‘Orbital’, An Ode To Earth, Wins The Booker

Samantha Harvey’s book Orbital — a short, poetic meditation about a day in the life of the International Space Station — has won the 2024 Booker Prize.

Though fiction and set in space (the first Booker winner that takes place beyond the Earth’s atmosphere), Orbital is not Sci-Fi in almost any sense of the term. There are stories — of the six crewmen and their families, of the super Typhoon that hits the Philippines, and of the station itself — but there is no particular plot, no suspense. Instead, it’s a beautiful poised set of experiences and observations that Harvey pieces together for a moment in time.

Constructed using the 16 orbits of the Earth that the space station makes in a single 24 hour span, Orbital presents short time frames in short chapters, each named for an orbit. Some orbits get a chapter for both their ascent and descent and sometimes that chapter includes the appropriate description of the view of Earth from space. It is a deliberate compliment to note that the descriptions convey the breathtaking vistas that the space crew see. Harvey has referred to the book as “space pastoral” and the genre, though speculative, is apt.

The book — not really a novel in any normal sense of the word — is also extremely brief. It is the second shortest ever Booker winner at 136 pages. Counter-intuitively, the very specific limitations of the book — the tight confines of the space station, the 16 ribs of the 24 hour day — help Harvey highlight the vast scope of wonder that is space and the triviality of human history in the infinite spin of time.

Indeed, the constraints mean that the book excludes almost all of human society: neither political revolution nor gossip seem possible or real from 250 miles above the earth. Only the vast and the intimate survive the translation into space, nothing of the water cooler. As the narrator projects onto Pietro, the Italian astronaut; “Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once.”

Orbital’s early consideration of the Velázquez painting Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting) — the high school lesson with the explanation was the moment that Shaun (the American astronaut) met his wife — provides a guide for the complicated subject of the book itself. The painting could be about the Ladies (“and dwarves and chaperones”) in Waiting, or about the princesses upon whom they attend, or about the King and Queen captured in the mirror, or the “furtive” messenger, or the artist pictured picturing them, or the viewer whose eye is necessary to piece all these images together, or it could be “a portrait of a dog.”

For a space station orbiting a “spaceship of a planet” that has been “relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines” whose crewmembers (a “floating family”) somersault around in between their tasks, the question of “centre” or “subject” is fraught. There is not even gravity, the astronauts are not flying, “but falling. Falling at over seventeen thousand miles per hour.” Indeed, the book is an explicit meditation on the fact that there is no center or stasis, we are all whirling (indeed “birling”!) — “There is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things”

The rapid running of “the Terminator, that sharp boundary line between day and night that falls across the full girth of the planet” underlines the contingency of planetary time. The astronauts and cosmonauts will “in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more…” The narrator is explicitly talking about the physical effects of being in space and the deterioration of their muscles. But she is also talking about their experiences, what it’s like to look back on mother earth from above for a year.

The experiments on the heart cells that Roman and Anton (the two cosmonauts) carry out are likewise both technical and metaphorical explorations of how space affects the heart. Nell (the British astronaut) eats honeycomb chocolate from her husband of 5 years who is living in his parents’ house in Ireland that, because of her extensive training and stay in space, she can barely picture. A digression speculates about robots and how much more robust they would be than these needy humans. And yet, an “animal… does not just bear witness, but loves what it witnesses.”

Unlike many mechanists who write compellingly about space (like Andy Weir or Daniel Suarez) Harvey writes poetically. When she uses a phrase like “height-sick homesick drug of space” there’s more than an echo of Hopkins’ Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves “time’s vást, ‘ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.” And she confirms that poetic intention, writing that the ”earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.”

Her narrator is, like the crew, almost omniscient and inextricably trapped, “They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.” With such a deep perspective, though, comes the inevitable contemplation of mortality, “[e]verything, everything is turning and passing.” After all, the crew is always just “[f]our inches of titanium away from death.” However, the super typhoon that sweeps across the southern Pacific is a fatally destructive result of global warming but seems almost aesthetic and evanescent.

More real-seeming is the sudden death of the mother of Chie (the Japanese astronaut). A single lost famil  life often hits harder than mass destruction, but it can take distance to realize it. Chie compulsively makes lists (“Irritating things” “Anticipated things” “Maddening things”) as a holdover from when she was a child dealing with being disturbed or anxious. It seems like the lists in the book are her dealing with the loss of her mother. But Harvey does the same thing, making list after list of sights seen, actions taken, objects hoarded — dealing with the loss of Mother Earth.

Orbital is a eulogy for a constantly disappearing planet. Edmund de Waal, chairman of the Booker judges said: “It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.” Orbital may not be SF but it nevertheless is Cli-Fi because we are already living in a world of climate change and any meaningful attempt to contemplate our existence on this planet must grapple with the Anthropocene. As we near the close of the book, Harvey presents another list of loss; landscape consumed by desire.

“The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastline, the skies, a planet contoured and landscape by want.”