Orbital

Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules.

Orbital is a slim book but full of detail, full of beauty, and full of life.

What is it like to experience sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets in twenty-four hours; to "circle the earth sixteen times at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour," and to watch from above the earth as clouds begin to "congregate" near the Marshall Islands; then, orbit by orbit, see them "curdle" into a super-typhoon that as it hits land looks like "a thick white mass sheened with moonlight?"

Up here in microgravity you're a seabird on a warm day drifting, just drifting. What use are biceps, calves, strong shin-bones; what use muscle mass? Legs are a thing of the past.

Chie looks from her lab window and sees her country, Japan, looking like "a dream she remembers once having. It lies slantwise and slight."

English Nell remembers her space walk. "Don't look down, you're told—focus on your hands, on your task, until you've adjusted." She remembers "hanging to the rig," grappling with tools and looking back at the space station which "in this moment... feels like home."

Roman, one of the Russians who has already completed three different mission, counts everything on this mission. Days, nights; hours of exercise; meetings with ground crew; changes of T-shirts, underwear, and socks; how much toothpaste he has swallowed. He "keeps his tally on a piece of paper in his crew quarters."

Shaun, the American who believes in a Creationist God (the crew suggest he is "there to convince them all that they have souls"), remembers an art teacher telling his class about the puzzles in Velazquez's painting, Las Meninas. He and the girl next to him were not impressed, but he has a postcard of the painting with him that his wife sent him many years later to remind him "of their first real exchange."

The crew like the metaphor of Shaun as the soul of the spaceship; meticulous philosophical Pietro (Italian) its mind; Anton, (the emotional Russian) its heart; dexterous Roman its hands; undefinable Chie, its conscience; and Nell ("with her eight-litre diving lungs') its breath. Each of them will spend about nine months on this space-station.

Samantha Harvey tracks each of their lives for the duration of one earth day and night—sixteen orbits of the earth. Their days are ordered by routine—breakfast, two hours of exercise in the gym (cycling, treadmill, bench press), contact with ground control, reading e-mails from family, performing their various tasks, recording and reporting weather patterns on earth, eating together and relaxing before climbing into their tethered sleeping bags and hanging "like bats" until their next day.

A daily task for each of them, too, "is the rigorous documenting of their own selves, the appetite reports, the mood monitoring, the pulse measuring, the urine sampling. They each extract blood for the flight surgeon to analyse..."

Shaun thinks of them all as "lab-rats," "specimens... objects of research who've forged the way for their own surpassing."

They swim in microgravity like little watched fish. The heart cells they culture will one day be used to replace those of the slingshotting astronauts bound for the Moon.

In Orbital, however, they are individuals, each coping with this isolating time in space in their own way. But there are boundaries between nations, too. There is a Russian WC and a US WC, each labeled. The crew regard this idea of national toilets as a joke. "I'm just going to take a national pee," Shaun will say. Mission control, via on-board cameras, watches the crew disregard the rules and concludes that trying to control astronauts and cosmonauts is a waste of time—like attempting to herd cats.

Through each of her characters, Samantha Harvey manages to convey what it feels like to live in space, the routine of it, the enclosed space and the lack of privacy, the isolation from family and friends and from normal earth life. At the start of this day, Chie hears that her mother has died and knows she cannot get back for the traditional funeral rites. Anton decides his marriage is a sham. Pierto dreams of decking the spaceship out like an old-fashioned farmhouse, "with flowery wallpaper and oak beams." Ramon conducts an odd "conversation" by two-way radio with a stranger on earth. They identify countries and land formations on earth as each orbit tracks over them, moving further east with each circuit of the globe.

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.

On Orbit 13, Harvey constructs the "cosmic calendar of the universe and life," adding the changes month-by-month to the cosmic year, from the moment of the Big Bang on January 1st, 14 billion years ago until on New Year's Eve 0.23 billion years ago the first "crafty" humans arrived to change their environment.

There is beauty in space, too. Not just the glorious masses of stars, but, as the orbit tracks across the Antarctic Circle, Roman sees "the flexing, morphing green and red of the auroras which snake around the inside of the atmosphere fretful and magnificent like something trapped."

"Nell, he says, come quick..."

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 whole crew comes to watch this, "the six of them, drawn moth-like." And each vows to remember it.

But there are man-made horrors, too: space debris, "two hundred million flung-out things"—satellites, bits of rockets, exhaust particles, dropped tools, and more. The space-station is "daily pelted and barraged and pitted with dents," and today the crew have watched fellow space travelers in a lunar spaceship negotiate this on its way to the moon.

Traveling through so many time zones—so many days and nights—in the course of their one day orbiting the earth is disorientating. The crew feel it, so does the reader at times when trying to imagine the course of the space-station and see the way night and day happen so often, yet the typhoon, for example, is watched as it grows over the course of a single earth day. Each chapter of the book represents a single orbit of the space station around the earth, and a chart at the front of the book shows its path as it moves from East to West.

As Shaun rightly thinks, "Everything, everything is turning and passing." Nine months is a long time to be there, and he ponders the meaning of it all, and at times wonders what he is doing there, "A tinned man in a tin can." His wife's response to his thoughts about extinction is not especially comforting.

Chie when she is anxious makes lists. And she talks to her experimental mice, encouraging them to let go of the bars of their cages and learn to fly.

Pietro believes philosophically that we "matter greatly and not at all," that "Life is everywhere, everywhere." And Roman and Anton, contemplating the long list of bodily changes their space sojourn will cause, that will age them five or ten years more than if they stayed on earth, agree they never worry about this. "Never."

Nell just enjoys being weightless and busy—no aches and pains, no decisions to make. Maybe you are trapped, going nowhere, but, "This isn't a complaint. God, no, this isn't a complaint."

Orbital, in a way, is like being in the space station with these people. We get to know them, like them, see what they see, and become part of their lives. And we still have time to contemplate some of strangeness of what makes humans want to explore space and what they will endure to do so. Our shared journey also conjures thoughts about the earth, its smallness, its fragility, its beauty, the power of nature, and the insignificance of mankind in the vastness of the universe. In Orbit 9, there is a list of the things we recorded on the golden discs we sent out into space on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. What chance is there that some life form will discover them and be able to retrieve all that information and decode it? "Not a chance" is the conclusion, but the discs will go on traveling in the Milky Way long after our earth is dead.

Samantha Harvey has not been into space, but she really has created an extraordinary picture of what life might be like for us if we ventured to go there. This is a fascinating, enjoyable, unusual, and beautifully written book—the well-deserved winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.