After winning the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel, “Orbital,” Samantha Harvey said in an interview with the Guardian, “When I’m down here on Earth, I find it difficult to be consoled by the things that we’re doing to the Earth and to one another. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that more resembles peace. I can look at it almost without judgment, just look at its beauty.”
I can appreciate that feeling of peace and the splendor of earth’s beauty from space, because down here on terra firma, things aren’t so peaceful.
I recommend this novel to anyone who could benefit from such a shift in perspective, but it’s not for everyone. It’s short enough to be categorized as a novella and the writing is so beautiful it reads almost like a prose poem. It has almost no plot. It takes place in a single day, following four astronauts and two cosmonauts working on a space station that orbits the earth sixteen times every twenty-four hours at 17,500 miles per hour, with a new day dawning every ninety minutes, skewing any sense of time.
“Orbital” is a meditation on what it means to be human on a speck in an endless universe. It asks for us to reflect and ponder and appreciate.
“The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.”
They can barely see a trace of human or animal life—just myriad colors during the day and clusters of light at night.
“They look down and they understand why it is 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.”
The crew conducts experiments, exercises daily to keep their muscles from atrophying, watches an enormous typhoon forming near the Philippines, and each consider and contrast their lives on earth and in space.
“At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in—a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness.”
Who couldn’t benefit from being ambushed by happiness?
