Beyond the blue orb | Review of 2024 Booker-shortlisted ‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Orbital explores the raw reality of life in space, devoid of fantasy.

When one thinks of space, it is hard not to be enamoured by its endless vastness. We continue to romanticise earth’s celestial existence and view the moon with a lover’s eye. English novelist Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-shortlisted Orbital, set in raw space that is “a panther, feral and primal”, reclaims the lesser-known side of this orbital romance, by taking out the fantasy from the genre.

Harvey writes of the ins and outs of an otherwise uneventful day spent at the International Space Station, where the “latest six of many” astronauts/ cosmonauts witness 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, and a tropical storm emerges out of the Pacific.

During the course of the 16 rounds they take of the ‘blue marble’ beyond them — each orbit lasts 90 minutes — memories of their childhood, of their families left behind, keep them centred in this looping and weightless existence. “Space shreds time to pieces,” writes Harvey. Their time, or whatever twisted sense of time remains, is spent adjusting to the near-vacuum setup amplified by “the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings which are floors”. They exercise excessively to prevent muscle atrophy; keenly monitor all their bodily signs; conduct experiments on lab rats or cultured heart cells; and observe the “almost endlessly connected” surface of their planet — where the only boundaries that exist are natural and not political.

At a time when scientists across the world are trying to draw maps of the universe and when the doomsday clock has been set at 90 seconds to midnight, humankind continues to exist between seamless progress and the proverbial apocalypse. Harvey offers some perspective in her novel, which concludes with a panoramic view of the “beautiful velvety poverty of man on earth that tips into the void”.

There is something melancholic, or perhaps even anticlimactic, when one puts Harvey’s astronauts and cosmonauts — from Japan, Russia, the United States, Britain and Italy — into the real-world context. Harvey enables it too. Roman, a cosmonaut, travels with a ham radio and idolises Sergei Krikalev, who was stuck in space in 1991 as his country disintegrated back on Earth; reminding us of the astronauts of the Boeing Starliner, currently stuck in space for months on end.

In another instance, an astronaut is asked for his inputs on a vital question: “with this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?” “We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf,” he wonders. “With the gilded pens of billionaires,” another astronaut replies, is how we are writing the future; and he is not entirely incorrect.

Harvey’s prose takes a pass at “man’s neurotic assault on the planet”. It asserts that in our relentless need to assert territorial authority and superiority, we do not spare space. We “must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day”, as Harvey puts it.