‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey

Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage Digital; 138 pages; 2023.

Orbital, by British writer Samantha Harvey, is a beautiful, thought-provoking love letter to our planet. It will probably be my book of the year for 2023.

Sometimes you need to leave a country, or a situation, to write about it, because the distance offers a broader perspective or new insights that you can’t see when you are too close. It’s that idea that Harvey has exploited here. She celebrates the beauty and fragility of our planet from the perspective of outer space.

Her novella charts the experiences of a group of astronauts orbiting the globe in the first 24 hours of a nine-month stint onboard the International Space Station.

It’s not science fiction; rather, it uses the device of literary fiction to delve into the well-documented “overview effect” — the profound change in perception, or consciousness, that astronauts undergo when observing Earth from space.

They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth. They all feel it from time to time. They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. (p8)

Orbiting our planet

The book is divided into multiple chapters, one for each orbit of the Earth on a single day in October, and each of those orbits (both ascending and descending) is told from the point of view of a different astronaut.

There are two women and four men on board. Four of them are astronauts from the US, Japan, Britain and Italy, and two are Russian cosmonauts.

Anton–quiet, and dry in his humour, sentimental, crying openly at films, at scenes outside the window–Anton the spaceship’s heart. Pietro its mind, Roman (the current commander, dextrous and capable, able to fix anything, control the robotic arm with millimetre precision, wire the most complex circuit board) its hands, Shaun its soul (Shaun there to convince them all that they have souls), Chie (methodical, fair, wise, not-quite definable or pin-downable) its conscience, Nell (with her eight-litre diving lungs) its breath. (p18)

From their vantage point — and travelling at an astonishing seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour — they see the sun rise and set with mechanical-like precision, observe the passing of continents and island states outside their windows, see the shifting weather patterns and cloud formations, taking as many photographs as they can along the way.

Their individual and collective sense of awe is palpable. The Earth looks  “so spectacular, so dignified and regal” and yet there’s a dissonance at play:

They think: maybe it’s hard being human and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s hard to shift from thinking your planet is safe at the centre of it all to knowing in fact it’s a planet of normalish size and normalish mass rotating about an average star in a solar system of average everything in a galaxy of innumerably many, and that the whole thing is going to explode or collapse.

Time for self-reflection

But the astronauts aren’t just fixated on what they can see outside; there’s a lot of introspection too. Shaun puts it like this:

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. (p49)

And there’s a preoccupation with their past individual histories  — after all, there’s a lot of time to think — and current situations down on Earth.

For instance, just a short time into the flight Chie discovers that her mother has died, which revives memories of her childhood in Japan and forces her to contemplate that she’s now an orphan. But here, cocooned from the stark reality of her loss, she finds solace in looking at Earth from up above and wishes she could stay orbiting it forever:

Don’t go back. Stay here ongoing. The creamy light of the ocean so exquisite; the gentle clouds rippling in tides. With a zoom lens the first fall of snow on top of Mount Fuji, the silver bracelet of the Nagara River where she swam as a child. Just here, the perfect solar arrays drinking sun. (p14)

They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they begin to see when they look down. The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want. (p75)