Orbital - Samantha Harvey (a review from mid 2025)
A small novella-like exploration of the existential view of space from the ISS, through the eyes of 6 Astro-Cosmonauts, their inner-deep overthinking and vibrant resonances and emotional meanderings as they orbit 10 times around the earth. The Chapters, orbital numbers and ascending/descending marking-offs, give us a perfunctory "structure", but this amazingly rich piece of writing goes so many widely divergent places it feels like a trip far beyond space and yet into the deepest recesses of our own minds, placing us in low-earth orbit, bringing us the mind's eye view of not just the unique geographical perspective from that vantage point, but the contained isolation, the odd progression of "days" and multiple spectacular sunrises/sets, north/south, east/west angled curved living hyper-map vantage points as this compact habitable satellite swing-falls around our own larger Solar satellite, our home, our planet Earth.
You can't read it fast. You take it in like the richest dessert. Gasp. Admire. Imagine what it would be like up there. Not just the view. The deep perspective.
It seems to end abruptly. Questions left echoing.
The florid vibrancy of the rhapsodic and beautiful *sounding* poetic prose sometimes, I'd suggest, wanders into that realm of "creative license", and I'd never consider this a "science-fiction" or hard science book, though it is well researched and does convey the orbital minutiae accurately. To use the phrase "swarm and buzz" of the multitude of satellites in low-earth orbit lingers beautifully in the mind but when one considers they vast empty spaces between these bits of technology and space junk, and the *silence* through which they travel... and that a swarm is a biological murmuration, of birds, insects chasing food/weather conditions, alate forms of which might erupt periodically but with nearness of collective purpose and interactions as well as *sound* in air, one realises that occasionally the author does rush with the hyper-flow and sound of proemtry rather than precision and accuracy. These artistic flourishes may be forgiven, as it's a luscious journey.
"With untold peace and silence, the typhoon hits land. From the stillness of their vantage point, their solar arrays are copper against the night. The darkness of the Indian Ocean cedes to cloud which curdles, and the typhoon is a thick white mass sheened with moonlight. Their orbit proceeds north-east over Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, but these islands are gone.
Nobody here is up to see it; it’s past two in the morning and the spacecraft is dark and humming. Through the great domed window there’s no view but a perspective-less expanse of typhoon. There’s the easternmost arm of its spiral, and the clouds for hundreds of miles around have been whipped into motion. Anybody watching would be struck by vertigo at this swirling earth."
"There are times when the rapidity of this passage across the earth is enough to exhaust and bewilder. You leave one continent and are at the next within quarter of an hour, and it’s hard sometimes to shake the sense of that vanished continent, it sits on your back, all the life that happens there which came and went. The continents pass by like fields and villages from the window of a train."
stormborns
prguitarman
titsay
origamiaround
izzy806