When Samantha Harvey’s name was announced as the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, the English author held her head in her hands, taking a moment of pure delight before hugging her family. Standing before the crowd to give her acceptance speech, she referenced Carl Sagan, who famously described humans as “starstuff pondering stars.” Harvey added her take on the saying, describing humans as “earth-stuff pondering the Earth.”
Her winning novel, the 136-page “Orbital,” takes place over just 24 hours and follows six astronauts during a day of their mission orbiting the Earth. The intimate space odyssey gives the reader a window into the minds of each of the astronauts, building the astronauts in vivid blocks of color despite limited page time.
We learn about each astronaut’s nationality, stories, loves, hopes, and dreams, and, most importantly, how they have responded to their position outside the Earth, looking down on tsunamis forming, day changing to night, borders fading to nothing but land and sea before their eyes.
Nothing in this book truly goes wrong, either—nothing breaks or endangers the characters. There is virtually no plot to the novel. It’s a day in the life in its purest form, but is filled with concise truths about living on Earth, the kind of understandings that are only apparent to those no longer on it.
A standout of this novel is its superb and tender writing in a kind of pseudo stream of consciousness, traveling with the same calculated speed as the ship through planetary orbit.
On the first page, Harvey writes, “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.”
Similarly, poetic lines appear on every page: beautifully crafted, taken in by the reader like bits of sweet candy, propelling the book forward with its almost stream of consciousness narration. Harvey dips into the mind of each astronaut from time to time, but then is able to unite their voices into one narration. The merging consciousnesses of the astronauts is a theme she mentions throughout the novel, forming a cast that is both individual and collective.
She writes of their response to their surroundings, showing this use of omniscient narration and singular train of thought: “They don’t know how it can be that their view is so endlessly repetitive and yet each time, every single time, newly born.”
There’s a kind of groundbreaking in this novel with its “space pastoral” imagery, as Harvey described it. She positions Earth’s orbit as a space and process to be pondered and to respond to, as the poets of the romantic era once responded to the natural world around them. She leans on this tradition in “Orbital,” while expanding on its boundaries. The quiet power within this work seems to forge new ground for fictional exploration beyond the Earth itself.
