August 20, 2018 • 45 mins
Mary Robinette Kowal’s work has inspired several episodes of the podcast. She has just written a pair of books that are called the Lady Astronaut duology, and Tracy got the chance to speak with Mary about her work and its historical settings.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We get
a lot of emails from publicists and authors pitching books
(00:21):
to us to feature on the show. I mean a lot,
a lot, very many. Until now we have mostly been
talking to people who are writing non fiction, but earlier
this summer we got a note from a publicist about
an author whose work has inspired three different episodes of
this show. Our episodes on the Year Without a Summer
and the Cato Street Conspiracy. We're both inspired by books
(00:43):
and Mary Robin at Kal's Glamorous History series, and she
was also the person who suggested that we cover the
first Russian women's Battalion of Death, which made an appearance
in the Six Impossible Episodes Soldiers, Snipers and Spies episode.
And now she has written a pair of books that
are called The Lady Astronaut Duology, and they touch on
a lot of subjects that we've covered on the show
(01:05):
or that we know our listeners are interested in. There's
the women Air Force Service pilots, the early days of NASA,
and the women computers who were crucial to the success
of the early space program. That last one is not
an episode of our show yet, but it is certainly
on the list. So since there is so much overlap
between the world of our podcast and the world of
Mary Robinett Coal's writing, I was very excited to have
(01:28):
the chance to bring her onto the show. We are
going to talk about how she incorporates history into her writing,
and then we are also going to talk about the
real history that has inspired these new books. So let's
get to it. Hi, Mary Robinett Coal, Welcome to the show.
(01:50):
Thank you so much for having me. I am a
huge fan. I am a huge fan of you. This
works out really well. We we have several episodes of
our show that have been inspired by your books, and
so when I got a note about about having you
on for these new books, it seemed like a very
natural fit. One of the reasons I wanted to talk
(02:11):
to you today is that your published novels all have
historical settings. So we have the Glamorous Histories, which are
Jane Austen with Magic for listeners who maybe don't know
they're set in the regency. There's Ghost Talkers, which is
set in Europe during World War One. And then there
are these new books, The Calculating Stars, which is out
now and The Faded Sky, which is coming out just
(02:33):
after this episode of our podcast does, and that's set
in an alternate space race starting in nineteen fifty two.
Has your research process been consistent among all of these
novels or is the setting that you're researching influencing the
research that you have to do. It's a little bit
of a mix. Um. My research process has evolved as
(02:55):
I've learned kind of more about my writing process. So
what I did in tually was that I would research
very well, actually know with with the very first novel
I'm Just Like I Love Jane Austin, and then there
were a lot of mistakes. But after that, what I
would do is I would research the period very very heavily, uh,
and then I would write. And what I discovered was
(03:17):
that I would wind up with a lot of information
that I wasn't going to use. So what I do
now is um and and have for several books as
a layered approach, which is I do kind of some
broad research to get a sense of the era that
I'm looking at, but generally I'm picking an era because
I've already come across something that has interested me, and
then that kind of begins to shape the story. And
(03:41):
as I work on the outline, I narrowed down and
hone my research so that it's more specific to what
I'm actually doing. The other thing that I would say
that has changed about my research process is that I
now assume that women and people of color and non
binary people are there in history and have just been
(04:04):
left out. So I go specifically looking for them and
you find them, Oh yeah, because they're everywhere. It's like
because they really were there, right, It's like this is
not a not a twenty one century invention. Um you know,
uh people of color, like you know there were there
were black Roman legionaries in in Scotland. I mean people,
(04:30):
people have been around a long time of all times.
It's it's not like we're you know, inventing things. It's
not like women suddenly appeared in nine. No. No, there
was a there was a review which I was delighted
to get but because it was in a national paper.
But it said, uh, something like if if Nasa had
had a heroine with an attitude, and I like NASA
(04:52):
did actually they had quite a number of them. Um
they just have maybe consumed a lot of the mass
media that presents astronauts and NASA's being, you know, all
whitened with chiseled jaws. But I mean Sally Ride, she
kind of she was good with NASA. I love Sally Ride.
(05:12):
I think one day we might have a podcast about her.
We don't yet. So you mentioned that when you when
you started out just by writing you Love Jane Authen,
you wrote a book that was Janausen with magic. And
then there were mistakes and it can you can you
tell me what any of the mistakes were. Oh, there's
so many. Um So, Like some of them are very
(05:33):
simple in a language level. For instance, I have them
I shall go out and check on the strawberries. And
the problem is that check at the time just meant stop,
So I will go out and stop on the strawberries.
It's like it's not um So. Some of them are
simple things like that. But other things are dinner parties.
I thought that the pairing up of couples and processing
(05:58):
into dinner parties is just how it was had always
been done. Uh. And it turns out in the regency
that's not at all the way things happen. Um, First,
the ladies lineup in order of precedence, and they go
in and they sit where they want to based on,
you know, their choice, because they're the first one in
the room. And then the gentleman line up in order
(06:20):
of precedence and they go in and sit down next
to who they want to. So it's you know, it's
important to understand that that at times when you're like,
oh and so and so was sitting next to the
part of the reason that was a big deal was
because the man had chosen to sit there, um, or
sometimes he had been forced to because someone else had
(06:41):
gotten into the room earlier. Wow, I didn't know that
at all. Right, something you said a moment ago brings
me to my next question, which is, I know that
now you're doing a lot to make sure the language
that you're using and the language that your characters are
speaking is not an achronistic. What are you doing to
make sure that there aren't a lot of anachronisms in
(07:02):
the language of these books? So with the Jane Austen books,
it was really simple. Um. And I say that in
the process that I'm about to describe, will sound anything
but simple UM. I created a Jane Austen spell check dictionary,
So basically I took the complete works of Jane Austen,
created it, ran it through Concordance Engine, which gave me
(07:24):
just a list of words that she used, and used
that as my spell checked dictionary. So it flagged anywhere
that Jane Austen did not use, which allowed me to
look it up and then see whether or not it
existed or if the usage had shifted. UM. It didn't
save me from words that she did use and the
usage had shifted, but it caught a lot. I did
(07:49):
a similar thing with ghost Talkers, but it was a
little bit harder because a lot of the language that
I was using in ghost Talkers was so because it
was dealing with spiritualism, UH and war, so coming up
with representative texts that covered that stuff was a little
(08:10):
bit harder. So coming up with the texts to serve
as as my basis was was trickier. And I did
not actually try to do this for UM for calculating stars.
What I did for that was I just paid attention
to idioms and jargon, looking for things that had shifted UM,
(08:36):
and then also for regionalisms one of the conversations that
my my editor and I had um with calculating stars
was about the use of the phrase oh Lord or
Lord knows. So, my main character is Southern and this
is a very common phrase, but she's also Jewish, and
(08:56):
so the question was, and my editor is Jewish, I'm not,
and so she flagged that she's like, this is this
is a very Christian phrase. I'm like, I I feel
like I have heard my Southern Jewish friends say this,
but I'm not certain. So I went and checked, and
I stopped on it, and it turns out that it
(09:18):
was pretty basically, in my highly scientific survey of Twitter,
that it was pretty evenly split, and the distinction seemed
to have been kind of how long people had been
in the South, so it was an assimilation thing. Ultimately,
I wound up pulling it out because I knew that
there were going to be enough people for whom that
(09:39):
would feel wrong, that even if it was correct for
Elma's character, because her people had been there since the
seventeen hundreds, it would still feel wrong to a lot
of people. And so I went ahead and pulled it out.
There's one or two that I missed, but for the
most part, I replaced it with God knows. You also
do audio book narration narration, including the audio book narration
(10:00):
for some of your own books. Does working within a
historical setting affect how you work as an audiobook narrator? Yes, um,
a lot of it. Well. I will say that any
text affects how I approach something as an audiobook narrator.
