ORBITAL: the stars look very different today
Sci-fi fans should read this beautiful, eerie novel on astronaut life
Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Grove, 2023. $24.
When literary authors cross over into science fiction, they often do so as enlightened homesteaders, equipped with notions of the field’s backwardness and confidence that their own innovative ideas will reform the backwaters of tropey sci-fi for the better. (Remember when Ian McEwan — in A. D. 2019 — told sci-fi writers that they’d better start “actually looking at the human dilemmas” that would arise with high-level AI?)
Samantha Harvey falls into a different camp, in that she’s not attempting what we might consider “science fiction” — not exactly. I initially found Orbital (2022) because it was displayed the sci-fi section of my library; however, Harvey has described it as “space realism”: a rendering of life in space as humans currently experience it. Orbital takes place in the near future, on an international space station (the ISS in all but name), wherein six astronauts live and work, sheltered from the black void by its narrow walls. Their daily tasks are structured and mundane, and nothing happens in the novel (spacewalks, toilet repairs, floating dinners served in bags) that hasn’t happened in real life. No speculative elements, except a new manned mission to the moon, are introduced.
That being said, sci-fi fans would do themselves a disservice in skipping Orbital. Although it has no aliens or new technology, it’s one of the most inventive and immersive novels I’ve read in a long time. Harvey’s worldbuilding — in the sense of evoking an environment and enmeshing characters within its ways of thinking — is deftly executed, from small details (astronauts collect their floating teardrops, wary of rust) to larger ones (the way the Great Lakes look like beaten metal from above). The prose style used by Harvey is Carl Sagan meets Virginia Woolf: full of wonder, hungry for beauty, moving organically between perspectives. Harvey, perhaps sensing the limits of the term “realism,” has also called the novel a “space pastoral — a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space.”
Harvey takes us deep into each person’s subjectivity: their dreams, their thoughts, their straining muscles as they exercise. Through them, we inhabit little microcosms: Shaun, the American astronaut, contemplates a floating postcard of Las Meninas, hundreds of miles and years away; the British Nell, an atheist, has a mysterious, almost-religious dream in which she dives towards a spherical, zero-gravity flame. The introverted Chie learns that her mother in Japan has died; she breaks down in her own selected corners of the craft. Pietro, the Italian, worries about a friend on earth now facing a typhoon, and —missing his wife — has uneasy, erotic dreams of Nell. The crew talk amicably but distantly, determined not to “cross the rubicon into one another’s internal lives,” but their proximity, and the trancelike experience of space, brings them inexorably together.
Like their spacecraft, constantly bombarded with debris and dust, the astronauts must deal with an onslaught of divine sights: the dark of space attacks them like a “panther,” and each sunrise (they see 16 dawns per chronological day) is a “shrieking star, a huge Bethlehem light.” Astronauts sometimes speak of the utter uniqueness of space; Harvey does her best to convey in words the energy, religiosity, and mystery that can’t come through in pictures. From the human characters, the prose goes outward, into the the vast systems of sun/space/planet that encompass them. An aurora over Antarctica
folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere… Detonates in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts of towers two hundred miles high… Here the flowing, flooding light, there the snaking blades of neon…
Readers can expect similar treats on almost every page; it’s a great book to be digested slowly over several days with tea. Although reviews have commented on its supposed lack of plot, I found the novel’s actual movement to be substantial. A lurking dread embodied by certain details — the devouring typhoon below, a miniscule crack in the ship’s hull, a lump in someone’s neck — builds steadily in the last chapters. By the end, each little budge from the craft was enough to make my stomach drop. Harvey successfully conveys the tremendous weight placed on minutiae in these extreme environments: a sense that death is simply waiting on the borders of the craft, for an infinitesimal gap to finally let it in. The Earth itself, a vast comforting mother-presence at the start of the book, seems to sicken as the day goes on; behind its robes of clouds and forests it’s a hostage planet, “a gun to its vitals,” yielding up its resources to an insatiable population.
There are some dud moments in Orbital, as happens in every book. One section, as an illustration of the passage of deep time, lists modern events, a la “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (“unfriending, the Russo-Japanese War, Coco Chanel…”). Some of its philosophical observations are cliches, more obvious given the originality of the rest of the book (“They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse”). Luckily, these moments are few and mostly concentrated together. Otherwise, Orbital is a compelling read, and — despite not being science fiction itself — demonstrates emphatically what the genre is and could be at its best.