Review of Orbital

Orbital

Author: Samantha Harvey

Publisher: Grove Press

Date of Publication: October 29, 2024

Date of Review: June 2025

 

         In space, the body rebels. It sleeps and wakes based on instructions from machines. The air it breathes is recycled and recirculated. The mind becomes the body’s sole authority on what demands and is worthy of attention. It must be hard to both control and obey that mind when circling the Earth 16 times a day. Orbital covers one day in the lives of several astronauts—16 trips around the globe. It is a meditative, lonely, lyrical veneration of the place we inhabit, gently mournful about how we inhabit that home.

         This is not science fiction that leans hard into technological specificities. It is instead dedicated in its effort to truly occupy the headspace of people observationally suspended, both weightless and quite literally detached, from the only home they know. Harvey does not diminish the enormity of her characters’ accomplishment. Instead, her astronauts’ wonder at their position is counterbalanced by their intense love for a home that they have worked so hard and risked so much to leave. It is not the space they are in that eventually binds them; it is their new ability to observe and reflect on their lives from afar. Each view of Earth is written with similar structure and content, giving the space station the static, familiar role of home. The space station has to become as familiar to the astronauts as the home they came from before they can look at Earth with a mix of fresh awe and critical detachment. The writing moves quickly from one astronaut’s mind to another, and uses the views as a form of rhythmic continuity physically connecting the astronauts’ varying temperaments. Those transitions communicate that shared experience does not always create shared perspective. However, they can make it difficult to keep track of which defining traits belong to which character. The integration of an immense physical journey into the ruminations of, and changes within, each astronaut creates the sense of action continually mounting without a climax, not unlike the astronauts’ perpetually forestalled fall toward Earth. While this might frustrate some readers, it gives some movement to a meditative book.

         For a book in part about observational detachment and grounding perspective, the marketing on and within the cover was frustratingly distracting. A defining point of the rear cover summary—that the space mission narrated is one of the last of its kind—is not referenced or relevant in the story itself, rendering the mention a weirdly misleading attention grab. Also detracting from the insular contemplation that defines Orbital, inside the front cover, before the title appears, there are numerous pages of promotion and praise blurbs. As a reader, I would prefer to enjoy a story without having to wade through pages of gushy pap from the publicity team before I even read the first paragraph written by the actual author.

         But this gripe is with the words that describe Orbital, not the ones that comprise it. The book itself is a reflection on the purposes and effects of exploration, why and how we love, and the results of being untethered from the known world. To those who enjoy a faster pace and a more grounded story, this book is probably not for you. To those for whom the mental journey complements and enriches the physical, do consider an Orbital sojourn.

Review of The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Scribner

Date of Publication: January 1971

    There’s nothing like waking abruptly from the middle of a dream, feeling on the verge of falling out of bed, to make you question reality. My body is tingling and strangely foreign, while my mind tells me that I have gone nowhere since I fell asleep. I feel entirely awake even as my frightful, still imagining subconscious tries to tell me that nothing I experience is real. This is the world in The Lathe of Heaven—abuzz, disorienting, and torn between the governance of the mind and an anarchy of the senses. It is terrifyingly brilliant and disorientingly familiar.

    George Orr is a man without much substance or significance. Yet he has discovered that he has the power of affective dreaming. He can literally change the world. Distraught at his capability, he consults a psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who sees and seizes an opportunity to improve the world. As Orr’s control over his power decreases, he becomes increasingly desperate to keep the world as it as and reign in his mind.

    In the case of George Orr, dreaming the world anew means that he is the only one who knows what was lost and what was gained in the change. It is an incredibly isolating premise. Not just the abstract world at large, but the people around him change, the place where he earns his keep changes all the time, and even his home can change in one night between sleeping and waking. Each time Orr has an affecting dream, he endures all the grief, fear, hope, and resignation that someone else might endure over the course of several years of change and loss. Le Guin does a beautiful job of conveying the toll of constant, isolating loss and novelty. Orr has no choice about whether he stays the same. He is both more deeply connected to his world and more deeply disconnected from it than anyone around him. His sanity is admirable, his desire to eliminate his power is humbling, and his ironic helplessness is pitiable. Because of all that Orr is and all that he cannot be, he is the perfect encapsulation of how awful it can be to be ordinary.

    This story amplifies many familiar doubts. George Orr has the hypothetical power to create an ideal world, yet no actual control over his capability to do so. His memories of each life “lived” blur together. He loves people who in some of his worlds never lived. In The Lathe of Heaven, idealism is of tenuous value, loving someone may become a waste, and while the mind is the only real source of truth, it can reinvent the truth at any time. Orr is a character that readers can empathize and connect with, yet not want to become. That is what makes him so human, and that is part of what makes the story so powerful.

    Le Guin’s writing is as magnificent as the character and story she tells. Her character descriptions are consistent without becoming repetitive. She shies away from excessive worldbuilding, as Orr’s world is always changing, but there is enough to give shape and flavor to each iteration. The details she does share evoke a place both crowded and lonely, aptly chosen for a protagonist experiencing Orr’s cruel capability. Her dialogue feels straight out of the minds of her characters, unfiltered and structured hastily as it leaves their mouths. Her diction aids a mounting sense of disturbance and disorientation. I finished Le Guin’s book and felt as though I was situated in the wrong world, that my mind should be able to position me within the covers I had just closed. Upon finishing Le Guin’s book, I had the sense that somehow, her worlds were more real than mine, even as they perpetually unmade themselves.

    This book is for the people that live in their heads and question the workings of their world and the limits of perception. It is for the people who wish they could be something other than themselves. It does what the best science fiction does: amplifies and extrapolates the strange, uncomfortable aspects of the world we think we know.