Goldilocks

 
 
Goldilocks

by Laura Lam

Orbit

2020

 

 

The briefest possible description for Laura Lam's Goldilocks, though not entirely accurate, might be Interstellar meets Handmaid's Tale.

 
Set maybe 15-20 years in the future, Goldilocks presents us with a hot, crowded Earth, a planet of rising sea levels and mass migrations of climate refugees, and an America with a redpill misogynist president, and women's life chances restricted in a way that's more like the 1950s than like Gilead. But Lam's realism is effective. Her story benefits from her insights about how small the changes would need to be to make life nearly intolerable.

 
Billionaire tech girlboss Valerie Black and her adopted daughter Naomi (orphaned by a California wildfire), along with three other women who also trained to go to space but had their careers thwarted by a NASA that increasingly reserves its best jobs for men, launch a private rocket into orbit, where they steal a long-range NASA ship, and set off for Mars. Valerie has been a decades-long advocate for human migration to an exoplanet, and this is her attempt to make her dream a reality.

 
In Lam's telling, humans have discovered a habitable world 10 light years away, dubbed 'Cavendish,' and haven proven and tested space-warp flight to make the journey possible. There have been unmanned probes to Cavendish, bringing back seeds that botanist Naomi has figured out how to grow under simulated exoplanet conditions. But humans still haven't used the warp drive themselves, and no human has visited Cavendish. Valerie, Naomi, and the others aim to change that.

 
The prologue to the book depicts Naomi returning to Earth without ever having left the solar system, so we know from the beginning that the plan will fail. The question will be how. An accident? What kind? Sabotage? Who and why? The first half of the book is concerned with realistic problems that might confront a small crew trying to pilot an unproven ship on a pioneering mission. There's a growing sense that Valerie is keeping secrets, which comes to a head, and then drives the action of the second half.
Also, Naomi finds out she's pregnant.

 
Valerie initially seems like a 'good billionaire,' until Lam systematically attacks the idea that there could be any such thing. But my one qualm about the book is that some of Valerie's secrets come off as almost cartoon villainy that seems at odds with the restraint of the rest of her worldbuilding. Then again, have I seen our actual billionaires? 

 
Anyway, Naomi is pregnant, tensions among the crew are high, truths are revealed, and then there's a devastating pandemic back on Earth. Goldilocks was published in May 2020, so Lam must have finished it in 2019. I won't spoil exactly what happens, but as we know from page 1, the ship returns to Earth instead of going onward to Cavendish.

 
With the exceptions of Interstellar, and maybe the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, I think most recent works about human migration to another planet is subversive or deconstructive. It accepts the premise that we might try, but also treats those attempts as naive. Goldilocks ends with an epilogue set 30 years later, sometime in the 2060s or 70s, that is slightly more hopeful than the rest of the book, but overall, I'd count Lam among the pessimists who doubt the very premise of outrunning our problems on Earth by moving to another planet.