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Samantha Harvey: Orbital

I read this book firstly because it won the Booker Prize in 2024 though that, in itself, would not normally make me want to read a book. The main reason was that the book is set in the international space station and I wondered how a few people in such a cramped space could form the basis for a novel unless you are throwing in sci-fi trope (aliens!) or perhaps a sort of locked room murder mystery. Well, there are no aliens and no sci-fi and no murders or other crimes. Harvey has managed to produce a first-class novel simply about six people in a space station orbiting the Earth.

The six people are Anton and Roman, two Russian men, Nell an English woman, Chie, a Japanese woman, Shaun an American man and Pietro, an Italian man. They serve a nine month stint. Three are on their first three months, the other three their second three months.

The basic outline is relatively straightforward, We follow their daily activities, life on a space station with five others in a weightless cramped space, what they see and what they do about it, their thoughts about what they see and how they feel being in a space station and their back stories. It is, of course, more complicated than that.

They tend to wake up early (by their time) and, during the course of the day have various tasks to carry out. They all seem to have different scientific experiments they monitor and we learn, for example, that, unsurprisingly, mice do not like being weightless and do not fare well in space. They have various household tasks. There are, for example, two toilets – the Russian one and the Western one. The Western one seems to be better, while the Russian one needs more cleaning. Rubbish needs to be disposed of and they just seem to chuck it out into space where it burns up. They have to do medical tests on themselves to see that they are still healthy. They even have to go outside on a space walk for maintenance purposes. At the end of the book Harvey thanks NASA, so I assume she got such information from them, not least because she herself has said that she definitely is not an astronaut.

They communicate with Earth, both with their controllers but also, both by voice and email, with their families and people who ask them questions. We learn something of their back stories. Chie’s mother, for example, whose mother died in the Nagasaki A-bomb attack, dies during the course of the book. The mother had had her photo taken the day of the Moon landings and Chie has a copy of the photo. Shaun is a devout Christian (there is a brief discussion about whether what they are seeing proves whether there is or there is not a God) and very much misses his wife while Roman’s marriage seems to be on the rocks.

Some of the time they look out of the window and we see what they see. We get wonderful descriptions of what to them seems to be an uninhabited planet (As they orbit they might as well be intergalactic travellers chancing upon a virgin frontier. It seems uninhabited). Harvey is at pains to point out what part of the world they are seeing, naming the countries and regions. They orbit the Earth sixteen times a day so they see a lot, both in daylight and in the dark. One of the rare plot elements in this book concerns a typhoon they are tracking which seems to be destined to hit South-East Asia and they report back on it and we eventually get a brief description of one area that it hits.

Where the book gets really interesting is when we get into what may be called the philosophical area. Indeed, the book opens with Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convergeWe get various comments of this nature such as they all have moments up here of a sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness.

This idea that the Earth seems small yet, as they point out, is their home and mother, is understandably a strong feeling they have. They discuss/think about the place of humans in the cosmos and wonder about alien civilisations.
They also are concerned about climate change and, seeing the Earth from on high, feel very protective towards it.Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

But there is the mundane as well: Lists of things that annoy them and things they miss. We learn of the physical changes they face though they do have a small exercise facility.We learn how they arrived and how they will leave. We also learn how they get on, not least the occasional Russian-West differences. We learn that, during the course of this book there is a lunar mission taking place. As with all previous missions all the lunar astronauts are American and there are more than one of astronauts in the space station who are somewhat envious. Indeed, one of the Russians has dreamed of being the first Russian on the Moon.

This could have been a very ordinary book but it very much is not. Even if you are not a space nerd – and I certainly am not – you cannot help but enjoy this book, not least because it so well written, covering the many aspects of life on a space station from the mundane such as toenail clippings floating in the weightlessness- to the profound such as man’s place in the greater scheme of things.

Publishing history

First published in 2023 by Jonathan Cape