Name: Aina's review of Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Item: Orbital
Rating: 5
Author: Aina

Samantha Harvey

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours. A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is a gift--a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.

Orbital

Aina

What a shame, says the voice still warmly, that you exist in all time zones and none at all, that you shift across longitudes in this great metal albatross, that more is asked of your brain than it knows how to do. Too bad for you that it all goes so quickly. That a continent lapses and gives way to another, that the earth, so beloved, never stays in your grasp. That the ride of your life will pass in an eyeblink, just as life does to the aging brain whose slowing makes everything appear to move faster.

Those lost in space are lost too in time.

Do we want buildings on the moon? she said. I love the moon as it is, she said. Yes, yes, he'd answered, me too, but all those things are beautiful, because their beauty doesn't come from their goodness, you didn't ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they're good, they're beautiful because they're alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They're beautiful because there's a light in their eyes. Sometimes destructive, sometimes hurtful, sometimes selfish, but beautiful because alive. And progress is like that, by its nature alive.

You could know the earth inside out, in its little hollow of space. You could never really comprehend the stars, but the earth you could know in the way you know another person, in the way he came quite studiedly and determinedly to know his wife. With a yearning that's hungry and selfish.

The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing.

Without that earth we are all finished. We couldn't survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea. 

The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sites that are difficult to tell.

He’s never sure if man's lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude.

Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated dis-traction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there? To become superb in our technology, knowledge and intellect, to itch with a desire for fulfilment that we can't quite scratch; to look to the void (which still isn't answering) and build spaceships anyway, and make countless circlings of our lonely planet, and little excursions to our lonely moon and think thoughts like these in weightless bafflement and routine awe. To turn back to the earth, which gleams like a spotlit mirror in a pitch-dark room, and speak into the fuzz of our radios to the only life that appears ta be there.

Hello? Konnichiwa, cido, zdraste, bonjour, do you read me, hello?

Sarah Christine Gill

In the new morning of today's fourth earth orbit the Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in hundred-mile ribbons. Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land. This is Africa chiming with light. You can almost hear it, this light, from inside the craft.  

The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits.

Maybe human civilisation is like a single life — we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad — if we're not special then we might not be alone. If there are who-knows-how-many solar systems just like ours, with who-knows-how-many planets, one of those planets is surely inhabited, and companionship is our consolation for being trivial. And so, in loneliness and curiosity and hope, humanity looks outwards and thinks they might be on Mars perhaps, the others, and sends out probes. But Mars appears to be a frozen desert of cracks and craters, so mavbe in that case they're in the neighbouring solar system, or the neighbouring galaxy, or the one after that.

From the space station's distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it's gone. It hides in plain sight.

Nienke Timmermans

Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he's about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from te void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere.

Anton finds himself crying, and his tears form four droplets which float away from his eyes, and which he and Chie catch in the palms of their hands. They're not to let liquids loose in here and they're all fastidious about that. 

A book I liked reading and sometimes really liked considering, even if at moments I felt the author wanted to transmit more emotion or idea than I got or tried to go for a poetic prose that didn't work.

Orbital feels like a fictionalized collage of diary entries from someone that has been living in a small space station for too long but hasn't lost his mind's propensity to wonder (and wander). I understand why it works as contemporary literature for many people and why it won the Booker, even if it didn't work that well for me. I remember having enjoyed her "The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping" more than Orbital. I might read again from her, more likely if she goes for a plot-heavy book, to see how her prose flow would adapt and work towards that.

André Nóbrega

A book I liked reading and sometimes really liked considering, even if at moments I felt the author wanted to transmit more emotion or idea than I got or tried to go for a poetic prose that didn't work.

