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.