Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt (Analog, September/October 2020) starts with three precocious fourteen year old girls planning a trip to the Moon. Throughout the construction of their ship (or rather the adaptation of a gas station storage tank with insulation and an anti-gravity drive), Penny the narrator goes to summer school. As she struggles to master her geography lessons—a list of states, etc.—we see her situation in school, i.e. the tribalism, bullying, pettiness, and so on. When Penny isn’t in class, or hanging out with Jacqueline and Selena, she works in her (presumably widowed) father’s scrap yard, where she sources the parts needed for the ship.
About half way through the story a ticking clock is introduced in the form of Selena and Jacqueline’s parents plans to move away, and the trio rush to test the anti-gravity drive:
By the time we’d solidified the anchors and rigged the power source, the eastern sky had lightened.
We crowded into the crane’s control booth fifty yards from our test site. Selena connected the video game joystick to the wires that ran to the Distortion Drive. She held it out to Jacqueline. “You should do the honors.”
I had my phone out to film our results.
I guess I thought the Distortion Drive would rise up from the golf cart trailer until the cables stopped its progress. That, or it wouldn’t move, which seemed more possible. I steadied the phone and turned on the video.
Jacqueline took a deep breath, then pushed the joystick forward a tick.
I lurched against the glass, as if someone had tipped the control booth from behind. Selena squeaked and caught herself from falling.
Jacqueline bumped her head on the window. Then the control booth shifted back into place.
I said, “What happened?” while rubbing my shoulder.
“Dang,” said Jacqueline. “That’s going to leave a welt.” She sat on the control booth floor, her notebooks spilled around her.
“My machine!” Selena opened the door.
Jacqueline grabbed Selena’s leg. “Not yet.”
A clattering like hail rattled the control booth’s metal ceiling for a couple seconds. Gravel and marble-sized rocks bounced off the ground around the booth. My toolbox that I’d left next to the trailer slammed down along with the wrenches and other tools that had been in it.
“I hadn’t considered that,” said Jacqueline. “I’ll need to narrow the distortion field.” p. 33
Eventually (spoiler) they set off on their trip, and Penny sees North America from orbit: now that the land isn’t an abstract shape on paper she can easily reel off the states and cities, and knows she’ll ace her geography test the next day. They continue on to the Moon.
I think I can see the attraction of this story, which is essentially a YA piece for teenage girls (although it harks back to the lone inventor trope it’s mostly about their personal tribulations). But I wonder if even that audience will manage to suspend disbelief at the thought of three fourteen-year-olds inventing a gravity drive and going to the moon.
I was also puzzled about the story’s appearance in Analog—I wouldn’t have though that the magazine’s readers would be interested in something like this but, surprisingly, it won the novelette section of the Anlab Awards for 2020. I suspect the (mainly) American readership like sentimental YA material more than I do.
** (Average). 8,300 words.