Samantha Harvey (Dear Thief) offers readers a slim but radiant novel of space, exploration, and meaning-making in Orbital, her fifth novel, which details the myriad depths held in just one day in the lives of six astronauts orbiting the Earth on an international space station.
Six men and women circle the planet at 17,500 miles per hour, a pace that takes a standard 24 hours and "throws sixteen days and nights at them in return." This mind-bending math is just a small slice of the disassociation thrust upon the six in space. They whirl about the Earth at an unfathomable pace that feels to them like stillness, tracking days with ticks on the wall, making lists of joys and anxieties and memories, gazing at photos, and sending e-mails back to family at home. They study microbes, viruses, fungi, and bacteria; observe 40 mice and their reactions to adjusted gravity in space; make notes on the human experience of space stations and space itself; observe the Earth and its weather systems from miles and miles away.
It is in that last function, especially, that Harvey probes questions of the human experience and our innate connections to the planet we call home. They watch Earth, drawn to her not just by gravity but by the pull of her meaning, what the planet gives to each of them as individuals, as humans, as a home and a place of comfort and nourishment and meaning. "The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell." From their H-shaped space station, they have no power, "only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence."
With Orbital, Harvey gives readers a powerful novel that, in less than 200 pages, manages to explore questions of philosophy and religion, faith, existence, meaning-making, art, grief, and gratitude, just to name a few. In showing one day in the lives of just six individuals, she probes deep into the human experience as it teeters between the profound and the mundane--even, or perhaps especially, as experienced from the rarified vantage point of space. Her luscious and lyrical language is as close to poetry as it is to prose ("Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge"). Orbital is a gift of language, a meditation on meaning, and a beautiful exploration of perspective. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer
Discover: In her fifth novel, Samantha Harvey offers readers a lyrical and poetic exploration of space, perspective, and appreciation for the planet that gives us life.