“The Earth is the answer to every question”
Samantha Harvey, Orbital
In Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel six astronauts and cosmonauts share the International Space Station for one day. During that time they orbit the Earth sixteen times, watch sixteen sunrises, run their experiments, and think about home. Meanwhile, below them a typhoon is building, and one of them learns, mid-orbit, that her mother has died. The station keeps circling, sixty degrees of latitude at a time, unable to stop for grief and indifferent to the storm.
What the six of them have, that the rest of us normally don’t, is observational distance. Not distance from feeling, but from the gravity that is our constructed reality. Enough distance to see the whole shape: the storm as a weather system rather than as a problem, and the threatened coastline as part of a pattern rather than as a sensational headline.
Harvey’s astronauts are not detached; the novel is at its best when it shows them fully wired to wh…