It’s been a good year for lesbians in space. First, the Australian animated film Lesbian Space Princess made its world premiere at the 2025 Berlinale. Now, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s ninth novel depicts a – literally – cosmic disaster steered by lesbian astronauts.
Set in the early 1980s, Atmosphere follows Joan Goodwin and Vanessa Ford, two fictional women joining Nasa not long after the first American woman on the moon, Sally Ride. As Joan fulfils her dream of training at Houston’s Johnson Space Centre, a wave of gay realisation hits her hard and fast.
Just as her early infatuation begins to raise questions about how to live with a same-sex partner in a viciously homophobic world – “You do realise bringing a woman as your date will make you look like a … you know …" – a 1984 mission threatens to take an apocalyptic turn.
There’s much talk these days about the screenplayification of novels, the claim that writers are replacing interiority with action and dialogue in a bid to get lucratively optioned. Less discussed is the increasingly default presence of cinematically non-linear narratives. What was once an experiment has become the done thing: 1. opening teaser as close to the end as possible, 2. cut to much earlier in the story, 3. interweave the pursuit of both threads until they join definitively at the end. Atmosphere follows this formula.
I doubt it would bother the author to have this pointed out. In her recent cover interview with Time, Jenkins Reid shot back at critics who assumed she’d ever been trying to write literary fiction: “[M]aybe I love being Candy Land [Jonathan] Franzen.”
The novel’s feminism operates at a similar emotional temperature: friendly, with a tendency to flatter the 21st-century reader’s existing sensibilities
She’s not a stylist, and that’s fine. Franzen can write Franzen’s books. Jenkins Reid’s job is to write her own. Her sentences convey character, setting and plot without drawing attention to themselves. Unhindered by the road bump of experimental prose, a casual reader might breeze past the insight often packed into short strings of words. But dialogue like this will seep into you if you let it: “Have you ever been in love?” “No, I don’t think so.” “Well, it’s like a bad cold: it’s miserable and then, one day, it’s gone.”
The humour is gentle rather than uproarious. Only once did I laugh aloud: “… Hank was the recipient of a very large trust fund. It was a fact that Hank wore with complexity." But there are moments that will elicit a soft smile, as when none of Joan’s male colleagues make Nasa’s final selection: “No men from our group, huh?” “No […] I am afraid they were not up to snuff."
The novel’s feminism operates at a similar emotional temperature: friendly, with a tendency to flatter the 21st-century reader’s existing sensibilities, rather than to prompt any startling self-interrogation. “Don’t thank me for doing the bare minimum,” a male astronaut tells Joan. “It does a disservice to us both.” I don’t disagree. Does anyone reading this?
One could reasonably rejoin that Jenkins Reid had never been trying to prompt any ideological awakening. The greater issue is how present-day online the phrase is. “The bare minimum” has been kicking around the English language for ages, of course, but its application to men being called feminist pioneers for acts of ordinary decency is distractingly contemporary. “Thank you for your excellent notes on how I can be scared in a less vulnerable way,” Joan says. “Did she fumble?” she wonders. She’s several decades too early for “vulnerable” to readily signify performatively confessional femininity, and back in the innocent 1980s the verb “to fumble” still needed an object. The scattering of these moments is too uneven for it to read as an intentional gesture to modern readers.
When the language does embody the context, it’s thrilling. Here’s a liaison with ground control: “We are go.” “Guidance?” “Go.” “FIDO?”, and on for another 20 lines. I had only the vaguest clue what was happening and I loved it; the texture and energy mattered more than the exact meaning.
I imagine it will divide gay readers that the HIV epidemic is mentioned only once. “At that very moment, people all over the country were convinced that Aids was a punishment for moral failing,” muses the narrator in autumn 1983. Two paragraphs later, Joan has returned to wishing she could get married. There is little sense of a broader queer community for the astronauts. Their romance takes place in an intergalactic vacuum – or a near-vacuum, to deploy the scientific precision that Joan would want – while gay people at home die en masse.
Some will hate this. Others will respond that we already have enough books on the trauma of those years. Even readers who find the intimacy myopic will, I think, be moved by it at the same time: “Joan had had no idea how quickly you could learn another’s body. How swiftly their legs become your legs, their arms your arms.”
May the lesbian space genre continue to boom. This book is an imperfect addition, but one that floats.
Naoise Dolan’s latest novel is The Happy Couple
