Atmosphere (2025)
Things go wrong in space, with lesbians.
One of my favourite TV shows is For All Mankind, which my partner and I jokingly refer to as the “things go wrong in space show”, so she recommended this book to me after about three chapters. I’m very glad she did.
The story follows Joan, an astronomer who starts training for the Space Shuttle in the early 1980s. Initially she’s only focused on her training and her niece Frances, and doesn’t think of herself as somebody romantic – until she meets fellow astronaut candidate Vanessa. The two begin seeing each other in secret, in a career and political climate that absolutely will not tolerate any form of “sexual deviance”.
Their burgeoning romance is told in parallel with a disaster on the Space Shuttle, in which Vanessa is the only person left concious, and Joan is in the CAPCOM chair. It’s clear that something has happened between them, but it takes most of the book for us to learn that Joan tried to break off their relationship shortly before Vanessa’s launch, in a misguided attempt to protect Vanessa’s flying career.
I’m always a sucker for sapphic romances, and this was no exception. I enjoy them both realising they can feel this way about anybody (let alone each other), and navigating the conflict with their other desires. Joan wants to be a surrogate parent to Frances; Vanessa wants to fly the Space Shuttle; they both have to decide how to mesh that with the relationship.
It’s a sweet story that blends two of my favourite genres, and I can imagine it being a comfort re-read in future.
Quotes and highlights
December 29, 1984 (page 6):
It would be easy to make the case that humans are ill-equipped to be in space. Whatever led to our design, it was not meant for this. But Joan sees it as the exact opposite.
Human intelligence and curiosity, our persistence and resilience, our capacity for long-term planning, and our ability to collaborate have led the human race here.
In Joan’s estimation, we are not ill-suited at all. We are exactly who should be out there. We are the only intelligent life-form that we know of in our galaxy who has become aware of the universe and worked to understand it.
Summer 1983 (page 227):
Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted.
Joan tried to remind herself that when Frances had been younger, she had held Frances’s little hand every single chance she got. When Frances had been a baby, she had smelled her hair sometimes for whole minutes at a time. She had been present for all of it. Didn’t that mean that she would not grieve its loss, since she had voraciously and self-indulgently taken all of it that was offered?
No. It did not.
She still ached for every version of Frances.
But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming.
She missed every Frances she had known. But oh, this Frances. This lanky, gangly, whip-smart Frances, with her ears pierced and a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt on, this Frances was a gift Joan would one day miss, too.
December 29, 1984 is extremely FAM (page 317):
It’s been happening for the past half hour, as everyone in Mission Control has tried to figure out how to address the unprecedented insubordination of the only conscious astronaut aboard a damaged shuttle.
Jack and the rest of the team have resigned themselves to what Joan knew well before Vanessa said it.
Then on page 323:
“I think both of us-Griff and I-should have been listening to you,” Vanessa says. “You had the right idea the whole time.”
“Ford, my song was from Sesame Street,” Joan says.
Vanessa does not laugh. “Yeah, but … it’s kind of that simple, isn’t it? You get up here, and then for one reason or another, you realize you want to come home.”
Joan does not answer for a moment. Jack moves closer to her, standing just behind her. She cannot bear to look at him. To see how much of this he understands.
“Goodwin, do you read?” Vanessa says.
“Of course.” Joan nods. “Yes, of course. Roger that.”
“I want to come home.”
“We know you do,” Joan says. “We know.”
“It’s just that I can’t do it without Lydia. I couldn’t live with myself.” Joan does not know what to say back.
How could I say I loved you if I didn’t love this about you?