Jan 8

Jan 8 Orbital. by Samantha Harvey. 2023

ORBITAL

RATED GREAT. 5/5

Buy your own copy here.

A multinational team of astronauts and cosmonauts circle the earth at 17,000 miles per hour on the last mission before the space station is decommissioned in favor of a more ambitious moonshot. And nothing much happens. Except for the Sense of Wonder!

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.

What plot exists in concerned with dealing emotionally with a family funeral that an astronaut cannot attend, a mission to the moon that these astronauts kinda follow, a supertyphoon that bears down on the Philippines, the scientific experiments that each crew member mundanely performs, and staring down at the earth and contemplating.

But this isn’t a book about plot.

It is hard to believe the quality of blackness that is the entirety of space around a day-lit earth, where the earth absorbs all the light – yet hard to believe in anything but that blackness, which is alive, and breathing and beckoning.

This is a beautifully written prose poem about the big and the small everywhere. Planet Earth is both immensely large and yet small and fragile in the context of space. Human beings are immensely important and yet cosmically meaningless. Some have called this an elegy for the Earth, and I’m not sure I agree with that. It is a contemplation of the sort men do at campires, into sunsets, above crashing waves, and into the eyes of newborn children or down at caskets.

That’s all this great human endeavour of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration,

So much of this novella ( ~40,000 words) is dedicated to the beauty of Planet Earth, spilling out in long sentences that run for pages, separated only by commas, covering widely diverse thoughts, or impressions, or quips, or questions, and yet hold a cadence that is masterful, propulsive, and worthy of listening to in an audiobook performance. I will definitely do that for a reread. I devoured this book in less than 24 hours.

At the beach hut they’d been human, a woman, a man, a wife and mother and daughter and a husband and father and son, and they’d crossed themselves, tapped their nails and bitten their lips in unconscious angst. But when they’d got to the launch pad they were Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney, imagineered, branded and ready. The rocket peaked in a cap of gleaming newness, absolute and spectacular whiteness and newness, and the sky was a glorious and conquerable blue.

Is this scifi? I don’t know. Probably not by my definition. The only extrapolative element is a few science experiments on mice and a new mission to the moon. Still, nothing has so completely put me inside a space station as completely as this novel. It has more in common with the great travel narratives — such as those written by Paul Theroux, Peter Mayle, and Pico Iyer — that most science fiction.

And yet, the “Sense of Wonder” in this book is amazing. Rockets, Planet Earth, Space Stations, Astronauts?If that isn’t great science fiction, then I’ve never read any of it.

when I watched the Challenger launch as a child, that was it for me. It wasn’t the moon landings, it was Challenger. I realised space is real, space flight is real, a thing real people do, die doing. Real people, like me, could actually do it, and if I died doing it that would be OK, I could die that way.

It a condemnation of the current genre that a book like this can win the 2024 Booker Award, but not even be in the Hugo Award discussion. Still, it finds its audience. A New York Times Bestseller and many thousand reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and the like.