The latest book in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series, The Relentless Moon is a disaster tale wrapped in a spy thriller, planted firmly in lunar soil.

A handful of years after the meteor strike which doomed life on Earth to slow extinction, Nicole Wargin, astronaut and ex-spy, finds herself facing a conspiracy to both destroy the lunar colony she’s stationed at and discredit her politician husband back home.

Kowal’s alternate history of the mid-20th century has always been a meticulously-researched vision of a world choking in prejudice while trying to rise above its own extinction, but the close confines of the lunar colony - and the horrors of the polio outbreak which further complicates the plot - emphasise the parallels to our current existence.

The joy of watching competent, educated men and women working together to achieve things previously thought beyond the reach of humankind still seeps through, but there’s a desperation too, of the crushing inequality of it all. 

Even if humanity can find a new home beyond the bounds of our rock, there will always be those left behind; The Relentless Moon has judgement aplenty for climate change deniers and anti-vaccination sentiment, but it also seeks to understand the desperation that would drive people to cling on to outdated beliefs and commit terrible acts.

And while it may not be able to fully reconcile the hope provided by its scientific vision with the pain of those abandoned, it at least attempts to imagine a future where that seems possible.