Orbital feels like a fictionalized collage of diary entries from someone that has been living in a small space station for too long but hasn't lost his mind's propensity to wonder (and wander). I understand why it works as contemporary literature for many people and why it won the Booker, even if it didn't work that well for me. I remember having enjoyed her "The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping" more than Orbital. I might read again from her, more likely if she goes for a plot-heavy book, to see how her prose flow would adapt and work towards that.

some novels settle in you like it’s lowering you into a warm body of deep, deep water; others, like 

settle like it was lowering the warm water into me. whatever that even means. it’s a vibe thing.

i know i’ll think about this periodically over the years, and will serve as a litmus test for how much capacity i still have left in me to love a world without feeling connected to it. it’s both an uncomfortable and a comforting thought. maybe not unlike living just outside of space, looking down at the planet you call home from the perimetres. nom nom nom.

What the shrug means is that they don't come into space to be encouraged. They come out of a drive for more, more of everything, more knowledge and humility. Speed and stillness. Distance and closeness. More less, more more. And what they find is that they are small, no, nothing.

some novels settle in you like it’s lowering you into a warm body of deep, deep water; others, like orbital, settle like it was lowering the warm water into me. whatever that even means. it’s a vibe thing.

i know i’ll think about this periodically over the years, and will serve as a litmus test for how much capacity i still have left in me to love a world without feeling connected to it. it’s both an uncomfortable and a comforting thought. maybe not unlike living just outside of space, looking down at the planet you call home from the perimetres. nom nom nom.

A poetic account of life from the perspective of astronauts. The audiobook narration made it a great book to listen!

Arpit

Harvey Samantha

Such a simple, massive story told in captivating prose. At once a meditation, a meticulous log of minutiae, and a grand epic. There is real emotionality not only in the existential musings but also the clever decision to set the 24-hour orbit amidst an encroaching typhoon on the Earth’s surface and a personal loss. 

Michael Klepacki

Such a simple, massive story told in captivating prose. At once a meditation, a meticulous log of minutiae, and a grand epic. There is real emotionality not only in the existential musings but also the clever decision to set the 24-hour orbit amidst an encroaching typhoon on the Earth’s surface and a personal loss. 

A wrenching, beautiful work. 

Jordan Chan 

I thought I would like this. But I kept looking down. My belly is a planet.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

I thought I would like this. But I kept looking down. My belly is a planet.

do they read books before handing out nominations?

i absolutely hated this, and its lack of space talk. 

it reflects on life and what matters, but it says absolutely nothing new, and possibly even nothing at all. it raises questions such as "what if politics matter" and "what if we moved to mars" and honestly i need a break

Stas

do they read books before handing out nominations?

i absolutely hated this, and its lack of space talk. 

it reflects on life and what matters, but it says absolutely nothing new, and possibly even nothing at all. it raises questions such as "what if politics matter" and "what if we moved to mars" and honestly i need a break

Yes, it was good, but not that good. I think it found the limit of how flowery  language can be pretty fast, and then didn’t do much with it. I can only read how mountains look like colors so many times before my eyes glaze over. I see why it won the Booker, I would recommend it, but if you don’t like it don’t force yourself to finish it.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

Maybe we’re the new dinosaurs and need to watch out. But then maybe against all the odds we’ll migrate to Mars where we’ll start a colony of gentle preservers, people who’ll want to keep the red planet red, we’ll devise a planetary flag because that’s a thing we lacked on earth and we’ve come to wonder if that’s why it all fell apart, and we’ll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old convalescing earth and we’ll say, Do you remember? Have you heard the tales?

Bilge Ince

It is a bit of a shame that I was not very wow-ed by this novel (novella?) Harvey's writing is beautiful and there are some truly profound and touching passages within it. But this reads more like scattered thoughts than a complete work - and this sometimes works but it did not quite for me here. I just wish there was a little more meat, a little more realisation to the ideas expressed within the writing.