But the way in which people speak shifts. So in
(10:22):
ghost Talkers, Um, Ginger has a mid Atlantic accent, which
a lot of people will flag in reviews. Is that's
a terrible British accent that she's doing for Ginger? Or
why does Ginger have something of a British accent? Like
she doesn't? It's mid Atlantic. That's It's fine, um. But
also just the approach to narration. When I was narrating
(10:43):
somebody else's book, The House of Hawthorne, which was looking
at Hawthorne himself and and his wife and family, the
prose is different. So that's the way that that the
rhythms with which you approach it are going to be
very different than say, when I'm narrating October Day for
Shawn and McGuire. It's it's just it's baked into the pros,
(11:06):
and so that affects the way I narrate. The last
sort of general question that I have for you about
working in this intersection of fiction and history is when
you've been working on these books, is there anything that
you have been surprised to learn was an anachronism or
the other way around, if that works better, it's surprised
(11:26):
that something wasn't an anachronism that you thought would be.
Uh So, one of the words that I cannot use,
even though it is completely historically accurate in all of
my Jane Austen things is electricity. Jane Austen used electricity
and electric a couple of times, but it totally sounds
like an anachronism. So I can't use that, And that
(11:49):
was surprising actually that it didn't flag um and and
hitting it in her text. One of the things, like
all of the things that that catch me off guard
are are really small things like switch back going up,
the switch back on on a on the side of
a hill. Um, that's a railroad term, and so I
(12:11):
can't use that before there are railroads other things that
are not anachronisms, but again feel like it or that
we're surprising barn storming, which I had always thought was
a flying term, is actually turns out to be a
theater term that predates the Civil War, and it was
(12:31):
touring companies would storm into town, set up in a barn,
and then storm out again. I also always thought that was, uh,
an aircraft term, Like I imagine that being more about
air shows. Yeah, winging it also is a theater term. Uh.
And and what that one? And that was another one
that was like really because I also thought that that
(12:53):
was an air term. Uh. And what it meant was
that when you were doing shows in rep and very
very fat, you would tape your lines of theater, your
your lines of text if you had a long speech
to a piece of scenery. But you're rehearsing on the
set of the previous show, and so sometimes you walk
out on stage and it turns out that the piece
(13:14):
of furniture you would rely on being there was in
the wings to wing it. Yeah, when when you said
it was a theater term, I immediately thought, Okay, I
think it has something to do with being in the wings,
but the furniture part is totally new to me. Right. Yeah,
there's a really fantastic book that you would love. It's
(13:34):
out of print, but it's called The Stage Red Menaces
of Mrs Gilbert. And she was a an actor who
had a I think sixty year career that began before
the Civil War UH and went on UH into the
early nineteen hundreds and um like she acted with John
Wilkes Booth and and talks about that. But it's fascinating
(13:59):
learning how theater has has changed over the years. What
I've generally found, also, I will say, is that the
places that I am most caught off guard are the
things that I think I know. So I I double
check all of the theater stuff very very closely. Now, um,
I double check all of my astronaut uh stuff, all
of my space stuff very closely, because there's a lot
(14:21):
of things that we think are common language that are
not anymore, that were stuff that was used either early
in the program and has shifted, or is stuff that
is used now and didn't exist in the early program.
Mary and I are going to talk about her new
books and just a moment, but first let's take a
quick break for a word from a sponsor. In this
(14:50):
next part of the interview, Tracy and Mary are going
to talk about the early days of the Space program
in the United States, along with the ninety nine which
is an international organization of women pilots, and the first
Lady Astronaut Trainees, which was a real program that started
out as a way to evaluate women's fitness to be
astronauts in the nineteen sixties. So let's move on to
(15:12):
the books about the space program. Tell us about your
Lady Astronaut duality. Sure, so this is basically me kind
of reimagining um Ray Bradberry sort of space adventures but
women centered. So it's it's said in that early early
(15:35):
space program, um and in my case it's in nineteen
fifty two, so before there was a space program really,
but I drop an asteroid on the planet, which kicks
off a space program fast and hard and with an
imperative to get off the planet, which means colonization, which
means that women have to be involved. And it's also
during the middle of the Civil rights era, so uh,
(15:57):
things progress a little different le um, a little more
inclusively in in my version of history than they do
in the real world. So at the very start of
the book, I think almost on the first page, there's
a reference to President Dewey, so obviously, that's Thomas Dewey,
nowadays most famous for having been the subject of the
(16:17):
Chicago Daily Tribunes wrong headline of Dewey defeats Truman. When
I first read The Calculating Stars, I sort of interpreted
this as a nod to readers, just saying, heads up,
this is a very different universe that we're looking at.
But your historical note at the end of the book
makes reference to the fact that you needed to get
the space race on a faster timeline than it really
(16:40):
happened in our world. So can you tell me a
little more about that? Sure, So there's two things to
know about this. One has to do with past Mary
making decisions that President Mary has to live with, and
that is that The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which is
(17:01):
the novella or novelette that kicked this off, was set
in an existing story universe that I had written, which
was based in a the first story, and this is
called We Interrupt this Broadcast, which contains information that none
of the characters in this universe will ever know, so
you don't have to read it. But that story depended
(17:24):
on punch cards and also on a programming error surrounding
Leap Day and a near past asteroid strike, and that
led me to nineteen fifty two. And the problem is
we have no satellites in nineteen fifty two, so I
went looking for well, why and how would we do that?
(17:46):
And that led me to having Dewey come into office instead.
So the thing about Dewey is that he as opposed
to Truman, is that Dewey was UM very much an
internationalist UM. He was very interested in collaboration, and he
was also really against corruption and h and very into efficiency.
(18:10):
And the being very into efficiency is the key twist here.
So after World War Two, what happened was that Verner
von Brown, who had been the head of the nazi
UM rocketry program, was brought back to the United States
with a bunch of his rocket scientists and they just
(18:31):
cooled their heels. They were just not being used at all.
And a lot of this was because hello, former Nazis,
well you know, I mean technically Nazis UM, so that
that had a lot to do with why they were
cooling their heels. There was a lot of effort to
get a rocket up at this point, and no one
was letting Von Brown and his people do it, and
(18:55):
everyone was trying to avoid the V Tube four launches
because because of its military history. My reasoning, and this
is the kind of reasoning that one does when one
is writing a short story, which is that it was
not very well researched, but I think it holds. My
reasoning is that Dewey would have probably said, you know what,
(19:18):
this is more efficient. Let's just let this guy and
his team use technology that we know how it works
instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, and then they
can go on and and so I think that it's
plausible that that we could have gotten I know that
we could have actually gotten rockets, like with the technology
that we had available, I am certain that we could
(19:40):
have gotten rockets and satellites off the ground faster than
we did. I think that having Dewey in office might
have made that happen. I don't know for certain, but
that that was the chain of reasoning that got me there.
So the women Air Force Service pilots and the women
computers from the early Space program are both just a
huge part of these So where did you first learn
(20:02):
about these women and what made you decide to write
a book about them? So, again, I mostly assumed that
they would be there but um. But more specifically, the
reason that I knew about the women computers was because
of my dad. My dad is a programmer, UM, and
he started programming before computer science was a term, UH,
(20:25):
and he started with punch cards, and he would talk
about the punch card girls, which is apparently the term
for them at the time, the punch card girls and
the women computers, and and so it was just something
that I was kind of peripherally aware of. And when
(20:45):
I started looking at who would go into space, because
I wanted to write, you know, this lady astronaut story
about this older astronaut, older woman astronaut in an era
of punch cards, I had to think about, well, what
what qualifications would she have? Because you would have to
be extraordinary in order to be able to get up there,
(21:06):
and what would what would the world look like? But
specifically what qualifications would you have? And that led me
to realizing, in order to get her up there in
a punch card era, that she would have to have
already been a pilot UM, and that she would also
have to have been very good in the sciences. And
then UM mathematics was a natural thing because that was
(21:28):
where women were kind of dominating. When I started researching
for the book, the first thing that I hit that
was really very very useful was the Rise of the
Rocket Girls by Natalia Holt, which focuses on the women's
the early role of women in the Space program UM
and a lot of it is is pre NASA. Most
(21:51):
of it's focused on the women of JPL, the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, but it it's pretty comprehensive in in how
involved they were. So with that that kind of gave
me the line into the computers UM. And then also
again I started looking for you know what, when did
(22:11):
women start into the space program? And I was again
aware of wasps kind of peripherally because of just sort
of some of the stuff that I had learned when
I was working on ghost Talkers, when I had been
looking at pilots UM, even though that's World War One,
the research had made me aware of the wasps while
I was working on it. But but when I started
(22:34):
specifically looking at this, I discovered the Mercury Thirteen, which
were a group of women, many of whom had been wasps,
who were put through the early astronaut the Mercury Training
or mercury testing, but not actually entered into the program,
so that that was kind of the roundabout way that
(22:55):
I found my way into learning about these folks. Well,
I had the first lady Astronaut trainees also on my
list of things to talk to you about, So obviously
I don't I don't want to give away too much
of the plot of your book. But obviously, since it's
called a Lady Astronaut book, there are lady astronauts, and
(23:15):
as you might imagine with women in the nineteen fifties,
some of the things that they're made to do as
astronaut trainees are kind of degrading. But this was something
that also happened to the first lady astronaut trainees in
our world, right, Yeah, so a lot of the things
(23:36):
that I have the Lady Astronauts go through are things
that happened in the real world. The incident with the
Dilbert Dunker in the bikinis is something that I completely fabricated. However,
there are enough incidences that are parallel to that that
I am absolutely certain that that's pretty much how it
(23:58):
would have gone down. The the things that I did
not make up were things like calling them all astro
nets UM focusing on their beauty and attractiveness and and
listing their measurements in newspaper articles. So what ultimately happens
to these first lady astronaut trainees. So this is a
(24:21):
this is a really complicated and and and ultimately tragic story.
