Orbital by Samantha Harvey
(Vintage / Penguin Random House, 2024, paperback 136 pages)
- A Day in the Life
- Around the World in 90 Minutes
- Down There
- Head Above the Clouds
- Elsewhere on the Bookshelf
- A Perspective
A Day in the Life
Six people get up, eat, exercise, do their jobs, take time to reflect, look out of the window, socialise and go to sleep. Just an ordinary day. Each of them have their every waking hour mapped out: the time they wake, when and what they eat and their every task. How can anything be remarkable about this? How can there be room for drama or intrigue? Indeed, in this short book there is none. And yet it is completely engaging, charming, moving. And utterly unique.
These six are not ordinary people, but skilled, resourceful and resilient individuals, selected from amongst thousands whose ambition was to be in their place. They are not in an ordinary setting, but in a weird enforced proximity. They are strangers forced into intimate company, while under constant scrutiny. Every nuance of their daily lives are monitored and recorded. What kind of torture or experiment is this?
The cast of a half dozen characters are all astronauts and the setting is the International Space Station. The story – if it is a story at all – recounts just 24 hours of their collective life in constant motion, about 400 km (250 miles) above the surface of the Earth.
Around the World in 90 Minutes
Multiple times in 24 hours they witness sunrise and sunset. But instead of heads scrambled by impossible jetlag, they live by an ordered, if arbitrary, timetable. They are not in zero gravity, because in Low Earth Orbit, gravity is not much diminished from what we experience on the surface of the planet. But as they fly, they are falling. Falling forever, like six people trapped in a lift in freefall, but never reaching the bottom of the shaft.
Looking up from the UK we can regularly see the ISS passing overhead. The times and locations to look are published by NASA, accounting for the jinks and jumps, occasional manoeuvres when the spacecraft has to change height in order to avoid some fragment of space junk, some discarded separation debris or shrapnel of satellite collision or deadly star-wars experiment. Any tiny piece encountered in their hurtling progress could rip their fragile den apart. Instant death by litter.
But it is the slow degradation of their bones, the wasting of muscles insufficiently exercised in their everyday weightlessness that will shorten their lives. Even as they work at laboratory experiments to assess the effects of long-term space travel on human and mouse bodies, they are themselves the subject of study, like the population of mice who certainly will not make it back home. Hence being strapped to the exercise bike and treadmill: resistance training that will only partially offset the weakening of their bodies.
Down There
But it is their overactive minds that are more interesting than their underactive bodies. Who are people they left behind? Will even their closest loved ones be able to grasp the life-swerving new perspective of seeing the world from space? Astronauts have often said that if everyone could see what they have seen, then they would lose their pathetic grasping of power, land, resources and see that we are all in this together, all of humanity is dependent on our fragile and abused and beautiful planet. Surely they would understand that we cannot mindless go on with our petty politics and unsustainably wasteful and destructive consumer society. We cannot just throw everything away. There is no “away”.
Just out of the window, the world rushes beneath them: tropical, temperate, arctic, mountain, ocean, and they look down on the thin meniscus of life. In a few kilometres exist all the greens and blues and browns of an unimaginably diverse and beautiful world, upon which the scars of human rapacity and violence and greed can barely be noticed from space. But they are there. The neural net-scape of streetlights and their relative absence over Africa shows the economic inequalities writ large. The algal blooms in river outflows signal the unchecked pollution and dying ecosystems. Under the influence of global warming, glaciers shrink and storms swell into monster hurricanes and tropical storms.
Head Above the Clouds
They have specific instructions to take photos of a tropical storm gathering in the Western Pacific. Irresistible power swirls and sweeps across the ocean, far below. The awe-inspiring spectacle becomes personal, as one of the crew fixates on his friend, a fisherman on a speck of island beneath the cloud. But they are themselves far above any weather. “For here am I floating in a tin can, far above the world.” Weather is one of the things that inhabits their daydreams: a walk in the rain, the smell of woods and mud, or the sun on their faces. They have worked so hard to achieve this amazing thing. Yet they long for a return to Real Life. Favourite food, shared with friends. Walking the dog. The pull of gravity. They carry joys and sadness with them, but in weightlessness a tear does not roll down the cheek. It floats away and has to be caught before it corrodes their fragile life raft.
Samantha Harvey has created an unforgettable book. It is meticulously researched and written with such imagination and tight use of language that some paragraphs are crafted like poems. Often I would stop and read one three times over. No wonder this book won its author the 2025 Booker Prize for fiction. It is a finely spun work of imagination, but it taught me more about the nuts and bolts of life on the ISS than any number of documentaries and serious articles. If you are interested in space at all, I recommend this remarkable book.
Elsewhere on the Bookshelf
- Space Station Orbit Tutorial by Cynthia A. Evans and Julie A. Robinson, Earth Sciences and Image Analysis, NASA Johnson Space Center
- Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) – one of several books in which the entire action takes place in a single 24 hour period. Time is marked by chiming of London bells. The action, such that it is, takes place in the inner reflections of a small number of characters.
Find sighting opportunities to watch the space station as it passed overhead: Freshwater, England, United Kingdom | Sighting Opportunity | Spot The Station | NASA
Perspective (from Carl Sagan, 1994)
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The absence of light noted in Africa from the space station is visible elsewhere from an airliner. In the 1990s I took evening flights to Moscow, and the sudden darkness below as the plane left Germany, crossed Poland and flew into Russia was quite striking.
On one trip I was taken to Star City and visited Russian Mission Control. The ISS had not yet been assembled, but the Mir space station was in orbit, unmanned between crews. Only one console was occupied on a Saturday morning, and the duty officer was amusing himself by playing SimCity. My host told me that a few weeks previously his son’s class had visited, and talked to the cosmonauts who were then in orbit.