here there be dragons

It's an alternate history/sci-fi series where a huge meteor strikes just off the coast of Washington DC in 1952, wiping out almost the entire existing US government and a huge portion of the population and plunging the world into several years of unnatural winter.

The perspective character is a WWII veteran, a WASP pilot and math PhD who survives at the edge of the blast with her rocket engineer husband and flies them to the safety of the nearest surviving air force base in Ohio. She's the first one to calculate that the cold snap will be followed by catastrophic global warming due to the water displaced into the atmosphere. The world kicks off an international effort towards space exploration (& colonization) centered in the new US capital of Kansas City--narrator is a computer for the program and her husband is the head engineer. (This is all the very beginning of the book.)

Ok so interesting premise, integrating lots of questions of climate & engineering & culture & race & gender. However I feel like a lot of it... falls flat? I've been told a lot of these things improve in later books.

Dialogue feels samey & quippy

Dialogue, narration, and framing of issues within the narrative feel distractingly modern

Narrative structure especially in part 1 that I associate with my own early writing attempts where it feels like the narrator is being whisked from scene to scene for Things To Happen To Her while her main agency is maintaining a Brave Face and Holding In Tears

Descriptions are cliche and sometimes repeated almost word for word a few pages later

Fantasy of escaping structural misogyny by having a husband who has unfalteringly modern feminist ideas

Fantasy of escaping structural misogyny by being exceptional in your field & bringing other women with you

Fantasy of structural racism being resolved by international scientific collaboration for the good of humanity (this one especially raised my eyebrows after some recent reading I've been doing about the imperialism & geopolitics of e.g. the space race and Antarctic science)

Fantasy of structural racism being circumvented by the white lead character inviting Black women pilots to demonstrate their abilities in a high-profile setting

Fantasy of misogyny & climate change denialism being resolved by going on tv and making a well-reasoned argument

I don't feel equipped to comment on the narrator's relationship to her judaism but to me that feels extremely contemporary as well, & brought up only sporadically

The lead is also self-described as white and some of the scenes where she's interacting with the Black characters were a little hair-raising in the way they felt meant to be... idk, a wink and a nod to potential biases the lead might have without actually addressing things meaningfully?

The story pauses in its tracks when the narrator's husband sends her to the doctor because she's been vomiting (due to what the reader can identify as anxiety/panic attacks) and her doctor stops to give her a very modern-framed explanation of how taking medications for mental illness is just like taking medications for any other illness and she shouldn't be ashamed.