I programmed a punch card to get the computer to type my name. KOWAL: My dad worked for IBM, and some of my early childhood memories are of going to visit him at work and going into the big mainframe rooms. PT: I think the Lady Astronaut series is a great example of that-you imagined a world where women were a major part of the early astronaut program. They offer a way to step back from the real world just a little bit and look at it on its side, which allows you to think about interesting questions in a different way. The thing that puppetry and science fiction or fantasy writing have in common is problem solving, world building, and looking at the way things connect. I had a career in puppetry before I went into writing, but I had a severe injury and had to stop performing.

KOWAL: I come out of a theater background. PT: How did you become a novelist, and what drew you to science fiction? Kowal recently talked to Physics Today about the “punch-card punk” inspiration for the series, the real women of the early space program, and launching a book in a pandemic. But the Moon settlement faces major challenges, including a campaign of sabotage that quickly turns deadly. The story follows astronaut Nicole Wargin as she works on humanity’s Moon base while supporting her husband’s political career back on Earth. It is set in an alternate version of 1963. The third and latest installment in the Lady Astronaut series, The Relentless Moon, is available on 14 July. The first Lady Astronaut novels, The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky, came out in 2018 to wide acclaim The Calculating Stars won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Even in that catastrophic scenario, women have to fight to be considered as candidates in the early astronaut program-and despite the grim prognosis for Earth, not everyone wants to build a future for humanity in space. The effects of the impact will make the planet uninhabitable, so humanity has only one option: finding a way to settle on the Moon and Mars. Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series opens with an apocalyptic event: a massive meteor strike in 1952 that covers Earth in a thick cloud of dust and debris.

The calculating stars series