Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Pub 2023.

I received this book from a friend earlier this year. She enjoyed it, and thought I might, too.

The novel is quite unusual, in that there is no real story or plot, more a character study and paean to the Earth. The setting is the International Space Station (ISS), populated by six astronauts from various northern hemisphere and first-world countries. Through one full day, the ISS makes 16 orbits of the Earth, and throughout these we meet the six and learn their histories and philosophies. There is painstaking detail about life on ISS, from what they do all day to how they eat and sleep. Much of the novel is given to each astronaut’s views, both literal and philosophical, on Earth and on their roles on ISS. There is much elegy about the beauty, power, and fragility of Earth, as well as the miracle (religious or cosmic) of the existence of Earth and mankind. By the end of the novel, not much has happened, but we’ve learned a lot about the strange and isolated lives of the astronauts and are left to consider their fates and our own.

The writing is beautiful – lyric and precise. I found some of the detail tedious in places, but Harvey clearly did their homework about the quotidian existence for residents of ISS and their strange weightless habitat (still subject to gravity at their altitude, the contents of ISS “float” due to the forward speed of the craft counteracting the downward pull of the Earth).

I read this on the first day of vacation and should perhaps have taken a few more days to read it, as it gives one lots to think about. Being away from the city, staring at the lake and the sky and the woods, the elegy to the Earth is especially poignant. In fact, the ISS passed overhead on the first few evenings away (sadly, obscured by clouds).

Such an unusual novel, about something both ordinary and extraordinary but with little in the way of plot, its Booker Prize win is surprising, considering its competition in 2024. But perhaps it is the very strangeness that elevated it – a short book about all existential questions rolled into one, it certainly resonates and lingers. With less than 10 years till ISS returns to Earth, the novel is a time capsule of a kind, capturing the zeitgeist of our cosmic thinking and (perhaps) the nadir of our orbitals. Only time will tell if our current technology is the peak or plateau of space exploration.

Fate: passing along to another reader.

8 – female author
11 – referral/chosen
13 – somewhere I’ve never been
20 – one word
25 – new author to me
27 – a gift
34 – a prize winner