A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
I blame Stephen Colbert for this. He launched a book club, I said hey that looks cool, I ordered the book, and now I’ve read it and as always I have some thoughts, though it took them a while to hit me. This is the kind of book that defies summarization and I really thought I wasn’t going to be able to review it at all, but I’m going to try.
Orbital covers twenty-four hours in the lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts from Japan, Russia, Italy, the United States, and the UK as they orbit the earth in the International Space Station. During the course of the book, they circle the planet once every ninety minutes for a total of sixteen orbits in one day. From this vantage, they cheer on the launch of a new moon landing mission and observe the development of a super typhoon that quickly engulfs the Philippines. In addition to these events, there is a multitude of daily tasks to be gotten through: there are experiments to be conducted with mice, equipment to be cleaned and repaired, muscle-maintaining exercises to be performed. Yet even with their busy schedule, the astronauts still have time to connect over shared meals and little sillinesses, such as their mutual disregard for the politics-driven, nation-specific toilet assignments. They still watch late-night movies and fall asleep in the middle of them, knowing fully well that they could technically be reprimanded for staying up past their very strict bedtime if the cameras didn’t get shut off at night.
Despite their packed routine and the cold indifference of space, there are also moments of acute humanity of the kind that would probably send me hopping off the space station and trying to float back to earth with or without an actual ride (there is a reason I didn’t become an astronaut). Chie learns that her mother has died, but, unable to return in the middle of her mission, can only look on as funeral arrangements are made. Roman tries to connect with local radio channels as they pass over them, but only manages to hold a few disjointed conversations before the connection is broken. Anton finds a suspicious lump in his neck and reflects on his loveless marriage, dreaming of walking away from his chronically ill wife. Pietro watches the developing typhoon with growing anxiety as he thinks of his friends, a Filipino fisherman and his family, living in the path of the storm. Nell and Shaun share their memories of the Challenger disaster, which they both watched live as children.
By the sixteenth and final orbit of the day, the astronauts are officially in bed. Messages accumulate on the screens beside their sleeping bags and a crack on the outside of the station begins to widen, but these are problems for tomorrow. Down in the Philippines, the fisherman and his family shelter in a church among some forty or fifty other people, about as safe as they’re going to be, and pray for the building to remain standing as the floodwaters begin to recede. The typhoon has worn itself out against the land; the waters are still high and the damage is considerable, but the wind is ebbing and the storm is dying, and for now at least things seem like they can start getting back to normal.
It used to be that beautiful prose took my brain away and prevented me from overthinking things the way I usually do, but I’m glad I seem to have outgrown that phase, because to be honest this book was kind of boring and even Harvey’s gorgeous sentences couldn’t distract me. There’s only so many times you can go through – or orbit around – the frankly endless catalogue of breathlessly described landscapes and cities before it becomes grating, repetitive, even pretentious. As with V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, the book seems to have been written in such a way that reviewers such as myself would simply have no choice but to lavish it with such adjectives as “lyrical,” “dazzling,” “breathtaking,” “wondrous,” “ethereal.” It’s less obvious than it was in Addie LaRue and therefore less obnoxious, if only because it feels more natural to the author and less contrived (I say, having read only one book by each author), but it does feel like it is constantly looking over its shoulder, waiting for the reader to recognize its dizzying splendor. Having said that, I have to admit there were times I had no idea what Harvey was talking about, and I never knew where she was going with the story. There was actually a point where I low-key thought we were building up to a catastrophic explosion, which admittedly would have been out of step with the tone of the book, but that crack in the station was really worrying.
It would also have been nice if there had been any sort of temporal landmarks, because I have no idea when this novel takes place. I suppose this disorientation is part of the point when the characters are so physically severed from human notions of time, but I’m nosy and I would have liked to know. I am curious as to whether every event in the book is invented (besides the Challenger disaster), or whether Harvey actually drew from real events. The super typhoon, for instance: given the timing of writing and publication, I thought the typhoon described might be Typhoon Haiyan/Super Typhoon Yolanda from 2013, but that took place in early November, where the book begins in early October and obviously doesn’t last through November. The book also describes a moon landing in a ship called Artemis, but the only thing that comes up for that is the Artemis program, whose planned 2027 moon landing will use a spacecraft called Orion. Then at the very end Harvey eschews ambiguity and says the space station will be de-orbited and sent plummeting into the spacecraft cemetery after another 35,000 orbits. I was raised to show my work, so here goes Math:
35,000 orbits ÷ 16 orbits per day = 2,187.5 days
2,187.5 days ÷ 365 days per year = 5.9 years
As of this writing, the space station is scheduled to be de-orbited in January 2031. If we round 5.9 up to 6, then the book takes place in 2025, six years before 2031, though this is of course based on the rather large assumption that Harvey intended for her in-universe de-orbiting date to match the actual one. Since the book was published in 2023 and NASA announced the de-orbiting date in 2022, it is entirely plausible that Harvey might have known about it in advance of publication and that she might consciously have chosen to set the story in 2025, in which case the typhoon discussed above was definitely invented. However, that still doesn’t fit with the 2027 Artemis landing. So are we in the past, the present, or the future? This bugs me more than it probably should, if only because it feels out of joint with actual space exploration. Even if the six astronauts are original characters, I would have thought the events taking place around them would be at least slightly based on reality. This ambiguous disconnect doesn’t produce the airy carelessness that seems to have been the intention; it seems more like Harvey was afraid to stake her name and her book to anything real, anything on which she might be challenged or corrected or disproven. It cannot possibly be a fear of confidentiality: everything I’ve cited above comes straight from Wikipedia, which, while it is not the most reliable source, is also not classified in any sense of the word.
It seems strange to have so comparatively little to say about a book when I have written obnoxiously huge walls of text for others, to the point that I am embarrassed by my Harry Potter reviews. But Orbital was a mildly discombobulating experience, partly because of the setting and partly because I was trying to follow the reams of environmental description rather than taking internal notes the way I usually do. This was kind of nice, in that it made me stay in the book without getting pulled into my own head, but that weightless detachment also works against it. Throughout the book, Harvey maintains that borders and political divisions disappear in the dark void of space, and from a visual standpoint I’m sure that’s true. The trouble is that most every human on the planet is going to remain earthbound for the entirety of their life, and on earth these things actually matter a great deal. She doesn’t go so far as to say that our problems are very small out in space – clearly the astronauts have problems of their own, and Harvey doesn’t try to downplay the danger and terror of a super typhoon – but it is disingenuous to posit a world with no real boundaries, where political divisiveness can be wiped out with a rocket ship.
In the end, I’d say the book is beautifully written and mostly thoughtful, if a bit oblivious and impossible to place in time. I’m not sorry I read it; if nothing else, it provided a definitive list of reasons I am glad I’m not an astronaut. And I actually did mostly enjoy it, surprisingly enough, because I wasn’t lying about that weightlessness. I have no interest in going to space and I never will, and this book did not change my mind. But it made me feel, just for a little bit, like I was floating amongst the stars, and for that fact alone I have no hesitation in recommending it.
