Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 138 pages; 2023. Orbital, by British writer Samantha Harvey, is a beautiful, thought-provoking love letter to our planet. It will probably be my book of the year for 2023. Sometimes you need to...
Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 138 pages; 2023.
Orbital, by British writer Samantha Harvey, is a beautiful, thought-provoking love letter to our planet. It will probably be my book of the year for 2023.
Sometimes you need to leave a country, or a situation, to write about it, because the distance offers a broader perspective or new insights that you can’t see when you are too close. It’s that idea that Harvey has exploited here. She celebrates the beauty and fragility of our planet from the perspective of outer space.
Her novella charts the experiences of a group of astronauts orbiting the globe in the first 24 hours of a nine-month stint onboard the International Space Station.
It’s not science fiction; rather, it uses the device of literary fiction to delve into the well-documented “overview effect” — the profound change in perception, or consciousness, that astronauts undergo when observing Earth from space.
Orbiting our planet
The book is divided into multiple chapters, one for each orbit of the Earth on a single day in October, and each of those orbits (both ascending and descending) is told from the point of view of a different astronaut.
There are two women and four men on board. Four of them are astronauts from the US, Japan, Britain and Italy, and two are Russian cosmonauts.
Anton–quiet, and dry in his humour, sentimental, crying openly at films, at scenes outside the window–Anton the spaceship’s heart. Pietro its mind, Roman (the current commander, dextrous and capable, able to fix anything, control the robotic arm with millimetre precision, wire the most complex circuit board) its hands, Shaun its soul (Shaun there to convince them all that they have souls), Chie (methodical, fair, wise, not-quite definable or pin-downable) its conscience, Nell (with her eight-litre diving lungs) its breath. (p18)
From their vantage point — and travelling at an astonishing seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour — they see the sun rise and set with mechanical-like precision, observe the passing of continents and island states outside their windows, see the shifting weather patterns and cloud formations, taking as many photographs as they can along the way.
Their individual and collective sense of awe is palpable. The Earth looks “so spectacular, so dignified and regal” and yet there’s a dissonance at play:
They think: maybe it’s hard being human and maybe that’s the problem. 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.
Time for self-reflection
But the astronauts aren’t just fixated on what they can see outside; there’s a lot of introspection too. Shaun puts it like this:
What the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? A tinned man in a tin can. Four inches of titanium away from death. Not just death, obliterated non-existence. (p49)
And there’s a preoccupation with their past individual histories — after all, there’s a lot of time to think — and current situations down on Earth.
For instance, just a short time into the flight Chie discovers that her mother has died, which revives memories of her childhood in Japan and forces her to contemplate that she’s now an orphan. But here, cocooned from the stark reality of her loss, she finds solace in looking at Earth from up above and wishes she could stay orbiting it forever:
Don’t go back. Stay here ongoing. The creamy light of the ocean so exquisite; the gentle clouds rippling in tides. With a zoom lens the first fall of snow on top of Mount Fuji, the silver bracelet of the Nagara River where she swam as a child. Just here, the perfect solar arrays drinking sun. (p14)
While Harvey slowly fleshes out the backstories of her individual characters, it’s the way they interact as a collective being that is really the point of the story. Here, living in the space station, their survival is wholly dependent on how they cooperate, collaborate and work together. Above all, they must curb their own independence and put the crew’s needs ahead of their own desires.
It’s hard not to see this as an allegory for what needs to happen on the Earth below:
A novel of ideas
For such a slim volume, Orbital is fat with ideas. It eloquently examines geopolitics, human greed and environmentalism, using the beauty of the Earth spinning in space as a way to take a high-level look at issues that deeply affect us all.
The writing is eloquent, and filled with lush, vivid descriptions. Only occasionally I thought they were beginning to wear thin (there are only so many ways you can say the same thing using different words, right?), but what held the narrative together and maintained my attention was the emotions it evoked in me. These ranged from awe to delight, anger to sadness — and everything in between.
But I came away from it feeling a real sense of hope. There’s a review at The Guardian which puts it better: “It’s an Anthropocene book resistant to doom”.
(Australian readers please note, this won’t be published here until early February. I purchased my copy via Amazon.co.uk after I read Harvey’s 2018 novel, The Western Wind, last month and then went looking to see if she had written anything new since then.)