Book review: Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but it used to be that the division between mainstream fiction and science fiction was a pretty hard boundary, and not many writers from the mainstream side ventured into SF. Quite a few SF writers managed to publish outside the genre, sometimes under different names, but there weren’t many who went the other way. Maybe it’s because the current Western world is a bit like a science fiction scenario, especially when you compare it to the classics of fiction. Computers and mobile phones and 3D printers and space stations are now part of everyday life. And beyond that, so much science fiction has inundated popular culture — from Star Wars and Star Trek to aspects of the Marvel Universe — that everyone grows up with SF. This is a far cry from the time of my childhood and before, when SF was a niche genre of interest almost exclusively to boys, and white boys at that.
When it comes to music, I’m not a fan of categorizing by genre, and I feel the same about fiction. I love a well-told story with spaceships and aliens, but I enjoy a lot of other kinds of fiction as well. Still, genre labels can be useful as a way of communicating about art.
I haven’t read anything else by Samantha Harvey, but Orbital caught my eye at my local library one day. As far as I know, she’s never written science fiction before, and one could easily argue that Orbital isn’t SF either. Be that as it may, I found it to be an enjoyable read. The “story” involves six people on the International Space Station in roughly the present day. The word is in quotes because there’s no real plot to the writing: the book covers one day in their lives, incorporating sixteen orbits around the Earth. The timeline is meticulously planned out, so that during each of the orbits, you know what part of the planet they’re passing over.
The astronauts are four men and two women, representing Russia, England, Italy, Japan, and the United States, and the prose wanders freely between their thoughts, portraying their experiences in a very evocative way. It’s all about their feelings, both physical and emotional, concerning such topics as functioning in microgravity, being encased inside a technological construct that floats in a hostile void, being separated by miles and experience from loved ones, relying on a large group of other humans for their very lives, and looking down at the Earth below them. There are also memories of their lives before the current mission. While the technical aspects of living in space are not the focus, Harvey did meticulously research the ISS and experiences of those who have been there, so there are many little concrete details that make it all feel real.
As I read the book, I often felt that it was very dream-like, a kind of shared narrative from the collective dreamworld of the six characters. Harvey’s prose is often quite poetic, with run-on sentences that convey the churning thoughts of people in extraordinary circumstances. One recurring theme is how parts of the world are lit up while they traverse the night side of the planet, with cities and even roads being visible, whereas the daytime land seems devoid of human influence. Cities are hard to discern, let alone such constructs as national borders. But the shrinking of polar ice and the prevalence of large storm systems bring to mind how fragile human life is and how much the world has been impacted by it.
Orbital is a kind of prose-poem love letter to the planet Earth, and a quick, enjoyable read that I recommend highly.