The luminous novel Orbital tracks six astronauts in the International Space Station for one day as they goggle at the majestic beauty of earth, feel emotional distance from those they've left behind, forge bonds with each other, and reflect on their lives while racing past sixteen sunrises and sunsets.
He seems to know that something is ending, that all good things must go this way, towards fracture and fallout.
Samantha Harvey's astronaut-focused novel Orbital traces a single day in the lives of six astronauts orbiting the earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour, clinging to Coordinated Universal Time as they pass through sixteen sunsets and sunrises in twenty-four hours, watching familiar geographic shapes come in and out of sight and tracking metropolitan areas and the darkness indicating rural life.
Meanwhile each astronaut thinks of family members on earth, prepares dehydrated meals, exercises, engages with each other, and attends to the minutiae of an extended stay in small quarters in space.
Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive? Trying to go where the universe doesn't want you when there's a perfectly good earth just there that does.
Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It's brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn't one single thing that is nice.
In Orbital, Harvey takes the ultimate locked-room setting of six people in a small space, orbiting 250 miles above earth. The astronauts' (literal) perspective on earth allows them to take in its beauty without considering borders or conflicts, to glimpse its majesty without any tainting by its messy human-caused complications, and to witness its raw power, as when they are the best observers of the building of a deadly, enormous typhoon in the Pacific. They are, adorably, unable to stop taking photo upon photo of earth with their telephoto lenses, as the gorgeous scenes of their ever-changing view never grow old.
Their mission necessitates physical and emotional distance from their typical everyday, earthly concerns, forcing intimacy with their fellow astronauts--their only company, and in close quarters, for many months--and inspiring reflections on life, death, loss, the past, the future, family and loved ones, and purpose.
They have talked before about a feeling they often have, a feeling of merging. That they are not quite distinct from one another, nor from the spaceship.
Meanwhile, their location and purpose require potentially excruciatingly rote daily routines of mechanical surveying, precise clean-up, and blood and urine sampling.
Some of those on the ground try to insist upon imposing barriers upon the space travelers. For example, the Russian cosmonauts are told to use their own designated bathroom, while the other astronauts are only "allowed" to use the second bathroom--a rule the six subversively ignore.
Maybe we're the new dinosaurs and we need to watch out. But then maybe against all the odds we'll migrate to Mars where we'll start a colony of gentle preservers, people who'll want to keep the red planet red, we'll devise a planetary flag because that's a thing we lacked on earth and we've come to wonder if that's why it all fell apart, and we'll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old convalescing earth and we'll say, Do you remember? Have you heard the tales?
I loved the dynamic only relevant to the world's tiny population of astronauts, in which the space-station habitants wistfully track the takeoff, journey, and pending landing of a rocket of moon-bound colleagues. The six space-station astronauts are circling the earth without traveling anywhere, they reflect, while the astronauts headed to the moon are stepping onto another world.
The space station and the shuttle headed to the moon both dodge the numerous items of space trash orbiting the earth--which seems to prove that humans just can't have nice things.
And all the while, the astronauts are facing what feels like the inevitability of the winding down of human space exploration in light of the growing promise of robots' clean, streamlined space travel and ability to obtain information without emotional or physical needs.
Maybe it's hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it's a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.
The story within the space station is emotionally full but quiet plot-wise in contrast to the workings of the typhoon, which the book begins to detail as it unfolds and wreaks destruction across a swath of earth. An occasional omniscient view of the earth, the universe, the past, and the future keeps all in perspective for the reader.
Harvey's language is often luminous and poignant. This is beautiful.
Orbital recently won the 2024 Booker Prize.
I'd love to hear your Bossy thoughts about this book!
Samantha Harvey is also the author of The Shapeless Unease: A Year Without Sleeping, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, The Wilderness, and All Is Song.
You can find more Bossy reviews of books set in space here.
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