Orbital: A moving elegy to our environment and planet

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital (2023) will, for some people, barely qualify (if that) as a novel, leaving them crying “Where’s the plot? Nothing happens!” And you know, I can’t argue with them. If you define a novel as a series of plot steps from a to b to c such that change occurs, then yes, Orbital probably won’t squeeze in under that definition. Its focus is less on “what is happening” and more on “what am I feeling about what is happening?” or “What am I thinking about while things are happening?” And if you’re looking for conflict or fleshed out and distinctive characters who are different at the end than when we first meet them, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. While we’re at it, if you’re the sort who doesn’t cotton to lots of lyrical language and/or frequent internal meditations, this probably isn’t the story for you either.

So who is it for? Well, me for one. Because I absolutely loved this novel. Loved it, ate it up, looking forward to reading it again. And if you’re also fine with stories that eschew the traditional trappings of plot, disdain deep dives into character, and don’t bother with adding the usual connective tissue between barely connected events/thoughts, all so long as you get yourself some beautifully poetic prose, some thought-provoking questions, and a number of quietly, briefly poignant moments of wonder, passion, and grief, then you’ll probably love it too.

To summarize what plot does exist, the story focuses on six space station astronauts (Chie, Roman, Anton, Shaun, Pietro, Nell), circling the Earth across a single 24-hour period, or a series of 16 orbits and during that time they’re tasked to take photos and report on a massive typhoon forming in the area of Japan and the Philippines. Each is given a little bit of background, some of which, in tiny ways, drives not so much events but thoughts: Chie’s mother has just died in Japan, Anton has a lump on his neck and also is considering exiting his now-loveless marriage, Pietro is worried about a fisherman he’d met while scuba diving whose family is in the path of the typhoon. And, checks notes, yep, that’s about it for plot.

What replaces plot are a series of meditative vignettes, musing within the minds of the characters or via the omniscient narrator on topics such as the way space station life erases time, the impact of climate change, whether a god exists, humanity’s need to explore and expand, the precariousness of life, the artificiality of human borders, the eventual end of the Earth and Sun, our fear we are alone in the universe, grief and regret, the beauty of the world, the powerful effect of human want on the planet, and more. Most of these, as noted, are related in a rhythmic flow of lyrical language, sometimes sweeping you along in long winding sentences and other times using short, simple phrases, sometimes employing list formatting and other times extended metaphors, all of it in a balanced cadence that immerses you within the passage. Here, for instance, is a vignette on our view of Earth and our place in the universe:

they sometimes think it would be easier to unwind the heliocentric centuries and go back to the years of a divine and hulking earth around which all things orbited – the sun, the planets, the universe itself. You’d need far more distance from the earth than they have to find it insignificant and small; to really

understand its cosmic place. Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness. It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether…

Or here, where Harvey employs an extended metaphor:

Samantha Harvey

Maybe human civilisation is like a single life – we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flush of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone … and now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.

I could happily continue to quote at length; the book is rife with beautiful passages. Is it possibly too much lyricism? Maybe. It’s true that the many segments lovingly detailing the visuals of what passes below them — “southeast into the thick of dark, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, flecks of pale gold” and the “pale light as they ascend north over the snow-capped cloud-flanked Andes … and below the Amazon, blistered and raw with fire” — blur somewhat together and maybe pile up too fulsomely. But that said, I don’t know which passages I would mark for excision in the name of concision; it would be too painful.

It’s also true that for the most part, these meditations, like the astronauts themselves, float above it all, untethered not just from the world but the characters. Save for a few examples, such as Chie mourning her mother or Pietro worried about his fisherman friend, they could have come from within the mind of any of the characters (or from the omniscient narrator). Though this is less of an issue as it may seem, given that one of the themes of the story is how the characters (and by analogy perhaps an aspirational humanity) have melded one into another in common purpose and setting: “They have talked before about a feeling they often have, a feeling of merging. That they are not quite distinct from one another, nor from the spaceship.“ Or more concretely, “We are one. For now at least, we are one. Everything we have up here is only what we reuse and share. We can’t be divided, this is the truth. We won’t be because we can’t be. We drink each other’s recycled urine. We breathe each other’s recycled air.“

I’ll note while we’re here that those references to recycled urine and air are representative of many more times that Harvey gives us concrete, physical, embodied facts and sensations; the book is far from all lofty lyricism. In fact, Orbital has a nice dichotomy between the airy and the earthy, the incredibleness of being in space (often unstated but reader-assumed) and the pragmatics physicality and mundanity of it: the chores, the impact on the body: “They know that the vision can weaken and the bones deteriorate. Even with so much exercise still the muscles will atrophy. The blood will clot and the brain shift in its fluid. The spine lengthens, the T cells struggle to reproduce, kidney stones form.“

But as much as we get these moments, what really drives Orbital is wonder. Wonder at the beauty of the Earth, wonder at how it brought us forth, wonder at what we have done (dismay as well), wonder at our existence wonder at the “trance of wild and lilting world.”