This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The Martian Contingency will be released on March 18, 2025.

I haven’t read the entirety of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series, but I was impressed by The Calculating Stars and even more impressed by The Relentless Moon, the latter of which was part of my first Hugo Readalong back in 2021. So it wasn’t a hard decision to request an ARC of the latest installment in the series, The Martian Contingency. 

The Martian Contingency returns to the perspective of Elma York, the original Lady Astronaut, who along with her husband is joining the second wave of scientists building up Mars for long-term settlement. But living on Mars is not without its difficulties, and it doesn’t take long before problems left over from the first wave, the shifting winds of Earthside politics, and a bit of “things happen in space” puts the whole mission in grave danger. 

The Lady Astronaut series is beloved for the way it focuses on brilliant women solving hard problems and navigating delicate social and political situations to win opportunities for those who had previously been locked out of important positions. And from that perspective, The Martian Contingency plays the hits. There are problems in space, and it takes a lot of competence and coordination to solve them. The stakes are high, the situation is tense, and every scrap of the astronauts’ abilities are needed to save the mission. So far, so good. 

But three books building up the connections among the main cast, coupled with the consistent, careful modeling of healthy disagreements sometimes makes it feel as though there really aren’t any significant disagreements—everything can be solved if the characters just talk it out. After a remarkably humanizing portrait of a terrorist organization in The Relentless Moon, the true villains in The Martian Contingency are portrayed as distant, faceless, and unenlightened. And a significant chunk of the danger stem from simple miscommunication, signposted in a way that makes it impossible for readers to miss and occurring between characters with sufficient rapport as to make it feel forced. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denying that good relationships can have communication problems. It’s just that there’s not enough subtlety here for the reader to really feel it. 

One of my favorite subplots from the previous books in the series orbits around the psychological ailments of the main characters. But again, The Martian Contingency runs into late-series problems where everything is sufficiently well-managed that it doesn’t deliver the same tension. Elma still fights anxiety in key moments, but she also has reliable coping mechanisms to fall back on. The fact is that first three books made a lot of progress, and the fourth suffers from too much already accomplished. 

Kowal is a good writer, so there’s a fairly high floor with this series. The whole thing is easy to read, and there are scenes that show glimpses of what the series had been to this point. But on the whole, it just doesn’t hit the level of the prior books. The villains are less compelling, the miscommunication is less believable, and the problems overcome in prior books haven’t been replaced with quite enough new ones. The result is a fine book that’s not making me scour release dates for a potential fifth. 

Recommended if you like: competence porn, working the system to advance liberal politics.

Can I use it for Bingo? It includes Reference Materials, and it is Published in 2025 if you want to wait a month for next year’s Bingo to debut.

Overall rating: 12 of Tar Vol’s 20. Three stars on Goodreads.