Orbital (International Edition) Paperback – June 27, 2024

ORBITALRATED GREAT. 5/5A multinational team of astronauts and cosmonauts circle the earth at 17,000 miles per hour on the last mission before the space station is decommissioned in favor of a more ambitious moonshot. And nothing much happens. Except for the Sense of Wonder!"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."What plot exists in concerned with dealing emotionally with a family funeral that an astronaut cannot attend, a mission to the moon that these astronauts kinda follow, a supertyphoon that bears down on the Philippines, the scientific experiments that each crew member mundanely performs, and staring down at the earth and contemplating.But this isn’t a book about plot."It is hard to believe the quality of blackness that is the entirety of space around a day-lit earth, where the earth absorbs all the light – yet hard to believe in anything but that blackness, which is alive, and breathing and beckoning."This is a beautifully written prose poem about the big and the small everywhere. Planet Earth is both immensely large and yet small and fragile in the context of space. Human beings are immensely important and yet cosmically meaningless. Some have called this an elegy for the Earth, and I’m not sure I agree with that. It is a contemplation of the sort men do at campires, into sunsets, above crashing waves, and into the eyes of newborn children or down at caskets."That’s all this great human endeavour of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration,"So much of this novella ( ~40,000 words) is dedicated to the beauty of Planet Earth, spilling out in long sentences that run for pages, separated only by commas, covering widely diverse thoughts, or impressions, or quips, or questions, and yet hold a cadence that is masterful, propulsive, and worthy of listening to in an audiobook performance. I will definitely do that for a reread. I devoured this book in less than 24 hours."At the beach hut they’d been human, a woman, a man, a wife and mother and daughter and a husband and father and son, and they’d crossed themselves, tapped their nails and bitten their lips in unconscious angst. But when they’d got to the launch pad they were Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney, imagineered, branded and ready. The rocket peaked in a cap of gleaming newness, absolute and spectacular whiteness and newness, and the sky was a glorious and conquerable blue."Is this scifi? I don’t know. Probably not by my definition. The only extrapolative element is a few science experiments on mice and a new mission to the moon. Still, nothing has so completely put me inside a space station as completely as this novel. It has more in common with the great travel narratives — such as those written by Paul Theroux, Peter Mayle, and Pico Iyer — that most science fiction.And yet, the “Sense of Wonder” in this book is amazing. Rockets, Planet Earth, Space Stations, Astronauts?If that isn’t great science fiction, then I’ve never read any of it."when I watched the Challenger launch as a child, that was it for me. It wasn’t the moon landings, it was Challenger. I realised space is real, space flight is real, a thing real people do, die doing. Real people, like me, could actually do it, and if I died doing it that would be OK, I could die that way."It a condemnation of the current genre that a book like this can win the 2024 Booker Award, but not even be in the Hugo Award discussion. Still, it finds its audience. A New York Times Bestseller and many thousand reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and the like.We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leafOrbital has my strongest recommendation possible. I love this!

I am sure this review will be like many others regarding this book. Let me begin with the positives (there are many). It puts the reader inside the space station with the six astronauts; we're made privy to their thoughts and for the most part, what they are feeling. It gives the reader a sense of the wider picture regarding mother earth; it's ills, its nourishment, and the soul shaking impact of seeing the broader picture. Harvey's prose is lyrical, beautiful, poetic; that in itself made me want to continue reading. However, and here is the opinion that I will likely share with others - there is little to no plot. I will recommend it, it only for the crafting of a truly gorgeous piece of writing.

The writing is strong. The sentences are meaty and vivid. In the beginning, I was in. The first half had me. It lost me a bit in the back half and I felt there was a lot more potential to this piece. But it's a love letter to existence as it is now. If you need to pull back from the stress of the world, Orbital is a good place to get the Star's Eye View.

I needed one more book to finish the 52 Book Club: Week 2024 Challenge, and the prompt was for "nominated for the Booker Prize." I decided I wanted to select a book nominated for the 2024 Booker (the nominations were announced yesterday, July 30), and I picked "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey, because it sounded different and interesting. I am so glad I chose this book -- it was unlike anything I've read -- while the basic premise involves the lives of a group of four astronauts and two cosmonauts assigned to the final mission of the Space Station, this book is so much more than that. The structure, the plot -- well, there is no traditional plot that most people would recognize as such -- the descriptive narrative that is beautiful and mesmerizing, the characters that you really come to relate to, the fact that world geography and climate change is a major part of the novel... I just finished reading it, and I already want to re-read it just to experience Ms. Harvey's beautiful prose.One of my favorite side stories of the book involves a postcard the astronaut Shaun brought as a personal item to the space station. When Shaun was in high school, a teacher showed her class a photo of Diego Velazquez's most famous painting, "Las Meninas." Shaun, who only wanted to learn how to be a fighter pilot, couldn't appreciate fine art, while his future wife understood the beauty and meaning of the painting and sent him a postcard 15 years prior to his trip to space, in which she tried to explain the painting to him -- he brought his postcard with him on his space voyage. I won't get into all the specifics, but Shaun shows the postcard to a a fellow astronaut (an Italian), who shows him a new way to interpret the painting -- a valuable lesson to apply not just to art, but to assumptions about life in space, life on earth and humanity in general.Another of my favorite aspects of the novel is the astronauts' use of lists, not just to pass the time but also to share personalities and opinions. There were lists of "anticipated things" (plums, slamming a door in anger, fried eggs, skiing, etc.), "surprising things" (imagination, Jackie Onassis's mode of death, a blue pen with a red lid, etc.), "irritating things" (tailgaters, tired children, lumpy pillows, stuck zips, etc.), and others. So relatable!There isn't a lot of political talk -- other than the two Russians having one toilet and the Americans, Asians and Europeans using another -- and they weren't supposed to share food or supplies -- all of which they ignored, but the underlying message is all countries and continents are connected (you can more visibly see this from low orbit), and we are all humans, no matter the ethnicity or nationality.This review really seems kind of disjointed, but the book fits that description. I loved it, not only because it was so out of the realm of most books I read (and I read a lot), but because it makes you appreciate our humanity and how we must work to save it.

Harvey delivers an imaginative and beautiful rendition of space travel and an invitation to believe we can still be one world on Earth, one humankind, if only we could see us from afar. A very good and worthwhile read.

Very poetic, beautiful views, the interconnected matrix of lives, and the fragility of of a breathing planet, suspended in Space, protected by a thin layer of atmosphere. Also, gives a closer look at the toll the mission has on the astronauts in Space, and the life inside the space station.This, however, is not a page turner novel. It was like reading a script of a documentary. Sometimes the views and thoughts become kinda repetitive. It is a wonderful short read though.