[This review is for both The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky ; I read them back-to-back, and they are, really, the two halves of a single story.] I read someone describing this duology as The Right Stuff meets Hidden Figures meets The Martian and, even if I only watched the movies based on the first two books, while I enjoyed both movie and book for the third, I quite agree. Of course there is much more than that, but it's a safe bet that if you liked at least one of those three, you'll love this alternate space exploration history that Kowal crafts from the Meteor impact of 1952 onward (OK, strictly speaking, this is a spoiler, but it's literally told in the first sentence of The Calculating Stars , so I don't feel so bad about it). It's a story of stubborness and determination, of impossibile choices and suffocating rules, of discrimination and obtusity; it's got one of the most well-fleshed, imperfect, believable...
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1983)