First Poppy

Welcome to the first big poppy of spring, fresh out of the bud and attended by bees (NB technically it is the second poppy, but the first was way down beneath the leaves and inaccessible to wildlife or cameras).
A1 is reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, an alternate-history sf novel set in 1952, when a meteorite hits the east coast of the US and wipes out most of the government. The ensuing threat of catastrophic climate change kick-starts the space program, and we follow a female “computer” — as in real life, the maths was done by women, many black — as she attempts to join the program and become an “astronette”. This book won just about every sf award going in 2018, including the usually reliable Sidewise award. But despite the laudable examination of gender and racial issues, the book comes across as … well, rather soppy and girly. It must have been a fallow year for good sf.