Oopsie finished this weeks ago and forgot to log. I would describe this as BARELY a novel (which is not a bad thing). I was really drawn to a couple elements of what would have otherwise been called a plot, but mostly my favorite parts were the physical descriptions of the planet/weather/continents. I think it’s very easy to write about the Earth with cliché language and themes, but I didn’t find that that was the case at all & I appreciated the different lens 

Terra Ganey

So fantastic, made me dread my mortality, envision a unified earth, confront the mark man has made on our planet, and dream of what man might be doing in ten years, a hundred, a million. 

Emily McMeans

Pretty quick read. Love the passage starting on 106. the whole book is such beautiful prose. An ode to earth, an existential deep dive into everything - our existence, space, humanity, all of it. Love!!

Harlee K

 It's 2025. A new circle around the sun. Feel the gravity in your limbs. Feel the contact with your seat, the floor, your bed. Your arms pulling against your shoulders. Feel how your ear senses which way is up and which way is left. You have a position: your weight, your presence in the world. Now look around, observe your room. So filled with detail but hardly perceived. What would it be like to be untethered? To see Earth's majesty from a cosmic level?

That is Orbital, a short novel which describes a day in the life of six astronauts aboard a space station orbiting Earth. A day, of course, is also relative. They make 16 orbits in a day and as such see the sun rise and set 16 times; 24 hours is a more accurate description. They live in microgravity, with no sense of down, a discordant circadian rhythm, and a body slowly atrophying. They sleep, they eat, they run experiments, and then they come back. It's not science fiction, at the time of writing there are 10 people doing exactly this.

Out their windows is, at rapid speed, the drift of our blue planet. Except every orbit provides a different colour, golden red deserts, green algae, purple nights, neon auroras of lime and orange, cyan flashes of lightning in black clouds. Every country passed is given meticulous textural detail: silken seas, velvet rainforests, the jagged jutting of mountain ranges. At sunset the dots of cities and the network of lit roads, in morning everything washed by the sun, leaving no human trace. I don't envy Harvey’s task of having to describe something hardly anyone has seen in a way that can be felt, and perhaps I admire her trying rather than really feeling it. It is a gargantuan feat.

Harvey mixes the realism of life in space with a cosmic romanticism, playing with interchanging ideas of life being beautiful and significant versus life being a flash in the pan of the universe’s history. Each astronaut’s history is delved into: their early lives, their fears, their dreams, their motivations in the pursuit of science, and their relationships with each other. Oftentimes they act as a hive mind with the pronoun ‘they’, at points all coming together telepathically to reveal some truth about their perception of the universe. They are fraternal, not romantic, they have a space-twin telepathy. Parenthood is a common fixture—because what describes the weightless, sustained, fixed, encased, non-quite-existent, beyond-time lives they live, other than the womb itself? 

This was a generally difficult read due to the experimental plotlessness, despite its very short length. The long descriptive passages were technically brilliant, but the lack of frame of reference makes it very difficult to visualise. The interpersonal stories of the astronauts were comparatively more affective; there is a genuinely emotional scene in here that brought tears to my eyes. 

In all, there are beautiful passages I'll definitely come back to. But, in the end, I am most inspired by Harvey’s bravery in even attempting to write about such a thing more than the thing itself.

shain

 It's 2025. A new circle around the sun. Feel the gravity in your limbs. Feel the contact with your seat, the floor, your bed. Your arms pulling against your shoulders. Feel how your ear senses which way is up and which way is left. You have a position: your weight, your presence in the world. Now look around, observe your room. So filled with detail but hardly perceived. What would it be like to be untethered? To see Earth's majesty from a cosmic level?

That is Orbital, a short novel which describes a day in the life of six astronauts aboard a space station orbiting Earth. A day, of course, is also relative. They make 16 orbits in a day and as such see the sun rise and set 16 times; 24 hours is a more accurate description. They live in microgravity, with no sense of down, a discordant circadian rhythm, and a body slowly atrophying. They sleep, they eat, they run experiments, and then they come back. It's not science fiction, at the time of writing there are 10 people doing exactly this.

