Orbital, Samantha Harvey. Grove Press (ISBN: 9780802163622) 2024.

Summary: A day aboard the International Space Station as six people recount their work, weightlessness, and the wonder of earth below.

Between the end of October and now, Orbital won the Booker and Hawthornden Prizes and was shortlisted for several others. In addition, it was designated a “Best Book of the Year” by Oprah Daily, Financial Times, and The Guardian. As I read the book, I wondered whether it was deserving of so much recognition.

For those not familiar with the book, it is a fictional account of a day aboard the International Space Station through the eyes of six people. During this time they orbit earth sixteen times. The chapters trace ascending and descending orbits. There is no plot. Rather, we glimpse what they are thinking and feeling, what life in zero gravity is like, their work and interactions through the day, and what they see of the planet that is home for the rest of us.

I noted what so many reviewers have commented upon–the sheer beauty of what it is like to see our home from 250 miles up, circling it at over 17,000 miles per hour. They witness multiple sunrises, and transitions to night, the city lights of their homes, and the variety of colors of earth’s varied land- and seascape. They see landmasses without borders. From space, they cannot see another human besides those on the crew. But they witness the effects of human activity–fires in the Amazon, algal blooms fed by fertilizers, and much more.

They follow a forming typhoon developing into a category five superstorm. One of the crew had stayed with a family on the Philippine coast toward which it is heading. There is concern for their safety, amplified by the vision of the sheer immensity of the typhoon.

One example of her descriptions is her account of the aurora borealis:

“The airglow is dusty greenish yellow. Beneath it in the gap between atmosphere and earth is a fuzz of neon which starts to stir. It ripples, spills, it’s smoke that pours across the face of the planet; the ice is green, the underside of the spacecraft an alien pall. The light gains edges and limbs, folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. At the top of the towers is a swathe of magenta that obscures the stars…”

It might look something like this:

By contrast, the descriptions of daily life, apart from a space walk, are startlingly ordinary. Working out to maintain muscle tone, preparing food, cleaning, emptying trash, running experiments, communicating with those back on earth. Essentially, it is an experience of transcendence amid the ordinary. Another paradox is the utter dependence these six have on each other, and yet the bounded privacy they observe. In particular, the narration takes us into the private thoughts and dreams of the crew.

They live with the precarity of their own situation. A hairline crack is slowly growing in the Russian module. A thin metal skin protects them from annihilation. But they also recognize another form of precarity–that of life on earth with its thin envelope of atmosphere as well as the unfolding changes being wrought by human activity, visible even from their vantage point.

So is this plotless work of fiction worth all the attention? I’ll be honest and say I’ve read better fiction and this won’t be my “best of the year.” The novel is uneven–some parts soaring with rapturous description, and some just ho-hum–just a list of all the places they are seeing. Actually, the account of life on board the station is interesting–all the ways they adapt to weightlessness, including learning to sleep. I also found the characters of interest–each had interesting back stories and interior lives and reactions to their experiences. All were transformed by seeing the earth from space.

You may find this amazing. I found it interesting but not amazing. I hope the success won’t hurt Harvey. There are flashes of brilliance here, and an imaginative conception in the book as a whole. But I think and hope her best books may be yet to be written.