Most of them were fine, like they would really have
enjoyed doing this, but um, but went on with their lives.
There were two UM, Jackie Cochrane and Jerry Cobb, who
were very much a team when kind of everything began.
(24:43):
So Jackie Cochrane established the ninety nine UM well she
was influential in establishing the ninety nine and and but
she established the wasps and she was like I had
won all kinds of awards, set multiple record as a pilot,
as a woman pilot. She was. She was very very
(25:04):
good and very driven and very ambitious. Jerry Cobb was
also a really phenomenal pilot, but uh, not so good
at public speaking. Um. She was literally tongue tied. Her
Her tongue had um had a connections that had to
be severed surgically so that she could speak. So she
(25:25):
was always very shy. But the idea of going into
space captivated her, and when she was brought in to
do these these tests, she started obsessing about it. So
what happens is that the women are doing the tests,
um there comes a test at which they have to
be sent to a NASA facility, and Jerry Cobb had
(25:46):
been sent to do it, and they wanted to send
the rest of the women, and someone asked for permission,
and it at this point begins to get shut down.
There's a draft of a letter that Lyndon Johnson never
sent that said let's shut this down, and he never
sent it. He said, instead, let's let NASA make those decisions,
(26:10):
but it's very clear from all of the surrounding communication
that he had expressed his displeasure. And the let's let
NASA decide was you guys are going to decide, but
you know what answer I want. So then there was
a protest, They go to Congress, they ultimately get a hearing,
and in this hearing, Jackie Cochrane, who had been pushing
(26:33):
for women to go into space, completely undercuts the program
by saying, yet NASA shouldn't invest in this because the
nation will spend all of this money training these women
who are just going to leave and go get married. Wow. Right,
And this was an argument that she had faced, and
this is what makes it so astonishing. This is an
(26:54):
argument that she had faced when she was trying to
establish the WASPS, that people said, there's no point in
doing this because if you do, these women are just
going to go and leave and get married. And she
had argued that that was not fair and prejudicial, and
and that married men continued doing their jobs and that
married women should be allowed to as well. So for
her to turn around them and use that same argument
(27:16):
to undercut the program, and basically what it came down
to was that she wanted to be in charge and
didn't like the way Jerry was kind of getting out
of control, and and Jackie Cochrane also had very specific
ideas about propriety and image, and she felt like the
(27:39):
current crop was, particularly with Jerry cobbs involvement, were beginning
to be ridiculed, and that if they shut it down
and then came back later that with her in charge,
that that things would be different. But it basically just
ended the program any in any chance of women being
(27:59):
in chard in the program at that time, and she
was not the only voice saying things like that, but
there were there were other people who were involved, and
at this point NASA introduced to the requirement right in
this era area that that in order to be an
astronaut you had to have been a test pilot. Now,
(28:19):
what's interesting about this is that at the same time
and during the hearings, when they were talking to John
Glenn about requirements, UM, the women were saying, you know,
the rules have been such that we can't have been
test pilots, so we should look at equivalent experience because
most of these women, or many of them, had like
(28:40):
four times the flight time as any of the existing astronauts.
And one of the arguments that they put forth was that,
you know, John Glenn would not have qualified with the
current or with the existing astronaut requirements because he didn't
have an advanced degree when he applied. He didn't have
(29:00):
an advanced degree when he went into space, but that
had become a requirement, and so they said, you know,
if you could relax it and look at equivalent experience
for him, why are you not able to do that
for women? And Glenn's response was, no, I would not
have qualified initially. UM. And if if we can find
any women who are as qualified as the men, you know,
(29:21):
the brave men who are going into space. Uh, then
I would welcome them with open arms, but you're not
going to find them, which again kind of shut things down.
And then he also said, I'd like to have that
stricken from the record because I have to go home
and talk to my wife tonight. Oh so he knew. Yeah, Uh, well,
(29:42):
I was a bit of an infuriating note to pause on.
When we come back from the break, we're going to
continue on with that being for just a bit with
a discussion of the racial segregation of the Women's Air
Force Service pilots during World War Two. Like we talked
(30:04):
about earlier in in these books, the Women Air Force
Service pilots are a huge part of the books. And
something that comes up that has come up when we've
talked about the WASP on this podcast before is that
almost all of the WASP were white. And one of
the actual historical stories that comes up in these novels
(30:27):
is that the only black woman who applied was asked
to withdraw her application because of her race. And that's
something that comes up in your book. So can you
talk about that a little as well. So that was
something that I had run across when I was reading
about the history of the wasps um and again, knowing
that people of color, and specifically women of color, get
(30:52):
just completely erased from history, I very deliberately went looking
for them. There was one Native American pilot, two Chinese pilots,
and UH. And then, as you mentioned the UH, the
woman who applied and then wasn't allowed it was asked
to withdraw her application. Jackie Cochrane was the one who
(31:15):
asked her where to withdraw the application because she felt
that with and and this is horrifying, but she felt
that with the UH segregation issues in the United States,
that if they had a black pilot, that would call
the entire operation into program. Now that was the UM
(31:35):
that was the rationale she used. But if you look
at it, a lot of the other things that she
said and she was actually just bigoted um and and
it was just straight up racism couched in the but
it's the best for the program. You found the name
of the pilot, which I had gone looking for and
had not been able to find. UH, So that was
(31:57):
super exciting. Mildred him Carter. Yeah, her husband was a
Tuskegee airman. Yeah, yeah, when I was so after you.
Since that to me, I went and look at and
was like reading about her and the fact that they
would they would fly, they would be flying and they
would do I Love you messages while in flight over field.
(32:18):
I was just like, that is the sweetest, most romantic
thing I think I've ever read. Yeah, that's um. I
I think had you written this book a couple of
years later, it might have been easier to find her name,
because it's been in the like the much more recent
past that she has been recognized as the the woman
(32:39):
who applied to be a WASP. Um. But yeah, she
was a pilot. Her husband was a pilot, was a
Tuskegee airman. I think he is still living or was
as of a couple of years ago. And it seems
like they have just together such a beautiful, sweet love story. Um.
And I don't think there's a quite enough public information
(33:00):
about her at this point to do a whole podcast
on her, but the fact that she has sort of
a little nod uh in the book. Uh. And I
don't think we've got a two part podcast on the
WASP on this show. Before we interviewed Dr Katherine Sharp
Landeck who has done a lot of research on them.
And we talked about the fact that the WASP were
(33:20):
all segregated, but I don't think it came up that
there had been an applicant who was asked to withdraw
her application. Yeah, it is definitely worth uh reading more
about that and and that and and the other women
in the wasps. And I'll also say that reading about
the early African Americans in aviations and in space history
(33:41):
is is really interesting. The because I couldn't find, Um,
Mildred Henman's carter's name, I made up a character to
be that person and based her surname in the book
is Coleman, which is a nod to Bessie Coleman. Um,
do you know about Bessie Coleman. I do you know
(34:02):
about Bessie Coleman. We have a podcast about her in
the archive. Excellent. Everyone should go read all about Bessie Coleman,
because but in short form for our listen all about
Bessie Coleman. But in short form for for people who
are listening right now. Uh. She was like, I would
like to be a pilot, and everyone in the United
States said, you can't because you're black, and you're a woman,
(34:24):
and so she said, I will go to France where
they will teach me to be a pilot, and I
will teach myself French so that I can go do
this thing, which is what she did, which is so
kick ass that I just I love her so much.
