• Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
• ISBN: 9781250237057
• Format: paper
• Start: 2025-10-12
• Finish: 2025-10-19

The Martian Contingency is the most recent installment in the Lady Astronaut series and picks up about five years after the events of The Fated Sky and The Relentless Moon. Elma is a member of the second Mars expedition, which is tasked with establishing permanent residence. This was good, but I think it was the weakest of the series. There was some very good character work (in particular one character subtly adopting language changes to be more inclusive which they definitely wouldn’t have before) and I loved how everyone celebrates everyone’s holidays since there are so many cultures represented among the crew. Most of the individual storylines were good, but I think the biggest problem was they didn’t relate well to each other so the book seemed disjointed. The different plot threads boiled down to “there are a lot of things going wrong” with no unifying direction. I still enjoyed it and would still recommend the series. I’ll read any new ones if she has any more planned.