Review: I wanted to be amongst the stars again
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 11, 2014
Some decisions are hard, but have to be made. While others seem so easy, but have consequences to face that are harder yet.+++(I'll apologize now, this gets a bit wordy and digresses slightly...)When I was younger I desperately wanted to travel out into the stars. I grew up on a diet of Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Blake's 7...the stars to me felt like home (I still feel a sense of warmth when I hear the theme song for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). What I didn't understand, until I was at least nine or so, was that the stars were not (and were never likely to be) that close for me. It wasn't a matter of getting into Starfleet and passing the exams with flying colors...it was a matter of science catching up to what I viewed as star travel.I think this is partially why hard science fiction in novel form has little appeal to me. I gobbled up Anne McCaffrey, Pamela Sargent and Louise Lawrence and to a certain extent they can all be considered "hard" scifi (depending on which series you're referring to largely), but I kept away from any books that dealt primarily with escaping to the stars.This has changed over the years, but I'm still leery of anything that posits humanity has reached into the stars and made a home there (we all got our quirks right?).THE LADY ASTRONAUT OF MARS was a touching, nostalgic tale that made me feel that wonder again. I wanted to be one of those kids crowding the gate to talk to Elma, pestering her with questions she had probably heard a thousand times, but curious just the same. I wanted to be Dorothy who even though space had not been kind to her still held onto those dreams from when she was a child.This is a story as much about the consequences of your decisions as much as anything else. If she had a baby would it have made things easier in the long run? If they hadn't moved to Mars would his body be so decrepit? Would her regret of leaving be more then her regret if she didn't leave?At its core there's the tale of two people in love with each other as much as they were in love with space. They understood each other, why even in their 60's neither could just let GO and let the younger generation take flight. Her husband understood why being grounded on Mars made her so restless and wistful. Why she hoped every time a call came through it was for her and not for him.This novelette was first published in audio form in the anthology RIP-OFF! which paired well known literary figures with science fiction authors to create a story. Kowal chose Oz and Dorothy Gale and while the connection is, at best, tenuous that didn't really matter. In many ways Elma is "Dorothy" - she flew away in her spaceship to a world of so many possibilities that coming back down just couldn't hold up.This is, as of 6/11/14, free on the Kindle to download. You can also read it at Tor.com for free. Or buy the anthology from Audible (or wait for the CD set in August). Really just check this story out. Its wonderful and remarkable and makes you want to be out there instead of down here.