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| Kindle eBook, n.pag. Published 2014 (originally 2012) Acquired and read August 2019 |
This novelette was the first-written story in Kowal's "punchcard punk" Lady Astronaut series, but it is set last. Unavoidably, as she clearly tweaked aspects of it when it came time to write the full-length novels, this story jars, and I think I would have been better off reading it in publication order, rather than chronological order.
The broad details line up with the later-written novels, but it doesn't quite fit. This story says Elma used to have a habit of folding paper eagles out of discarded punch cards, something she never actually does in the prequel duology. This story riffs on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, with an orphan named Dorothy on a Kansas farm with an uncle named Henry and an aunt named Em; no one comments on what a weird coincidence that is. It must be meant to be a literary device, not a literal thing, but that's not the tone of the very grounded novels. (The character of Dorothy also appears in The Calculating Stars, but the Oz elements are downplayed.) I think worst of all is that the entire plot of the novelette revolves around whether Elma will go through a "tesseract field" to another star system, a fanciful thing that doesn't fit with the hard sf approach of the novels. As a result, it's hard to buy the emotional dilemma upon which the entire novelette rests.
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