Had she been of the right age and still alive,
I totally would have had her be an astronaut. She
has some, uh, some parallels to the story of Eugene Bullard,
(34:46):
who is on the list for an episode of this
show at some point, and who also has a character
named after him in your novel. Yes, indeed, thank you
for catching that. Uh my last question, that my my
last thing that surprised me to learn it was a
real thing. When I was reading these books. Again, without
giving away too much plot, uh, there is a prescription
(35:09):
anti anxiety drug that plays a part in these books.
It's called Milltown. And I thought that it was just
a thing that you had created for these books until
my spouse, who is a librarian, did what librarians do
and looked into it, and I learned that this was, uh,
this was a real anti anxiety medication, and it was
(35:32):
as much of a household name in the fifties as
Prozac is has been in more recent years. So can
you talk about that. Yeah, So Milltown was really kind
of the first widely prescribed um anxiety drug, and it
was so popular that, like Milton Borrow joked about changing
(35:55):
his name to Milltown Burrow. And one of the things
that I have in the books is saying that you know,
you you saw the advertisements for Milltown everywhere, including one
that said we have ice cream and Milltown and that
was like an actual ad at a real drug store.
You can find those images. Um, it was just it
was everywhere, and it was called Mother's Little Helper. Um.
(36:20):
This was called the the Age of Anxiety is what
sometimes people called the era which I refer to in
the books. H And that was already in existence. So
Milltown kind of one of the things that was interesting
about it is that it was the first time, as
I said that, that there was a widely prescribed drug,
and it was also the first time that anxiety was
(36:43):
sort of treated like, um, oh you have a cold,
you have anxiety, here, take this medication. So Milltown was
not so much an anti anxiety medication as it was
a tranquilizer. And what kind of happened to it over
the course of history is that because it was so
(37:03):
successful and popular, a lot of other people began trying
to create their own drugs and and take it over, uh,
and take over the marketplace, and they did things with
things that were actually more effective at treating anxiety and
actually looking at anxiety. But by nineteen fifty six, like
one in twenty Americans had tried Milltown, it was just
(37:25):
seen as completely innocuous and totally harmless. And again it
was the first time that that we had kind of said,
you know, it's okay to treat this. The flip side
of this is that because it was so popular and
because people started using it recreationally and because it was addictive,
(37:45):
that's when we started to get the pushback that happened
later of oh, no, you don't want to take any
medication for your illnesses, for your for your mental health,
because because it's going to mess you up, it'll make
you a different person. Uh. And so that's there's this
this unfortunate pushback that comes later. But at the time
(38:05):
of the book, Milltown was the thing, and it was
and it did help people who had anxiety, but it
was also something that was very easy to be misused.
So how did you go about researching how this there
a drug was prescribed and what it was like to
be on it. Uh. Fortunately, there's a really good book
(38:29):
that's basically just looking at that. Um, I've reade on
the coattails of other people's research. Uh. So the first
thing that I found was a it was actually a
CBC radio thing on Milltown. Milltown, a game changing drug
you've probably never heard of, which is is a great
(38:50):
half hour episode that's just looking at Milltown. So in
addition to the CBC program, there's also this fantastic book
called The Age of Anxiety. A history of America is
turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers by Andrea Tone And it looks
at the search for the best ones. Uh, it looks
(39:11):
at the rise of the America's prescription drug culture. Um,
it looks at, you know, a really complicated relationship with
tranquilizers and and the fact that it became this billion
dollar industry. Um. And and actually Milltown was also an
accidental discovery. The guy was looking for another form of penicillin. Oh,
(39:32):
that's not the same thing at all. No, No, it
was really one of those whoops. Um. Yeah. And and
also you know someone else who had fled the nazis um,
so he was he was looking actually, I guess he
was looking for a way to to preserve penicillin um.
And then he stumbled on this chemical which was a
(39:53):
relaxant that eventually led to the drug Milltown Um. But
he had he had wanted the drug to be classified
as a sedative, but someone had said, um, what's his name.
His name is Burger, Um, Frank Burger. So he had
wanted to be classified as a sedative, but a friend
(40:14):
convinced him that there were so many sedatives on the
market and what the world really wanted was tranquility. So
he advertised it as a tranquilizer. That's fascinating. It's also
very it's very different from how I imagine tranquilizers in
the nineteen fifties working like it seems like in sort
(40:36):
of sitcom depictions from later on, tranquilizers are things that
leave you on the couch immobile. Uh. But that's not
what happens at all with the characters in your book,
or regular people going about their days on and whatever
(41:00):
prescription is needed for their their mental health. Yeah. Functionality yeah,
and and really it was like it was so widely embraced.
Apparently in Hollywood at some of the big celebrity parties,
Milltown would be passed around the way you would pass
around peanuts. And there were there were also miltinis, which
(41:24):
were Martini's inspired by not just inspired by actually but
actually combining alcohol and Milltown, which sounds like a really
terrible idea. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good plan
at all. No, No, that's fascinating. So is there anything
else that you want to make sure that listeners either
(41:46):
know about your books or no about this world that
the books have been set in, or even the real
world analogs to the world that it's that they're set in.
I would say that one thing when you're reading the
book is that I start every chapter with headline and
a short news article. And the vast majority of those
(42:06):
new news articles are completely real. I say completely real. Um,
I have tweaked them to be appropriate for the timeline,
but the vast majority of them are actually from that era.
So when I'm talking about riots, those were actually riots
that were occurring in the real world. When I'm talking
about women's involvement, those were articles from the real world,
(42:31):
but they they just get left out. And I guess
that's the thing that the big kind of takeaway but
I would want people to to take from this is
that so many people just get left out, which is
you know, the kind of the point of your entire podcast.
But just a reminder, especially for people who are writers,
(42:52):
to to go looking um and to not not get
stuck in in regurgitating what media has given you, because
that just reinforces stuff that's wrong. Right. Thank you so
much for being on the show today, Mary, Yeah, my pleasure.
Thank you so much for inviting me. I really enjoy
(43:13):
your books, and I think a lot of our listeners,
if they are not already familiar, will as well. Thank
you again to Mary robinettoal for being on the show today.
Her new books are The Calculating Stars and The Faded Sky.
The Calculating Stars is already out and The Faded Sky
is coming out in August one, which is just after
(43:34):
this episode of our show will publish. These are both
prequels to her earlier novelette called The Lady Astronaut of Mars,
which won Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Do You have
a Little listener mail for US Tracy I do. It
is from Elizabeth and it is about I to be Wells.
Elizabeth says, I'm a little behind in my podcast, but
was listening to your podcast on I T B Wells
(43:56):
today and just yesterday she was highlighted in the New
US here in Chicago Land. There's a movement to build
a monument here in Chicago to be placed in Bronzeville,
where she lived. As so many women don't have monuments
dedicated to them, she should be so honored. She has
a link to an article and then says a quote
set out to me that I thought the podcast would
find interesting. Quote. Throughout the country, there are hundreds of
(44:19):
monuments to the Confederacy. There are fewer than twenty monuments
to black women, said Duster, a writer and lecturer at
Columbia College in Chicago. She hopes that this will be
the start of a movement toward better representation. It's the
end of the quote. Elizabeth goes on to say this
movement is crowdfunded. Although the article says they have the funds,
the website says they do not. Perhaps you can read
(44:41):
this on the podcast and get more people to contribute
the u r L for I to b Wells Monument
dot org based on everything I can find out about
this project. The primary funding for the initial statue is complete,
but they're currently working on a round two, which will
involve some other smaller pieces of artwork near the main
(45:03):
monument that has been funded. So thank you so much, Elizabeth.
We got several tweets and emails and Facebook comments about
this over the last couple of weeks, so thank you.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, we're at History Podcasts at how
stuff works dot com. We are also on Facebook and
Pinterest and Instagram and Twitter all as missed in History.
