ENgineering Explorer (SELENE) as a thirty-six-meter, well, hole. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter got good images of it, confirming that it was an underground cave that’s somewhere between eighty and ninety meters deep. Researchers think that it might be the skylight to a lava tube. There are other confirmed lava tubes on the Moon, including a massive one in that region spotted by the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter. And yes, in the real world people are considering them as a possible location for extended human habitation on the Moon.
The Moon is covered with a ton of interesting things. Including ninety-six bags of human waste. Yes. Poop. When the astronauts needed to launch from the surface, every pound counted, so they did not follow the cardinal rule of hiking to pack it in and pack it out. Ninety-six bags of poop on the Moon, ninety-six bags of pooop. Take one down, pass it around … In all seriousness, modern scientists would like future lunar visitors to return the “fecal containment units” so that they can see if anything is still alive after fifty years on the surface. Science is glorious.
Radiochef Speedy Weeny was a real thing. I’d just wanted to find out what would be in a vending machine and found this … thing. Go ahead. Look it up. It’s very odd.
With the polio outbreak, the LAU has a significant change from the real world. In our world, Jonas Salk developed an inactivated virus vaccine and through the March of Dimes, a massive vaccination campaign took place across the United States. It was delivered by injection and required boosters to be effective. A decade later, Albert Sabin brought out his attenuated virus vaccine, which was administered via a sugar cube.
Both methods were controversial at the time. The headline about Chicago refusing to vaccinate children? That is real. The vaccination program did work though and brought the polio epidemic to a standstill. The last case of wild polio in the United States was in 1979 in an unvaccinated Amish population.
In the LAU, when the Meteor hit in 1952, Jonas Salk was working on his vaccine, as he did in our world, in Pittsburgh. The March of Dimes was headquartered in Washington, D.C. His vaccine was never completed. This means that polio would have continued to be a problem so I extrapolated based on historic trends.
When I wrote this book, COVID-19 didn’t exist. As we go to press, we’re in the middle of what my husband calls being “ensconced in situ,” and I have to tell you that the choices that I’ve made to be religious in my social distancing and mask-wearing are directly influenced by the research I did about polio. My father says that he remembers movie theaters being shut down, how no one would get into a public swimming pool, and that “everyone was afraid of getting it.” Everyone knew someone who had gotten polio.
Polio was originally a childhood illness that hit in infancy. Most children got a little cold and then got better. Very rarely, one would lose some limb function. Then in the late nineteenth century, outbreaks began to occur. These grew steadily worse. It stopped being a childhood disease, striking adults. Influenza was a deadlier disease, but polio survivors remained part of their communities. They were also, largely, white and affluent. This, more than the deadliness of the disease, made polio dominate the headlines.
Houses were scrubbed. Children were kept isolated from each other. Towns were quarantined with checkpoints in and out. And massive temporary hospitals were set up in places that were experiencing outbreaks.
It is very easy to think of polio as a historic disease. While it is true that we have gone from 350,000 reported cases worldwide in 1988 to 22 in 2017, there are still polio survivors in every country. More disturbingly, people who had the disease as a child and appeared to recover symptom-free can experience post-polio syndrome decades later. Since it was possible to get polio and have no more than a fever, some people never realized that they had it as a child, which makes diagnosing post-polio syndrome challenging.
Anorexia is, similarly, an illness that can be difficult to diagnose. The common depiction of it in the media is of a teenage girl obsessed with her appearance. There’s a reason for t
hat. Cultures that value thinness have a higher incidence of anorexia and women are often taught that our value is linked to our appearance. But anorexia affects men. It affects older women. It affects people who are not concerned with being thin.
We think of it as a modern condition. Medical literature documents religious fasting as early as the Hellenistic era. In medieval Europe, self-starvation with a goal of religious piety was called anorexia mirabilis. 1n 1873, Queen Victoria’s personal physician, William Gull, named the disorder “anorexia nervosa.”
The Mayo Clinic says this and I think it’s worth quoting in full. “Anorexia isn’t really about food. It’s an extremely unhealthy and sometimes life-threatening way to try to cope with emotional problems. When you have anorexia, you often equate thinness with self-worth.”
We have so normalized an obsession with weight that it can be very easy to miss early warning signs until the condition becomes life-threatening. Here are a few: Preoccupation with food, which sometimes includes cooking elaborate meals for others but not eating them; frequently skipping meals or refusing to eat; denial of hunger or making excuses for not eating; eating only a few certain “safe” foods, usually those low in fat and calories; fear of gaining weight that may include repeated weighing or measuring the body; frequent checking in the mirror for perceived flaws; complaining about being fat or having parts of the body that are fat.…
I tried to be very careful when I was writing this to not include triggering behavior. There’s a thing called “thinspiration,” in which people with anorexia will read about a character who has the disorder and rather than taking it as a warning will mimic the behavior. I remember doing this when The Karen Carpenter Story came out and I often think that the film may have been the only thing that saved me. The only time in my life that I haven’t felt like I was overweight was after I had dysentery.
If you recognize yourself or a family member, I encourage you to talk to a doctor or to at least learn more about the disease. As a starting point: www.nationaleatingdisorders.org. The National Eating Disorders Hotline number is 1-800-931-2237.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
Collins, Michael. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Etzioni, Amitai. The Moon-Doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1964.
Hadfield, Chris. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything. New York: Back Bay Books, 2015.
Hardesty, Von. Black Wings: Courageous Stories of African Americans in Aviation and Space History. New York: Smithsonian, 2008.
Holt, Nathalia. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. New York: Back Bay Books, 2017.
Jessen, Gene Nora. Sky Girls: The True Story of the First Women’s Cross-Country Air Race. Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2018.
Kurson, Robert. Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon. New York: Penguin Random House 2018.
Nolen, Stephanie. Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Roach, Mary. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
Scott, David Meerman and Richard Jurek. Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014.
Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016.
Sobel, Dava. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.
Teitel, Amy Shira. Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA. New York: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016.
von Braun, Dr. Wernher. Project MARS: A Technical Tale. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide Publishing, Inc., 2006.
TOR BOOKS BY MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL
THE GLAMOURIST HISTORIES
Shades of Milk and Honey
Glamour in Glass
Without a Summer
Valour and Vanity
Of Noble Family
Ghost Talkers
THE LADY ASTRONAUT SERIES
The Calculating Stars
The Fated Sky
The Relentless Moon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the Glamourist Histories series, Ghost Talkers, and the Lady Astronaut novels. She’s a member of the award-winning podcast Writing Excuses and has received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, four Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and a Locus Award. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Uncanny, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Kowal, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), recording fiction for authors including Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow, and Neal Stephenson. She lives in Nashville with her husband, Rob, and more than a dozen manual typewriters. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com, or sign up for email updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part II
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Part III
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the History
Bibliography
Tor Books by Mary Robinette Kowal
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE RELENTLESS MOON
/>
Copyright © 2020 by Mary Robinette Kowal
All rights reserved.
Cover figures by Gregory Manchess
Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-23696-8 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-23695-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-23648-7 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250236487
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: 2020
The Relentless Moon Page 52
