Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Publisher – Jonathan Cape
Published – Out Now
Price – £14.99 hardback £7.99 Kindle eBook
Life on our planet as you’ve never seen it before: in this spellbinding and uplifting novel six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it.
The Astronaut even now still has an air of mystique to them. The human beings who have touched that final frontier. Have and continue to risk death and when they return they carry often a sense of seeing something more than we stuck on Earth ever can. Is this the mystique we had for ancient sailors who explored the edges of oceans; who found trade routes across the deserts and therefore will eventually the astronaut too fade into a job as regular as a plane pilot is today? The transience of moments is something I found explored to great effect in Samantha Harvey’s absorbing novella Orbital. We the reader, get to spend a simple day in the life of the International Space Station and yet it also has an absolutely fascinating glimpse of being human on such an interesting scale that it has seeped into my thoughts quite a few times after reading it.
The six person crew of the International Space Station are about to start another day. One of their number is dealing with an unexpected bereavement. A devastating typhoon is making its way towards inhabited islands which they need to monitor and just passing them is the first expedition to the Moon since the 1970s.
If you’re expecting a Gravity style adrenaline rush with extra zippy special effects you’ll be disappointed. This is less a story with racing plots and huge character arcs and instead more an unusual meditation on being human. Each chapter represents one of the 16 orbits that the International Space Station makes across the Earth in a single day and each has a mini theme focusing either on one of the astronauts or the things they’re witnessing from far above. There is a line in the book about how being an astronaut is leaning to somersault while you’re constantly falling in orbit and this is very much the theme for me that the book explores and indeed something the book could apply to being human. Human life is by definition transient and very arbitrary in how things can happen unexpectedly in the blink of an eye. We think a day is 24 hours but a few miles above us you can see sunsets and sunrises every few hours and our bodies starts behaving in different ways. Harvey uses the varied crew to explore how life changes. One astronaut knows their marriage is at an end. Another suddenly realises how the Challenger Disaster brought them so far and another that they really want to go no further and be back with their partner.
The mini cast are both refereshingly human and yet also in our world highly unique thanks to the juxtaposition of the situation they find themselves in. Harvey allows us to feel that perspective of someone who gets to be truly above it all, unplugged from humanity’s politics and pettiness (the astronauts wilfully ignore rules on which country’s toilet must be used). But they also feel the isolation and desire to connect which is why this little working group are something inbetween friends, family and work colleagues in a truly unusual way. They have to share because there is no one else there. They see the Earth as something hardly anyone else will ever truly see and this perhaps has changed them too.
The inevitability that the moment must pass gets explored in intriguing ways. We watch Chie grieve for her mother and ponder her last enigmatic photo passed to her before she left. She may puzzle over what it means but she can never now ask. While we get to witness the awe of the Earth moving below the ISS Harvey also makes us notice a Typhoon near the Philippines where a dear friend of an astronaut can only really watch. There is no magic button to move it out of the way. We’re powerless and can but hope for the best.
The ISS itself is a huge technical marvel but the story notes it has a shelf life. Already with the next lunar mission there are signs space travel is moving on. This huge space station is going soon to be mothballed and will one day crash burning into an ocean. Harvey explores humanity evolving and how the only thing that may ever outlast us is a little Voyager spacecraft sent decades ago (which also carries secrets of a love affair within it). The way the story makes the reader change perspective – past and future; on earth and up above and even way beyond is really impressive and Harvey asks us to do what an astronaut does look at the familiar from a different position and appreciate that new view and what it says about us.
So literary fiction or science fiction? It’s mere years into the future and is using the set to explore its themes but isn’t that the nature of SF? Either way this was a book you can breath in over a few hours and yet at the same time does make you look at the world differently. A fascinating journey awaits you on this one. Highly recommended!
