Orbital is a meditation on how little we matter in the grand scheme of the universe and yet how deeply we matter to each other.

If books had soundtracks, I would set Samantha Harvey’s 2024 Booker prize-winning Orbital to Spiritualized’s excellent 1997 space rock track Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space. It’s an atmospheric, looping soundscape of a song that returns again and again to the same lyrics, much like the narrative of the book.

Orbital follows the daily routines, reflections, and memories of six astronauts as they spend a day orbiting the Earth sixteen times in the International Space Station. The book is plotless and there is no narrative tension or fear for the astronauts’ safety – the danger, it seems, comes more from the human race and what we’ve done to our planet.

As the spacecraft circles around the Earth, the narrative loops around and back to a few repeated observations. A passage on Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas challenges us to think about perspective and what we are truly looking at in this painting. Is it the painter regarding the viewer from his spot by the easel? Could it be the young princess in the center, her ladies in waiting, or her parents reflected in the mirror on the back wall? Or is the subject as simple as the dog?

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas

As the astronauts look down on their home planet floating below them, they can identify familiar spots of land, but cannot see a single individual on Earth. From their perspective, it looks uninhabited. Yet all of mankind known to them resides on that glossy blue sphere turning gently in the black void. And they are all connected. Up in space, they can see that:

“…humanity, in coming down in its essence to this handful of people, is no longer a species of confounding difference and distance but a near and graspable thing.”

In Orbital, Samantha Harvey uses lists to depict this human connection in great detail. The lengthy recounting of the countries, cities, and topographies passing below; the lists of people, events, inventions, activities that tell the story of the development of humanity and modern society; the many objects and creatures washed down a flooded street after a typhoon – these things matter. They make up our humanity – even if:

“In the cosmic calendar as it would exist, then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing. 

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life, and knowing, one finger snap of frantic being and this is it.”

I would recommend Orbital for readers who are happy with slow reads, meditation, reflection, and beautiful prose, rather than plot- or character-driven stories.

Ways to Engage

Shortly after I read Orbital, I had the opportunity to see Jonny Kim, a NASA astronaut on the International Space Station, participate in a live interview at a conference. Through a real-time video feed displayed on a giant screen in the conference hall, we watched him hover, surrounded by complicated-looking spaceship equipment, releasing his microphone and letting it float gently around him while he waited for the interview questions to travel 250 miles into space to reach him. 

Jonny Kim, earth linking from space

Throughout his interview he too kept coming back to the power of human connection. Whether as a leader, a storyteller, or an astronaut putting his life in the hands of his fellow space station residents, the ability to adapt and connect with other human beings is crucial to our survival. You can watch the full 20-minute interview here.

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