(45:26):
You can come to our website, which is missed in
History dot com and find a searchable archive of all
the episodes that we have done on the show and
show notes for the episodes Holly and I have done together.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
(45:49):
stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Steph you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We get
a lot of emails from publicists and authors pitching books
(00:21):
to us to feature on the show. I mean a lot,
a lot, very many. Until now we have mostly been
talking to people who are writing non fiction, but earlier
this summer we got a note from a publicist about
an author whose work has inspired three different episodes of
this show. Our episodes on the Year Without a Summer
and the Cato Street Conspiracy. We're both inspired by books
(00:43):
and Mary Robin at Kal's Glamorous History series, and she
was also the person who suggested that we cover the
first Russian women's Battalion of Death, which made an appearance
in the Six Impossible Episodes Soldiers, Snipers and Spies episode.
And now she has written a pair of books that
are called The Lady Astronaut Duology, and they touch on
a lot of subjects that we've covered on the show
(01:05):
or that we know our listeners are interested in. There's
the women Air Force Service pilots, the early days of NASA,
and the women computers who were crucial to the success
of the early space program. That last one is not
an episode of our show yet, but it is certainly
on the list. So since there is so much overlap
between the world of our podcast and the world of
Mary Robinett Coal's writing, I was very excited to have
(01:28):
the chance to bring her onto the show. We are
going to talk about how she incorporates history into her writing,
and then we are also going to talk about the
real history that has inspired these new books. So let's
get to it. Hi, Mary Robinett Coal, Welcome to the show.
(01:50):
Thank you so much for having me. I am a
huge fan. I am a huge fan of you. This
works out really well. We we have several episodes of
our show that have been inspired by your books, and
so when I got a note about about having you
on for these new books, it seemed like a very
natural fit. One of the reasons I wanted to talk
(02:11):
to you today is that your published novels all have
historical settings. So we have the Glamorous Histories, which are
Jane Austen with Magic for listeners who maybe don't know
they're set in the regency. There's Ghost Talkers, which is
set in Europe during World War One. And then there
are these new books, The Calculating Stars, which is out
now and The Faded Sky, which is coming out just
(02:33):
after this episode of our podcast does, and that's set
in an alternate space race starting in nineteen fifty two.
Has your research process been consistent among all of these
novels or is the setting that you're researching influencing the
research that you have to do. It's a little bit
of a mix. Um. My research process has evolved as
(02:55):
I've learned kind of more about my writing process. So
what I did in tually was that I would research
very well, actually know with with the very first novel
I'm Just Like I Love Jane Austin, and then there
were a lot of mistakes. But after that, what I
would do is I would research the period very very heavily, uh,
and then I would write. And what I discovered was
(03:17):
that I would wind up with a lot of information
that I wasn't going to use. So what I do
now is um and and have for several books as
a layered approach, which is I do kind of some
broad research to get a sense of the era that
I'm looking at, but generally I'm picking an era because
I've already come across something that has interested me, and
then that kind of begins to shape the story. And
(03:41):
as I work on the outline, I narrowed down and
hone my research so that it's more specific to what
I'm actually doing. The other thing that I would say
that has changed about my research process is that I
now assume that women and people of color and non
binary people are there in history and have just been
(04:04):
left out. So I go specifically looking for them and
you find them, Oh yeah, because they're everywhere. It's like
because they really were there, right, It's like this is
not a not a twenty one century invention. Um you know,
uh people of color, like you know there were there
were black Roman legionaries in in Scotland. I mean people,
(04:30):
people have been around a long time of all times.
It's it's not like we're you know, inventing things. It's
not like women suddenly appeared in nine. No. No, there
was a there was a review which I was delighted
to get but because it was in a national paper.
But it said, uh, something like if if Nasa had
had a heroine with an attitude, and I like NASA
(04:52):
did actually they had quite a number of them. Um
they just have maybe consumed a lot of the mass
media that presents astronauts and NASA's being, you know, all
whitened with chiseled jaws. But I mean Sally Ride, she
kind of she was good with NASA. I love Sally Ride.
(05:12):
I think one day we might have a podcast about her.
We don't yet. So you mentioned that when you when
you started out just by writing you Love Jane Authen,
you wrote a book that was Janausen with magic. And
then there were mistakes and it can you can you
tell me what any of the mistakes were. Oh, there's
so many. Um So, Like some of them are very
(05:33):
simple in a language level. For instance, I have them
I shall go out and check on the strawberries. And
the problem is that check at the time just meant stop,
So I will go out and stop on the strawberries.
It's like it's not um So. Some of them are
simple things like that. But other things are dinner parties.
I thought that the pairing up of couples and processing
(05:58):
into dinner parties is just how it was had always
been done. Uh. And it turns out in the regency
that's not at all the way things happen. Um, First,
the ladies lineup in order of precedence, and they go
in and they sit where they want to based on,
you know, their choice, because they're the first one in
the room. And then the gentleman line up in order
(06:20):
of precedence and they go in and sit down next
to who they want to. So it's you know, it's
important to understand that that at times when you're like,
oh and so and so was sitting next to the
part of the reason that was a big deal was
because the man had chosen to sit there, um, or
sometimes he had been forced to because someone else had
(06:41):
gotten into the room earlier. Wow, I didn't know that
at all. Right, something you said a moment ago brings
me to my next question, which is, I know that
now you're doing a lot to make sure the language
that you're using and the language that your characters are
speaking is not an achronistic. What are you doing to
make sure that there aren't a lot of anachronisms in
(07:02):
the language of these books? So with the Jane Austen books,
it was really simple. Um. And I say that in
the process that I'm about to describe, will sound anything
but simple UM. I created a Jane Austen spell check dictionary,
So basically I took the complete works of Jane Austen,
created it, ran it through Concordance Engine, which gave me
(07:24):
just a list of words that she used, and used
that as my spell checked dictionary. So it flagged anywhere
that Jane Austen did not use, which allowed me to
look it up and then see whether or not it
existed or if the usage had shifted. UM. It didn't
save me from words that she did use and the
usage had shifted, but it caught a lot. I did
(07:49):
a similar thing with ghost Talkers, but it was a
little bit harder because a lot of the language that
I was using in ghost Talkers was so because it
was dealing with spiritualism, UH and war, so coming up
with representative texts that covered that stuff was a little
(08:10):
bit harder. So coming up with the texts to serve
as as my basis was was trickier. And I did
not actually try to do this for UM for calculating stars.
What I did for that was I just paid attention
to idioms and jargon, looking for things that had shifted UM,
(08:36):
and then also for regionalisms one of the conversations that
my my editor and I had um with calculating stars
was about the use of the phrase oh Lord or
Lord knows. So, my main character is Southern and this
is a very common phrase, but she's also Jewish, and
(08:56):
so the question was, and my editor is Jewish, I'm not,
and so she flagged that she's like, this is this
is a very Christian phrase. I'm like, I I feel
like I have heard my Southern Jewish friends say this,
but I'm not certain. So I went and checked, and
I stopped on it, and it turns out that it
(09:18):
was pretty basically, in my highly scientific survey of Twitter,
that it was pretty evenly split, and the distinction seemed
to have been kind of how long people had been
in the South, so it was an assimilation thing. Ultimately,
I wound up pulling it out because I knew that
there were going to be enough people for whom that
(09:39):
would feel wrong, that even if it was correct for
Elma's character, because her people had been there since the
seventeen hundreds, it would still feel wrong to a lot
of people. And so I went ahead and pulled it out.
There's one or two that I missed, but for the
most part, I replaced it with God knows. You also
do audio book narration narration, including the audio book narration
(10:00):
for some of your own books. Does working within a
historical setting affect how you work as an audiobook narrator? Yes, um,
a lot of it. Well. I will say that any
text affects how I approach something as an audiobook narrator.
But the way in which people speak shifts. So in
(10:22):
ghost Talkers, Um, Ginger has a mid Atlantic accent, which
a lot of people will flag in reviews. Is that's
a terrible British accent that she's doing for Ginger? Or
why does Ginger have something of a British accent? Like
she doesn't? It's mid Atlantic. That's It's fine, um. But
also just the approach to narration. When I was narrating
(10:43):
somebody else's book, The House of Hawthorne, which was looking
at Hawthorne himself and and his wife and family, the
prose is different. So that's the way that that the
rhythms with which you approach it are going to be
very different than say, when I'm narrating October Day for
Shawn and McGuire. It's it's just it's baked into the pros,
(11:06):
and so that affects the way I narrate. The last
sort of general question that I have for you about
working in this intersection of fiction and history is when
you've been working on these books, is there anything that
you have been surprised to learn was an anachronism or
the other way around, if that works better, it's surprised
(11:26):
that something wasn't an anachronism that you thought would be.