Out their windows is, at rapid speed, the drift of our blue planet. Except every orbit provides a different colour, golden red deserts, green algae, purple nights, neon auroras of lime and orange, cyan flashes of lightning in black clouds. Every country passed is given meticulous textural detail: silken seas, velvet rainforests, the jagged jutting of mountain ranges. At sunset the dots of cities and the network of lit roads, in morning everything washed by the sun, leaving no human trace. I don't envy Harvey’s task of having to describe something hardly anyone has seen in a way that can be felt, and perhaps I admire her trying rather than really feeling it. It is a gargantuan feat.

Harvey mixes the realism of life in space with a cosmic romanticism, playing with interchanging ideas of life being beautiful and significant versus life being a flash in the pan of the universe’s history. Each astronaut’s history is delved into: their early lives, their fears, their dreams, their motivations in the pursuit of science, and their relationships with each other. Oftentimes they act as a hive mind with the pronoun ‘they’, at points all coming together telepathically to reveal some truth about their perception of the universe. They are fraternal, not romantic, they have a space-twin telepathy. Parenthood is a common fixture—because what describes the weightless, sustained, fixed, encased, non-quite-existent, beyond-time lives they live, other than the womb itself? 

This was a generally difficult read due to the experimental plotlessness, despite its very short length. The long descriptive passages were technically brilliant, but the lack of frame of reference makes it very difficult to visualise. The interpersonal stories of the astronauts were comparatively more affective; there is a genuinely emotional scene in here that brought tears to my eyes. 

In all, there are beautiful passages I'll definitely come back to. But, in the end, I am most inspired by Harvey’s bravery in even attempting to write about such a thing more than the thing itself.

A tiny book that becomes laborious and repetitive. Could've worked better as a 30 page short story. 

It had me early on with its zoomed out perspective.

c0up

A tiny book that becomes laborious and repetitive. Could've worked better as a 30 page short story. 

It had me early on with its zoomed out perspective.

The longer I read the book, the more hopeless I kept feeling. This book isn’t written for those that worship and respect the light that the planet is made to float in, but for power-hungry male egos that won’t stop at anyone, anything or any reason until they are done tearing the earth to shreds. 

Samantha Harvey paints with words. Some of the most beautiful prose I’ve had the pleasure of reading.

There are so many lines that just grab you by the throat. One passage in particular, where a character reminisces about the long, thin bone in their deceased mothers arm, and how prominent it was when she would wash or comb their hair, really caught me off guard. 

Harvey is masterful at capturing the small, understated parts of life and shines a torch right on them, for all to see.

Not for those who want a plot — and I would have loved a chance to explore the characters’ dynamics a bit more. 

Samantha Harvey paints with words. Some of the most beautiful prose I’ve had the pleasure of reading.

There are so many lines that just grab you by the throat. One passage in particular, where a character reminisces about the long, thin bone in their deceased mothers arm, and how prominent it was when she would wash or comb their hair, really caught me off guard. 

Harvey is masterful at capturing the small, understated parts of life and shines a torch right on them, for all to see.

Not for those who want a plot — and I would have loved a chance to explore the characters’ dynamics a bit more. 

definitely a very pretty book but not something i found grew very far beyond its initial premise and lost me the more i read. felt like an ornate, delicate thing that was a little out of reach for me. 

Tom Lawlor

cerebral, dizzying, and bursting with hope

daphne

Not going to rate this because I read 2%. I get what the book is trying to do, but this is not a style I usually enjoy and is not something I want to read right now. I would probably enjoy listening to the audiobook, though. This is going back into the TBR pile; I will definitely come back to this later. 

Spooky Clair

Not sure what I think - ate up the beginning but then lost momentum. But for sure this an incredibly beautiful, peaceful read. Maybe it missed some drama? 

Beautiful writing, super descriptive and imaginative. But not for those who enjoy a plot. 

Aims

any book that uses the word 'gibbous' correctly has my loyalty

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Orbital by Samantha Harvey

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