An interstellar event that happened 30 years in the past is at the centre of Laura Lam’s Goldilocks. The novel begins with one of the people who was involved in the event and its consequences finally deciding to break her silence.

We are introduced in the first chapter to an unnamed narrator who is visiting Dr Naomi Lovelace. The night before the narrator is due to leave, Lovelace decides to spill the beans about what happened on the Atalanta 5 mission and the role she played in it.

The second chapter sets the scene. The mission was unauthorised, the result of women being excluded from all forms of paid employment by a President whose brand of Christianity believed woman’s place was in the home. The shrinking of women’s rights was insidiously gradual and Lam indirectly references The Handmaid’s Tale with her “There had been no grand lowering of an iron curtain, with passports voided and bank accounts emptied.” Dr Valerie Black was commander of the original mission to take a brand new spaceship ten and a half lightyears, beyond the solar system, to a planet called Cavendish, utilising a warp ring based on Alcubierre’s theory for warp drive that had been built around Mars. Black’s groundbreaking all female crew were to explore Cavendish as a potential new home for the human race. President Cochran’s election led to Black being sidelined and most of her crew replaced by men. Two weeks before the official mission was due to start, Black and her four woman team stole a space shuttle and headed for Atalanta.

Scene set, the narrative follows the spaceflight out to Mars, interrupted every now and then by earlier events that give context to the relationship between Black and Lovelock and to what happens on the spaceship. The narrative reveals that Earth is in trouble, the polar icecaps melted, the tropics and equator too hot to inhabit. Technology has advanced to a stage where routine tasks, such as the launch of a space shuttle, are carried out by unmonitored robots and AI. The collapse of Earth’s climate is so accepted that some of the characters still travel by private jet and none of the technological advances are being used to fix the problems on Earth. No precise chronology is given, but Lovelace is a child when the VLT in Chile is built and future climate targets in the 2040s and 2060s are mentioned, so the setting isn’t too far forward from now (Lam confirms the year she had in mind in the acknowledgements). While I could accept that the course of planetary decimation that our species set decades ago had progressed to the point that humanity needs to leave Earth, I found it difficult to believe that science and technology had advanced quickly enough to make interstellar travel possible and life on Mars close to being viable.

I was a little bored by the technical exposition at the start, finding that it interrupted the flow of the narrative too much without really adding any depth. I didn’t care about how a spacesuit works, for example. I could take it for granted that it did, because they have since the late 1950s, and I didn’t believe that a bunch of women trained as astronauts would take the time to marvel at their equipment before they set out on a spacewalk, even if it was their first one. They’d just get on with it. It felt like Lam had done a lot of research to build her story’s world (something else confirmed in the acknowledgements) but kept a lot of her learning visible, while at the same time not bothering us with the precise technical details. In doing that, though, she left her scientist characters looking at times like laypeople.

I was also wary of the notion that arriving on a planet at the same point in its evolution as “Earth back in the Jurassic era, before humans had come along to interfere” and then interfering with the intention of speeding up evolution so that humans could live there could be a good thing. In this story, humans have messed up one planet and now have the technology to mess up another, like a bad tenant hopping from rental to rental, losing their deposit with every relocation.

I was intrigued by the twist in the approach to birth control and the overturning of Roe v Wade. Lam’s novel was published in 2020, two years before Supreme Court judges appointed by Trump voted to overturn the legislation. In Lam’s world, Roe v Wade is only partially overturned, enforcing the birth of a first child but permitting subsequent pregnancies to be terminated on the grounds of financial hardship. The legislation is backed up by a government pay out on the first child to keep the mother at home for five years and a tax on each subsequent child, meaning only the rich can afford to have large families and for the mother to remain in work.

The mashing together of government research with privately funded science vanity projects was also interesting. To have a woman in charge of a company intent on expanding the horizons of the universe through space travel was a refreshing twist on the tech bros we have playing a similar game in our actual reality. That the success of women is seen as a threat by the men desperate to cling to power felt particularly pertinent. Capitalism presents a plethora of opportunities, most of which shouldn’t be taken up. The bottom line and cutting corners to reach it are aspects of capitalism that aren’t conducive to safe interstellar travel, and it’s the corner cutting by the company that built the Atalanta that causes the first crisis event.

Hidden in a storage bay are five cryogenically preserved reserve crew members. The ship is kitted out to support life for five crew members. The reserve crew are only meant to be revived as individual replacements should any of the main crew die. If anything went wrong with the cryogenic chambers, difficult decisions would have to be made. Especially if the reserve crew is made up of familiar colleagues.

Despite the backstory Lam has created for the main characters Black and Lovelock, I found it difficult to relate to them. Black in particular seemed like a caricature of the strong woman in a man’s world, all hard edges and manipulation, a cartoon baddie at times. Lovelock felt like someone who didn’t know whether to be a go-getting scientist or a romantic idealist. Some of the plot lines felt a bit hokey to me; Lovelock’s whirlwind marriage to and subsequent whirlwind divorce from a fellow astronaut; Black having enough money and influence to manipulate people’s careers to her own advantage but not enough to retain official control of the mission; the mawkishness around the crisis that uncovers the full horror of the mission; the cloak-swishing Machiavellian nature of Black’s secret plan; the suddenly arising and equally suddenly resolved jeopardy at the end. The supporting characters didn’t feel strong enough to hold up the weak points in these plotlines, mostly acting as ciphers rather than agents. Hart, the doctor, has the most interaction with Lovelace and is depicted as the sole crew member not in some form of thrall to Black, but she’s largely a sounding board bouncing back Lovelace’s ruminations.

All that said, Goldilocks is a readable story, a reasonable page turner, easy to absorb and with enough interesting content to recommend it for anyone looking for a science fiction novel that’s a bit different. Of the contemporary sci-fi I’ve read by women, though, I preferred Becky Chambers.

Read 28/09/2022-05/10/2022

Rating 3 stars

Book four in my Borrowed Books Backlog.