GOLDILOCKS / AUTHOR: LAURA LAM / PUBLISHER: WILDFIRE / RELEASE DATE: APRIL 30TH
When an exosolar planet capable of supporting life is discovered, a spaceship crewed by five female astronauts is launched in the desperate hope of saving humanity from its ravaged home. The only problem is that the ship is stolen, and hidden secrets might end up sabotaging the mission before the intrepid pioneers have even arrived.
Science fiction is often used as a mirror of society, reflecting back its issues in such a manner that makes them apparent while the fictional setting renders them palatable. In this very near future, climate change and overpopulation have destroyed the planet to the point that it has mere decades left, but many people refuse to believe the problem is real despite the mounting evidence, including billionaires with the resources to actually do something about it. Sound familiar?
The story is told by Naomi Lovelace, the ship’s botanist, who is also the foster daughter of its captain, Valerie Black, a wealthy industrialist with whom she has a periodically antagonistic history gradually revealed in flashback chapters set in the run-up to the mission’s launch and the years preceding it. These also serve to flesh out Naomi’s backstory as someone willing to risk quite literally everything on a dangerous gamble that, one way or another, will see an end to her current life, making the story more about its interpersonal dynamics than its nevertheless realistic and meticulously researched space flight.
That all might be enough for one story, but the book also incorporates commentary on the rights of women, in particular reproductive rights, which here have been gradually eroded until the entire gender is perceived as an inferior choice for any kind of work and of little use other than as incubators for children. It’s telling that there is no single huge event that suddenly results in a reversal of societal development, but is instead tacitly portrayed as something that was insidiously brought about over time after the ascension to power of MRA types until it was accepted as standard. How jarring you consider this extrapolation from real world circumstances will largely depend on your own experience and / or understanding of the everyday disregard women are forced to endure by misogynists. Thus, rather than making some kind of statement, the single gender crew is a significant plot point doubling down on why their theft of the starship cannot be allowed to stand, leading to the omnipresent danger of pursuit being launched in addition to the inherent dangers associated with actually making the journey in the first place.
Goldilocks is a terrifyingly contemporary variation on the Dying Earth sci-fi subgenre, a timely commentary on society’s treatment of women, a reiteration of the hope that the stars can save us, and a very human story where even the grandest of schemes can be brought low by human foibles. Best of all, it manages to be all these things at the same time and, like the planetary habitable zone its title references, it gets the balance just right.
