Review: The Martian Contingency, by Mary Robinette Kowal

The Martian Contingency is the fourth book of the mostly-realistic science fiction alternate history series that began with the novelette "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" and the novel The Calculating Stars. It returns to Elma York as the main character, covering her second trip to Mars after the events of The Fated Sky. It's helpful to remember the events of the previous two books to follow some of the plot.

Elma is back on Mars, this time as second in command. The immediate goal of the second Mars mission is to open more domes and land additional crew currently in orbit, creating the first permanent human settlement on Mars. The long-term goal is to set up Mars as a refuge in case the greenhouse effect caused by the meteor strike in The Calculating Stars continues to spiral out of control. Elma is anxious and not looking forward to being partly in charge, particularly since her position is partly due to her fame with the public (and connection with the American president). She'd rather just be a pilot. But she'll do what the mission needs from her, and at least this time her husband is with her on Mars.

As one might expect from earlier installments of this series, The Martian Contingency starts with the details and rhythms of life in a dangerous, highly technical, and mission-driven scientific environment: hard science fiction of the type most closely modeled on NASA and real space missions. Given that this is aimed at permanent Mars colonies that would theoretically have to be independent of Earth, it requires a huge amount of suspension of disbelief for the premise, but Kowal at least tries for verisimilitude in the small details. I am not an expert in early space program technology (Kowal's alternate history diverges into a greatly accelerated space program in the 1950s and, for example, uses female mathematicians for most calculations), so I don't know how successful this is, but it feels crunchy and believable.

As with the previous books, though, this is not just a day in the life of an astronaut. There's something wrong, something that happened during the first Mars expedition while Elma was in orbit and left odd physical clues, and no one is willing to talk about it. Elma is just starting to poke around before the politics at home go off the rails (again), exacerbated by a cringe-worthy social error by Elma herself, and she once again has to navigate egregious sexism and political meddling in a highly dangerous environment a long way from home.

It is a little surprising that I like this series as much as I do. I don't particularly care for pseudo-realistic science fiction, although I admit there is something deeply satisfying about reading about people following checklists properly. The idea of permanent Mars colonies as an escape from a doomed Earth is unbelievable and deeply silly, but Kowal locked herself into that alternate future with "The Lady Astronaut of Mars," which is still set in the future of all of the books so far. A primary conflict in each of the books comes from the egregious sexism and racism of a culture based on 1950s American attitudes towards both, and the amount of progress Elma can make against either is limited, contingent, and constantly compromised.

And yet. At its best, this series is excellent competence porn, both in the spirit of the Apollo 13 movie and for the navigation of social and political obstacles and idiocy. Elma is highly competent in a believable and sympathetic way, with strengths, weaknesses, and an ongoing struggle with anxiety. There is something rewarding in watching people solve problems and eventually triumph by being professional, careful, principled, and creative. It's enough to make a good book, even if I am not that interested in the setting and technology.

As with the rest of the series, this will not be for everyone. You have to be up for reading about a lot of truly awful sexism and racism without the payoff of a complete triumph. This is a system that Elma navigates, not overthrows, and that's not going to be enough for some readers. You also have to accept the premise of a Mars colony, which in an otherwise hard science fiction novel is a bit much despite Kowal's attempts to acknowledge some of the difficulties. But if you don't mind that drawbacks, this series continues to be an opportunity to read about people being quietly and professionally competent.

This is not my favorite entry, mostly because Elma makes a rather humiliating mistake that's central to the plot and has a lot of after-effects (and therefore a lot of time in the spotlight), and because there is rather a lot of discussion of sexuality that felt childish to me. The intent was to try to capture the way people in the 1950s talked about sex, and perhaps Kowal was successful in that, but I didn't enjoy the experience. But I still found myself pulled into the plot and happily rooting for the characters, even though a reader of "The Lady Astronaut of Mars" has a pretty good idea of how everything will turn out.

If you liked the series so far, recommended, although I doubt it will be the favorite entry for most readers. If you did not like the earlier books of the series, this one will not change your mind.

Content notes: Way, way too much detailed discussion of an injury to a fingernail than I wanted to read, as well as some other rather explicit description of physical injury. Reproductive health care through the lens of the 1950s, so, uh, yeah. A whole lot of sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination that is mostly worked around rather than confronted.