Uh So, one of the words that I cannot use,
even though it is completely historically accurate in all of
my Jane Austen things is electricity. Jane Austen used electricity
and electric a couple of times, but it totally sounds
like an anachronism. So I can't use that, And that
(11:49):
was surprising actually that it didn't flag um and and
hitting it in her text. One of the things, like
all of the things that that catch me off guard
are are really small things like switch back going up,
the switch back on on a on the side of
a hill. Um, that's a railroad term, and so I
(12:11):
can't use that before there are railroads other things that
are not anachronisms, but again feel like it or that
we're surprising barn storming, which I had always thought was
a flying term, is actually turns out to be a
theater term that predates the Civil War, and it was
(12:31):
touring companies would storm into town, set up in a barn,
and then storm out again. I also always thought that was, uh,
an aircraft term, Like I imagine that being more about
air shows. Yeah, winging it also is a theater term. Uh.
And and what that one? And that was another one
that was like really because I also thought that that
(12:53):
was an air term. Uh. And what it meant was
that when you were doing shows in rep and very
very fat, you would tape your lines of theater, your
your lines of text if you had a long speech
to a piece of scenery. But you're rehearsing on the
set of the previous show, and so sometimes you walk
out on stage and it turns out that the piece
(13:14):
of furniture you would rely on being there was in
the wings to wing it. Yeah, when when you said
it was a theater term, I immediately thought, Okay, I
think it has something to do with being in the wings,
but the furniture part is totally new to me. Right. Yeah,
there's a really fantastic book that you would love. It's
(13:34):
out of print, but it's called The Stage Red Menaces
of Mrs Gilbert. And she was a an actor who
had a I think sixty year career that began before
the Civil War UH and went on UH into the
early nineteen hundreds and um like she acted with John
Wilkes Booth and and talks about that. But it's fascinating
(13:59):
learning how theater has has changed over the years. What
I've generally found, also, I will say, is that the
places that I am most caught off guard are the
things that I think I know. So I I double
check all of the theater stuff very very closely. Now, um,
I double check all of my astronaut uh stuff, all
of my space stuff very closely, because there's a lot
(14:21):
of things that we think are common language that are
not anymore, that were stuff that was used either early
in the program and has shifted, or is stuff that
is used now and didn't exist in the early program.
Mary and I are going to talk about her new
books and just a moment, but first let's take a
quick break for a word from a sponsor. In this
(14:50):
next part of the interview, Tracy and Mary are going
to talk about the early days of the Space program
in the United States, along with the ninety nine which
is an international organization of women pilots, and the first
Lady Astronaut Trainees, which was a real program that started
out as a way to evaluate women's fitness to be
astronauts in the nineteen sixties. So let's move on to
(15:12):
the books about the space program. Tell us about your
Lady Astronaut duality. Sure, so this is basically me kind
of reimagining um Ray Bradberry sort of space adventures but
women centered. So it's it's said in that early early
(15:35):
space program, um and in my case it's in nineteen
fifty two, so before there was a space program really,
but I drop an asteroid on the planet, which kicks
off a space program fast and hard and with an
imperative to get off the planet, which means colonization, which
means that women have to be involved. And it's also
during the middle of the Civil rights era, so uh,
(15:57):
things progress a little different le um, a little more
inclusively in in my version of history than they do
in the real world. So at the very start of
the book, I think almost on the first page, there's
a reference to President Dewey, so obviously, that's Thomas Dewey,
nowadays most famous for having been the subject of the
(16:17):
Chicago Daily Tribunes wrong headline of Dewey defeats Truman. When
I first read The Calculating Stars, I sort of interpreted
this as a nod to readers, just saying, heads up,
this is a very different universe that we're looking at.
But your historical note at the end of the book
makes reference to the fact that you needed to get
the space race on a faster timeline than it really
(16:40):
happened in our world. So can you tell me a
little more about that? Sure, So there's two things to
know about this. One has to do with past Mary
making decisions that President Mary has to live with, and
that is that The Lady Astronaut of Mars, which is
(17:01):
the novella or novelette that kicked this off, was set
in an existing story universe that I had written, which
was based in a the first story, and this is
called We Interrupt this Broadcast, which contains information that none
of the characters in this universe will ever know, so
you don't have to read it. But that story depended
(17:24):
on punch cards and also on a programming error surrounding
Leap Day and a near past asteroid strike, and that
led me to nineteen fifty two. And the problem is
we have no satellites in nineteen fifty two, so I
went looking for well, why and how would we do that?
(17:46):
And that led me to having Dewey come into office instead.
So the thing about Dewey is that he as opposed
to Truman, is that Dewey was UM very much an
internationalist UM. He was very interested in collaboration, and he
was also really against corruption and h and very into efficiency.
(18:10):
And the being very into efficiency is the key twist here.
So after World War Two, what happened was that Verner
von Brown, who had been the head of the nazi
UM rocketry program, was brought back to the United States
with a bunch of his rocket scientists and they just
(18:31):
cooled their heels. They were just not being used at all.
And a lot of this was because hello, former Nazis,
well you know, I mean technically Nazis UM, so that
that had a lot to do with why they were
cooling their heels. There was a lot of effort to
get a rocket up at this point, and no one
was letting Von Brown and his people do it, and
(18:55):
everyone was trying to avoid the V Tube four launches
because because of its military history. My reasoning, and this
is the kind of reasoning that one does when one
is writing a short story, which is that it was
not very well researched, but I think it holds. My
reasoning is that Dewey would have probably said, you know what,
(19:18):
this is more efficient. Let's just let this guy and
his team use technology that we know how it works
instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, and then they
can go on and and so I think that it's
plausible that that we could have gotten I know that
we could have actually gotten rockets, like with the technology
that we had available, I am certain that we could
(19:40):
have gotten rockets and satellites off the ground faster than
we did. I think that having Dewey in office might
have made that happen. I don't know for certain, but
that that was the chain of reasoning that got me there.
So the women Air Force Service pilots and the women
computers from the early Space program are both just a
huge part of these So where did you first learn
(20:02):
about these women and what made you decide to write
a book about them? So, again, I mostly assumed that
they would be there but um. But more specifically, the
reason that I knew about the women computers was because
of my dad. My dad is a programmer, UM, and
he started programming before computer science was a term, UH,
(20:25):
and he started with punch cards, and he would talk
about the punch card girls, which is apparently the term
for them at the time, the punch card girls and
the women computers, and and so it was just something
that I was kind of peripherally aware of. And when
(20:45):
I started looking at who would go into space, because
I wanted to write, you know, this lady astronaut story
about this older astronaut, older woman astronaut in an era
of punch cards, I had to think about, well, what
what qualifications would she have? Because you would have to
be extraordinary in order to be able to get up there,
(21:06):
and what would what would the world look like? But
specifically what qualifications would you have? And that led me
to realizing, in order to get her up there in
a punch card era, that she would have to have
already been a pilot UM, and that she would also
have to have been very good in the sciences. And
then UM mathematics was a natural thing because that was
(21:28):
where women were kind of dominating. When I started researching
for the book, the first thing that I hit that
was really very very useful was the Rise of the
Rocket Girls by Natalia Holt, which focuses on the women's
the early role of women in the Space program UM
and a lot of it is is pre NASA. Most
(21:51):
of it's focused on the women of JPL, the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, but it it's pretty comprehensive in in how
involved they were. So with that that kind of gave
me the line into the computers UM. And then also
again I started looking for you know what, when did
(22:11):
women start into the space program? And I was again
aware of wasps kind of peripherally because of just sort
of some of the stuff that I had learned when
I was working on ghost Talkers, when I had been
looking at pilots UM, even though that's World War One,
the research had made me aware of the wasps while
I was working on it. But but when I started
(22:34):
specifically looking at this, I discovered the Mercury Thirteen, which
were a group of women, many of whom had been wasps,
who were put through the early astronaut the Mercury Training
or mercury testing, but not actually entered into the program,
so that that was kind of the roundabout way that
(22:55):
I found my way into learning about these folks. Well,
I had the first lady Astronaut trainees also on my
list of things to talk to you about, So obviously
I don't I don't want to give away too much
of the plot of your book. But obviously, since it's
called a Lady Astronaut book, there are lady astronauts, and
(23:15):
as you might imagine with women in the nineteen fifties,
some of the things that they're made to do as
astronaut trainees are kind of degrading. But this was something
that also happened to the first lady astronaut trainees in
our world, right, Yeah, so a lot of the things
(23:36):
that I have the Lady Astronauts go through are things
that happened in the real world. The incident with the
Dilbert Dunker in the bikinis is something that I completely fabricated. However,
there are enough incidences that are parallel to that that
I am absolutely certain that that's pretty much how it
(23:58):
would have gone down. The the things that I did
not make up were things like calling them all astro
nets UM focusing on their beauty and attractiveness and and
listing their measurements in newspaper articles. So what ultimately happens
to these first lady astronaut trainees. So this is a
(24:21):
this is a really complicated and and and ultimately tragic story.
Most of them were fine, like they would really have
enjoyed doing this, but um, but went on with their lives.
There were two UM, Jackie Cochrane and Jerry Cobb, who
were very much a team when kind of everything began.
(24:43):
So Jackie Cochrane established the ninety nine UM well she
was influential in establishing the ninety nine and and but
she established the wasps and she was like I had
won all kinds of awards, set multiple record as a pilot,
as a woman pilot. She was. She was very very
(25:04):
good and very driven and very ambitious. Jerry Cobb was
also a really phenomenal pilot, but uh, not so good
at public speaking. Um. She was literally tongue tied. Her
Her tongue had um had a connections that had to
be severed surgically so that she could speak. So she
(25:25):
was always very shy. But the idea of going into
space captivated her, and when she was brought in to
do these these tests, she started obsessing about it. So
what happens is that the women are doing the tests,
um there comes a test at which they have to
be sent to a NASA facility, and Jerry Cobb had
(25:46):
been sent to do it, and they wanted to send
the rest of the women, and someone asked for permission,
and it at this point begins to get shut down.
There's a draft of a letter that Lyndon Johnson never
sent that said let's shut this down, and he never
sent it. He said, instead, let's let NASA make those decisions,
(26:10):
but it's very clear from all of the surrounding communication
that he had expressed his displeasure. And the let's let
NASA decide was you guys are going to decide, but
you know what answer I want. So then there was
a protest, They go to Congress, they ultimately get a hearing,
and in this hearing, Jackie Cochrane, who had been pushing
(26:33):
for women to go into space, completely undercuts the program
by saying, yet NASA shouldn't invest in this because the
nation will spend all of this money training these women
who are just going to leave and go get married. Wow. Right,
And this was an argument that she had faced, and
this is what makes it so astonishing. This is an
(26:54):
argument that she had faced when she was trying to
establish the WASPS, that people said, there's no point in
doing this because if you do, these women are just
going to go and leave and get married. And she
had argued that that was not fair and prejudicial, and
and that married men continued doing their jobs and that
married women should be allowed to as well. So for
her to turn around them and use that same argument
(27:16):
to undercut the program, and basically what it came down
to was that she wanted to be in charge and
didn't like the way Jerry was kind of getting out
of control, and and Jackie Cochrane also had very specific
ideas about propriety and image, and she felt like the
(27:39):
current crop was, particularly with Jerry cobbs involvement, were beginning
to be ridiculed, and that if they shut it down
and then came back later that with her in charge,
that that things would be different. But it basically just
ended the program any in any chance of women being
(27:59):
in chard in the program at that time, and she
was not the only voice saying things like that, but
there were there were other people who were involved, and
at this point NASA introduced to the requirement right in
this era area that that in order to be an
astronaut you had to have been a test pilot. Now,
(28:19):
what's interesting about this is that at the same time
and during the hearings, when they were talking to John
Glenn about requirements, UM, the women were saying, you know,
the rules have been such that we can't have been
test pilots, so we should look at equivalent experience because
most of these women, or many of them, had like
(28:40):
four times the flight time as any of the existing astronauts.
And one of the arguments that they put forth was that,
you know, John Glenn would not have qualified with the
current or with the existing astronaut requirements because he didn't
have an advanced degree when he applied. He didn't have
(29:00):
an advanced degree when he went into space, but that
had become a requirement, and so they said, you know,
if you could relax it and look at equivalent experience
for him, why are you not able to do that
for women? And Glenn's response was, no, I would not
have qualified initially. UM. And if if we can find
any women who are as qualified as the men, you know,
(29:21):
the brave men who are going into space. Uh, then
I would welcome them with open arms, but you're not
going to find them, which again kind of shut things down.
And then he also said, I'd like to have that
stricken from the record because I have to go home
and talk to my wife tonight. Oh so he knew. Yeah, Uh, well,
(29:42):
I was a bit of an infuriating note to pause on.
When we come back from the break, we're going to
continue on with that being for just a bit with
a discussion of the racial segregation of the Women's Air
Force Service pilots during World War Two. Like we talked
(30:04):
about earlier in in these books, the Women Air Force
Service pilots are a huge part of the books. And
something that comes up that has come up when we've
talked about the WASP on this podcast before is that
almost all of the WASP were white. And one of
the actual historical stories that comes up in these novels
(30:27):
is that the only black woman who applied was asked
to withdraw her application because of her race. And that's
something that comes up in your book. So can you
talk about that a little as well. So that was
something that I had run across when I was reading
about the history of the wasps um and again, knowing
that people of color, and specifically women of color, get
(30:52):
just completely erased from history, I very deliberately went looking
for them. There was one Native American pilot, two Chinese pilots,
and UH. And then, as you mentioned the UH, the
woman who applied and then wasn't allowed it was asked
to withdraw her application. Jackie Cochrane was the one who
(31:15):
asked her where to withdraw the application because she felt
that with and and this is horrifying, but she felt
that with the UH segregation issues in the United States,
that if they had a black pilot, that would call
the entire operation into program. Now that was the UM
(31:35):
that was the rationale she used. But if you look
at it, a lot of the other things that she
said and she was actually just bigoted um and and
it was just straight up racism couched in the but
it's the best for the program. You found the name
of the pilot, which I had gone looking for and
had not been able to find. UH, So that was
(31:57):
super exciting. Mildred him Carter. Yeah, her husband was a
Tuskegee airman. Yeah, yeah, when I was so after you.
Since that to me, I went and look at and
was like reading about her and the fact that they
would they would fly, they would be flying and they
would do I Love you messages while in flight over field.
(32:18):
I was just like, that is the sweetest, most romantic
thing I think I've ever read. Yeah, that's um. I
I think had you written this book a couple of
years later, it might have been easier to find her name,
because it's been in the like the much more recent
past that she has been recognized as the the woman
(32:39):
who applied to be a WASP. Um. But yeah, she
was a pilot. Her husband was a pilot, was a
Tuskegee airman. I think he is still living or was
as of a couple of years ago. And it seems
like they have just together such a beautiful, sweet love story. Um.
And I don't think there's a quite enough public information
(33:00):
about her at this point to do a whole podcast
on her, but the fact that she has sort of
a little nod uh in the book. Uh. And I
don't think we've got a two part podcast on the
WASP on this show. Before we interviewed Dr Katherine Sharp
Landeck who has done a lot of research on them.
And we talked about the fact that the WASP were
(33:20):
all segregated, but I don't think it came up that
there had been an applicant who was asked to withdraw
her application. Yeah, it is definitely worth uh reading more
about that and and that and and the other women
in the wasps. And I'll also say that reading about
the early African Americans in aviations and in space history
(33:41):
is is really interesting. The because I couldn't find, Um,
Mildred Henman's carter's name, I made up a character to
be that person and based her surname in the book
is Coleman, which is a nod to Bessie Coleman. Um,
do you know about Bessie Coleman. I do you know
(34:02):
about Bessie Coleman. We have a podcast about her in
the archive. Excellent. Everyone should go read all about Bessie Coleman,
because but in short form for our listen all about
Bessie Coleman. But in short form for for people who
are listening right now. Uh. She was like, I would
like to be a pilot, and everyone in the United
States said, you can't because you're black, and you're a woman,
(34:24):
and so she said, I will go to France where
they will teach me to be a pilot, and I
will teach myself French so that I can go do
this thing, which is what she did, which is so
kick ass that I just I love her so much.
