Space Time

Orbital

Samantha Harvey

Grove Press, 2024

Orbital by Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize, and it was widely hailed, despite not having anything resembling a plot. The word “meditation” or “meditative” appears in almost every review, and it’s hard to dispute that assessment. The novel feels as suspended as its six astronaut protagonists as they float about the international space station over the course of a day, but not suspenseful.

Everything I read about this book made me think it was for me. I don't need a plot to keep me interested in a novel, and I love a slim volume. I've also read reams of material on space exploration and astrophysics. Orbital is physically small, short and wide but not thick, at just over 200 pages. But it's thematically as large as possible. I bought a copy and read it.

And I thought it was fine.

It may merely be the time I read it; I was having a very snobbish week, one where I was being overly critical and looking for holes to poke in almost everything. It’s not admirable, but sometimes it’s a fact of my life. So I set myself a little literary challenge: find the things about it that I could imagine other people liking. And in writing these thousand-plus words, I won over my snobbish self, to a degree. There's not a lot I can do about my initial reaction of thinking this novel was merely fine, but in writing about it I realized how much there is think about in Orbital. This essay barely scratches the novel's surface. This is a hallmark, to me, of a good book.

Throughout the book, the characters play out a dream of international harmony that has been crumbling for some time and is being pulverized as I write this. The six astronauts come from five countries (two are Russian), and they work alongside each other without friction. They eat together, they watch movies together, they allow each other private time, they attend to their individual tasks. They share a very confined H-shaped station made of seventeen modules packed with the systems that keep them alive.

They also share a sense of the melting of Earthbound boundaries, political demarcations, borders. Astronauts have long talked about experiencing this sense, at once unifying and disorienting. And in 1987, space philosopher Frank White named the phenomenon the overview effect. A similar philosophy was expressed by Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot, based on an image of Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 on its way out of our solar system:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The six astronauts are part of humanity, part of the pale blue dot. And yet the distance of their orbit, 250 miles, allows them distance from the events on Earth. News seldom breaks into the narrative, and no one seems to be using their time or bandwidth to doomscroll. They’re asked to track a massive typhoon as it nears landfall, and though they think of the people who will be affected by it, they will not be affected by it themselves. There is, for many readers, imagine, a fantasy of not having to know and not being affected. The fantasy of being able to float above it all.

Life on the space station is not idyllic, and personal news does inevitably come through. One of the characters has a death in the family, and her inability to attend to either the dying or the funeral for the dead carries shades of the early COVID-19 pandemic. Her grief at a distance will feel familiar to the millions of readers who lost family members while hospitals and nursing homes were observing isolation protocols.

There are other COVID-era echoes, like the warping of time that began in spring of 2020 and seems to have persisted for half a decade. The astronauts experience this acutely, given that their orbits do not sync with day and night; they can’t. The structure of the book makes that clear, since the space station completes an orbit around the planet every 90 minutes. That’s 16 orbits in 24 hours, and the chapters chart the ascending and descending section of each orbit, along with the 16 sunrises and sunsets the astronauts observe. When things are going badly, a month may seem to last a season here on Earth, but a day on the space station lasts two weeks.

For all of the snaking tubes and wires, the metal hull, and the deadly cold expanse of space that surrounds the space station, the novel itself is brimming with life. Harvey’s descriptions of the Earth from a distance are an innovative kind of nature writing. Rather than getting close and examining flora and fauna in minute detail, she is able to take in swaths of continents. It reminded me of the most literary nonfiction nature writing, like the works of Rachel Carson and Robin Wall Kimmerer, or of Annie Dillard. It’s possible to open Orbital to almost any page and find a passage of nature writing:

Down over the arrowing peninsula of Dakar, crossing the equator, and in the closing minutes of the day the lights of Brazzaville and Kinshasa on either side of the Congo River tepid in the dusk. Blue becomes mauve becomes indigo becomes black, and night-time downs southern Africa in one. Gone is the paint-splattered, ink-leached, crumpled-satin, crumbled-pastel overflowing-fruit-bowl continent of chaotic perfection, the continent of salt pans and red sedimented floodplain and the nerve networks of splaying rivers and mountains that bubble up from the plains green and velvety like mould growth. Gone is a continent and here another sheer widow’s veil of star-struck night.

Harvey pulls out all the poetic stops in passages like this: metaphor, simile, alliteration, imagery, anaphora, rhythm. This kind of nature writing can be both satisfying and stimulating—it’s easy to be carried along by the poetry until the end of the paragraph releases you back to the world of, in this case, Roman and Anton, the Russian cosmonauts in their module. It’s only then that you might look up from the page and consider the language, the images, the intentions of the author. These lingering descriptions are not asides—they are the point. They are for savoring. They are the opposite of doomscrolling.

One final thing that I think readers probably appreciate: each astronaut has a clear mission to carry out, and they do. End of story. They may ponder the nature of time or the nature of politics or the nature of nature, but they are there to take blood samples and test mice. They aren’t sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, wondering what they’re doing and if they should be doing it or if they should be doing something else entirely. They are doing science. They trained their whole lives to be here. There is no walking off the job until a transport comes to take them back to Earth.

Okay, one last and truly final thing: Orbital is both deep and short. Its profundity is, like the astronauts, confined. There is plenty for a reader to consider, but if it were any longer, it would be easy to become overwhelmed. Sixteen orbits—a two-week day—is just right.

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