Rating: 7 out of 10

16 Mar 2026 4:23am GMT

On Friday May the 13th OpenSSL project has published advisory details for CVE-2026-2673. The CVE is treated as non-important by the project. The patches are only provided as commits on the stable branches. No git tag, no precise fixed version, and no source tarballs provided.

The patches that were merged to openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches were not based on top of the last stable point release and did not split code changes & documentation updates. It means that cherry-picking the commits referenced in the advisory will always lead to conflicts requiring manual resolution. It is not clear if support is provided for snapshot builds off the openssl-3.5 and openssl-3.6 branches. As the builds from the stable branches declare themselves as dev builds of the next unreleased point release. For example, in contrast to projects such as vim and glibc, with every commit to stable branches explicitly recommended for distributors to ship and is supported.

I have requested OpenSSL upstream in the past for the security fixes to branch off the last point release, commit code changes separate from the NEWS.md / CHANGES.md updates, and then merge that into the stable branches. This way the advisory that recommends cherry-picking individual commits, would actually apply conflict free - at no additional maintenance burden to the OpenSSL project and everyone who has to cherry-pick these updates. There is a wide support voiced for such strategy by the OpenSSL distributors and the OpenSSL Corporation. But this is not something that OpenSSL Project is yet choosing to provide.

To avoid duplication of work, I am starting to provide stable OpenSSL re-releases of the last upstream tagged stable point release with security only patches split into code-change only; documentation update; version update to create security only source tarball releases that are easy to build; easy to identify by the security scanners; and which cherry-pick changes without conflicts. The first two releases are published on GitHub as immutable releases with attestations:

• OpenSSL 3.6.1+1 - OpenSSL 3.6.1 with fix for CVE-2026-2673
• OpenSSL 3.5.5+1 - OpenSSL 3.5.5 with fix for CVE-2026-2673

16 Mar 2026 2:11am GMT

Regression Tracking

Debusine is a tool designed for Debian developers and Operating System developers in general. Debusine can run QA pipelines to check that Debian packages are ready to upload. This blog post describes the regression tracking mechanism that's recently become available in Debusine QA pipelines.

The debian_pipeline workflow in Debusine can build, test, and upload a package to the Debian archive (or any other repository, such as a native Debusine APT repository). The QA tests involve running the standard Debian QA utilities (lintian, autopkgtest, piuparts, blhc) on the built artifacts. In addition we can run the autopkgtests of every other package in the archive that depends on the built package, like britney does for testing migration in Debian. Some of these other packages may have currently-failing autopkgtests that have nothing to do with the changes in the upload under test.

For example:

Figuring out which of these failures are new (and thus worth investigating) has been a manual process in Debusine until now. We have just completed the basic functionality of the regression_tracking=true feature, and have enabled it in the upload-to-* workflows on debusine.debian.net.

With this enabled, you'll get a new QA tab on your debian_pipeline workflows that shows the trend of each test:

This is determined by looking at recent task history for each task in the debian:qa-results collection. If there is no recent result for a given <package, version, architecture>, then tasks are queued under the "reference tests" qa workflow tree on the pipeline.

These reference tests are run by using the same tasks as the main qa workflow, but without the addition of the package under test. In fact, it uses the same qa workflow that we use to check the package, but with a few different parameters to populate the regression tracking results collection.

The debian:qa-results collection used for analyzing regressions is specified to the debian_pipeline with the regression_tracking_qa_results lookup parameter. On debusine.debian.net we have configured a debian:qa-results collection for sid that can be referenced and added to by tasks in any workspace.

Regressions can be more subtle than a simple Success → Failure. If the number of autopkgtests that fail increases, or the number of lintian tags emitted increases, those are also considered a regressions.

Using regression tracking now

It's enabled by default on most of the upload-to-* workflows on debusine.debian.net. To disable, pass -O debusine_workflow_data.enable_regression_tracking=false when you dput an upload to debusine.

To use the regression-tracking in your own workflows, use a debian_pipeline workflow that is configured with enable_regression_tracking=true. This will require a qa_suite to be specified, pointing to the baseline suite.

We hope this will make it easier to check QA results for packages tested on debusine.debian.net.

16 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT