Orbital is a book in which almost nothing happens, and I’m fine with it. Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for a reason.
It takes place in the minds of six astronauts orbiting Earth, some time in the future. They watch the Earth beneath them while they reflect on life and nature and beauty and humanity.
It’s beautifully written, meditative and lyrical. Here’s how it starts:
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
There’s a ‘supertyphoon’ threatening Southeast Asia, though it doesn’t create much drama. There’s no central conflict other than as the astronauts consider their decisions and future. The book exists in a kind of dream state, where we ride along with the various characters as they do various chores and think about their loved ones.
Orbital is also deeply researched. Her descriptions of the technical aspects of life in space – the eternal feeling of falling, the difficulty of getting adjusted to it, the mechanics of maintaining physical health in zero gravity – balance the dreamy qualities of the more esoteric topics.
I loved this book as an antidote to the chaos of life, but I could see reading it at another time and being a bit let down if my expectations were off, or if I came at it too quickly.
We’re windblown leaves.
We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf. And isn’t it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are. Aren’t we so insecure a species that we’re forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what makes us different. We great ingenious curious beings who pioneer into space and change the future, when really the only thing humans can do that other animals cannot is start fire from nothing. That seems to be the only thing – and, granted, it’s changed everything, but all the same. We’re a few flint-strikes ahead of everything else, that’s it.
Take this one slow and know what you’re getting into, and it’s a gorgeous and rewarding thing.