Had she been of the right age and still alive,
I totally would have had her be an astronaut. She
has some, uh, some parallels to the story of Eugene Bullard,
(34:46):
who is on the list for an episode of this
show at some point, and who also has a character
named after him in your novel. Yes, indeed, thank you
for catching that. Uh my last question, that my my
last thing that surprised me to learn it was a
real thing. When I was reading these books. Again, without
giving away too much plot, uh, there is a prescription
(35:09):
anti anxiety drug that plays a part in these books.
It's called Milltown. And I thought that it was just
a thing that you had created for these books until
my spouse, who is a librarian, did what librarians do
and looked into it, and I learned that this was, uh,
this was a real anti anxiety medication, and it was
(35:32):
as much of a household name in the fifties as
Prozac is has been in more recent years. So can
you talk about that. Yeah, So Milltown was really kind
of the first widely prescribed um anxiety drug, and it
was so popular that, like Milton Borrow joked about changing
(35:55):
his name to Milltown Burrow. And one of the things
that I have in the books is saying that you know,
you you saw the advertisements for Milltown everywhere, including one
that said we have ice cream and Milltown and that
was like an actual ad at a real drug store.
You can find those images. Um, it was just it
was everywhere, and it was called Mother's Little Helper. Um.
(36:20):
This was called the the Age of Anxiety is what
sometimes people called the era which I refer to in
the books. H And that was already in existence. So
Milltown kind of one of the things that was interesting
about it is that it was the first time, as
I said that, that there was a widely prescribed drug,
and it was also the first time that anxiety was
(36:43):
sort of treated like, um, oh you have a cold,
you have anxiety, here, take this medication. So Milltown was
not so much an anti anxiety medication as it was
a tranquilizer. And what kind of happened to it over
the course of history is that because it was so
(37:03):
successful and popular, a lot of other people began trying
to create their own drugs and and take it over, uh,
and take over the marketplace, and they did things with
things that were actually more effective at treating anxiety and
actually looking at anxiety. But by nineteen fifty six, like
one in twenty Americans had tried Milltown, it was just
(37:25):
seen as completely innocuous and totally harmless. And again it
was the first time that that we had kind of said,
you know, it's okay to treat this. The flip side
of this is that because it was so popular and
because people started using it recreationally and because it was addictive,
(37:45):
that's when we started to get the pushback that happened
later of oh, no, you don't want to take any
medication for your illnesses, for your for your mental health,
because because it's going to mess you up, it'll make
you a different person. Uh. And so that's there's this
this unfortunate pushback that comes later. But at the time
(38:05):
of the book, Milltown was the thing, and it was
and it did help people who had anxiety, but it
was also something that was very easy to be misused.
So how did you go about researching how this there
a drug was prescribed and what it was like to
be on it. Uh. Fortunately, there's a really good book
(38:29):
that's basically just looking at that. Um, I've reade on
the coattails of other people's research. Uh. So the first
thing that I found was a it was actually a
CBC radio thing on Milltown. Milltown, a game changing drug
you've probably never heard of, which is is a great
(38:50):
half hour episode that's just looking at Milltown. So in
addition to the CBC program, there's also this fantastic book
called The Age of Anxiety. A history of America is
turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers by Andrea Tone And it looks
at the search for the best ones. Uh, it looks
(39:11):
at the rise of the America's prescription drug culture. Um,
it looks at, you know, a really complicated relationship with
tranquilizers and and the fact that it became this billion
dollar industry. Um. And and actually Milltown was also an
accidental discovery. The guy was looking for another form of penicillin. Oh,
(39:32):
that's not the same thing at all. No, No, it
was really one of those whoops. Um. Yeah. And and
also you know someone else who had fled the nazis um,
so he was he was looking actually, I guess he
was looking for a way to to preserve penicillin um.
And then he stumbled on this chemical which was a
(39:53):
relaxant that eventually led to the drug Milltown Um. But
he had he had wanted the drug to be classified
as a sedative, but someone had said, um, what's his name.
His name is Burger, Um, Frank Burger. So he had
wanted to be classified as a sedative, but a friend
(40:14):
convinced him that there were so many sedatives on the
market and what the world really wanted was tranquility. So
he advertised it as a tranquilizer. That's fascinating. It's also
very it's very different from how I imagine tranquilizers in
the nineteen fifties working like it seems like in sort
(40:36):
of sitcom depictions from later on, tranquilizers are things that
leave you on the couch immobile. Uh. But that's not
what happens at all with the characters in your book,
or regular people going about their days on and whatever
(41:00):
prescription is needed for their their mental health. Yeah. Functionality yeah,
and and really it was like it was so widely embraced.
Apparently in Hollywood at some of the big celebrity parties,
Milltown would be passed around the way you would pass
around peanuts. And there were there were also miltinis, which
(41:24):
were Martini's inspired by not just inspired by actually but
actually combining alcohol and Milltown, which sounds like a really
terrible idea. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good plan
at all. No, No, that's fascinating. So is there anything
else that you want to make sure that listeners either
(41:46):
know about your books or no about this world that
the books have been set in, or even the real
world analogs to the world that it's that they're set in.
I would say that one thing when you're reading the
book is that I start every chapter with headline and
a short news article. And the vast majority of those
(42:06):
new news articles are completely real. I say completely real. Um,
I have tweaked them to be appropriate for the timeline,
but the vast majority of them are actually from that era.
So when I'm talking about riots, those were actually riots
that were occurring in the real world. When I'm talking
about women's involvement, those were articles from the real world,
(42:31):
but they they just get left out. And I guess
that's the thing that the big kind of takeaway but
I would want people to to take from this is
that so many people just get left out, which is
you know, the kind of the point of your entire podcast.
But just a reminder, especially for people who are writers,
(42:52):
to to go looking um and to not not get
stuck in in regurgitating what media has given you, because
that just reinforces stuff that's wrong. Right. Thank you so
much for being on the show today, Mary, Yeah, my pleasure.
Thank you so much for inviting me. I really enjoy
(43:13):
your books, and I think a lot of our listeners,
if they are not already familiar, will as well. Thank
you again to Mary robinettoal for being on the show today.
Her new books are The Calculating Stars and The Faded Sky.
The Calculating Stars is already out and The Faded Sky
is coming out in August one, which is just after
(43:34):
this episode of our show will publish. These are both
prequels to her earlier novelette called The Lady Astronaut of Mars,
which won Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Do You have
a Little listener mail for US Tracy I do. It
is from Elizabeth and it is about I to be Wells.
Elizabeth says, I'm a little behind in my podcast, but
was listening to your podcast on I T B Wells
(43:56):
today and just yesterday she was highlighted in the New
US here in Chicago Land. There's a movement to build
a monument here in Chicago to be placed in Bronzeville,
where she lived. As so many women don't have monuments
dedicated to them, she should be so honored. She has
a link to an article and then says a quote
set out to me that I thought the podcast would
find interesting. Quote. Throughout the country, there are hundreds of
(44:19):
monuments to the Confederacy. There are fewer than twenty monuments
to black women, said Duster, a writer and lecturer at
Columbia College in Chicago. She hopes that this will be
the start of a movement toward better representation. It's the
end of the quote. Elizabeth goes on to say this
movement is crowdfunded. Although the article says they have the funds,
the website says they do not. Perhaps you can read
(44:41):
this on the podcast and get more people to contribute
the u r L for I to b Wells Monument
dot org based on everything I can find out about
this project. The primary funding for the initial statue is complete,
but they're currently working on a round two, which will
involve some other smaller pieces of artwork near the main
(45:03):
monument that has been funded. So thank you so much, Elizabeth.
We got several tweets and emails and Facebook comments about
this over the last couple of weeks, so thank you.
If you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast, we're at History Podcasts at how
stuff works dot com. We are also on Facebook and
Pinterest and Instagram and Twitter all as missed in History.
(45:26):
You can come to our website, which is missed in
History dot com and find a searchable archive of all
the episodes that we have done on the show and
show notes for the episodes Holly and I have done together.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
(45:49):
stuff Works dot com.
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