Orbital

 

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Fiction

2023

Finished on October 12, 2025

Rating: 2/5 (OK)

Publisher's Blurb:

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

Truthfully, I didn't care for Orbital. Since it was a book group selection, I felt obligated to finish the book (which isn't very long--slightly over 200 pages), but it took me a longer than it should have, and it felt a bit like a chore. There are a few lists (things the astronauts wished for, things that surprise them, things they anticipate) that I liked to read, but the long one that begins on page 172 reminded me of Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire" and seemed contrived. I recently read Project Hail Mary, which I think is much more entertaining. Orbital isn't much on plot and not a true character study, either. I'm in the minority, at least with my book group, most of whom loved the book and Harvey's lyrical writing. 

Life in Orbit:

Sometimes they wish for a cold stiff wind, blustery rain, autumn leaves, reddened fingers, muddy legs, a curious dog, a startled rabbit, a leaping sudden deer, a puddle in a pothole, soaked feet, a slight hill, a fellow runner, a shaft of sun. Sometimes they just succumb to the uneventful windless humming of their sealed spacecraft. While they run, while they cycle, while they push and press, the continents and oceans fall away beneath--the lavender Arctic, the eastern tip of Russia vanishing behind, storms strengthening over the Pacific, the desert- and mountain-creased morning deserts of Chad, southern Russia and Mongolia and the Pacific once more.

Time:

They feel space trying to rid them of the notion of days. It says: what's a day? They insist it's twenty-four hours and ground crews keep telling them so, but it takes their twenty-four hours and throws sixteen days and nights at them in return. They cling to their twenty-four-hour clock because it's all the feeble little time-bound body knows -- sleep and bowels and all that is leashed to it. But the mind goes free within the first week. The mind is in a dayless freak zone, surfing earth's hurtling horizon. Day is here, and then they see night come upon them like a shadow of a cloud racing over a wheat field. Forty-five minutes later here comes day again, stamping across the Pacific. Nothing is what they thought it was.

I might have enjoyed this novel had I read it before Project Hail Mary. I'm curious to hear what others think.