Samantha Harvey

Life on our planet as you've never seen it before 'A slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas' GUARDIAN 'Stunning... An uplifting book' SUNDAY TIMES A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

Orbital

Nienke Timmermans

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.  

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

Jiya

The earth is the face of an exhausted 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. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sites that are difficult to tell.

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. 

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