Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space
There’s a Filipino connection running through Samantha Harvey’s thin novel Orbital, which won the 2024 Booker Prize and takes place on the orbiting International Space Station. From up there, watching the weather patterns and swift cycling of night and day, the six characters in Harvey’s novel—four men and two women, astronauts and cosmonauts from Japan, the US, Britain, Italy and Russia—go through their own orbits of wonder, reflection, isolation and separation from their planet.
All of them register concern about an impending typhoon set to sweep through the Philippines, and one, Pietro, recalls his own personal connection with a fisherman from Samar, silently praying for them all to get out of harm’s way: “To those on the tiny eastern islands, just get out. To one particular fisherman and his family, Pietro thinks, get out now, get out yesterday. But get out where? And how?”
It’s one of the points where these distant ponderers, caught up in daily activities to keep the ISS functioning, even as their own bodies become more brittle in space, actually seem to connect things back to the big blue marble they’re orbiting.
“An astronaut and a fisherman,” Pietro thinks. “What a collision of worlds. He came to dinner with his wife and charmed your children and cast a spell of wonder on your cardboard house as if he’d dropped in that afternoon from space itself.”
Orbital tries to do a lot of deep pondering over its 144 pages. Harvey admits she felt like an impostor, writing about space when she’s never been or spoken with astronauts. She relied on her characters to reveal the precarious nature of space travel and travelers. How routine runs their lives, but wonder emerges every time they awake and remember again where they are, what they’re doing.
For a split second Shaun thinks, 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.
Why would you do this? Trying to live where you can never thrive? Trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does. He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a “hero’’ or an idiot. Undoubtedly something just short of either.
Up in space, they think about alien life. They think about God. They think about death (one astronaut has recently lost her mother, a loss that seems more palpable a year away in space). They think about their own body cells, which are being grown in vitro, an experiment in extending human endurance in space. They’re a bit jealous that their merry-go-round ride a-circling the Earth is being overshadowed by an upcoming human moon landing. And here they are, just doing their science projects and running the ship in an endless loop around the planet.
Tracking that Philippines-bound typhoon is a dramatic through-line in Orbital. Harvey mixes in details from down below when it hits—one imagines (ungenerously) that it’s images from YouTube videos the writer has viewed online, maybe showing “a car door winging along a street, followed by a sheet of corrugated iron.” (Astronauts, in truth, are no further removed from real-life catastrophes than we are, watching things from afar on YouTube.)
Other through-lines include Chie’s various lists (“Reassuring Things,” “Irritating Things”) that she compiles to pass the time in space; and the lingering specter of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, how it impacted a generation of future astronauts. To go into space is no small thing; it requires a deeper understanding of your own mortality, of what you’re willing to give up in order to serve the mission, which is really about enhancing human knowledge.
What does it all mean? Harvey’s prose is poetic and enveloping, but it’s hard to feel she’s creating characters, so much as loose sketches. Maybe a longer stab at a novel would have dug deeper. A novella-like piece such as this can’t possibly encompass all; clearly, it’s meant as a personal reflection on our place in the infinite. Scientifically, it doesn’t really need to address broad, practical questions that are just upon the horizon now: questions about commercial space travel, a Mars mission before 2050, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and the other huge Trump donors, looking to be space cowboys.
Orbital has a less-immense mission: to remind us of our place in the universe, and our relation to an oasis of life in the middle of vast nothingness. Looking down on their home from afar, in their “clean-shaven, androgynous bobbing,” they understand why it’s called “Mother Earth.”
“The earth, from here, is like heaven,” reads one passage (and at some point, we don’t know whether these passages are reflections by the astronauts, or from some weird, sentient third-person narrator in space, within the ghost circuitry of the ISS): “It flows with color. A burst of hopeful color. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”
