“Orbital” - Samantha Harvey

🌏This is not a sci-fi novel. Not at all. 

🌏 This was an unusual (but very enjoyable) read as there is quite literally, no plot. I picked it up after a trip with the kids to Kennedy Space Center, so admittedly I had space travel on my mind. Harvey gives us an insider’s peek at a group of international astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the ISS. The book contains their thoughts upon observing their home from afar, using their exclusive POV to contemplate society and life on Earth. We can contrast their waking actions and thoughts with their dreams while tucked away in their sleeping pods.

🌏 Harvey’s writing is poetic and meandering. We are privy to a stream of consciousness from multiple viewpoints. Although individually, the inhabitants of the ISS are quite different from one another, Harvey’s omniscient narrative voice intentionally blurs the distinctions between them, suggesting that all of humanity is similarly interconnected and similarly insignificant when observed from the vastness of space.

🌏 Harvey opens the novel with a contemplation of time. Aboard the ISS, time is an arbitrary metric. Each day when the astronauts awaken, they must ground themselves in time by repeating “today is the morning of a new day”; in this way, they’ll orient themselves to ISS days where they will witness 16 sunrises and sunsets.

🌏 Harvey’s musings on loneliness, reminded me of the famous photograph taken by astronaut Michael Collins which captured Apollo 11’s lunar module (with Aldrin and Armstrong inside) and the Earth in the background. This photograph literally contains all of humanity, save one: the photographer. At the same time, Collins with his photographer’s eye, is the only human presence in the photo.

🌏 Chie (pronounced “chee-aye”) contemplates the meaning of grief and loss from her unique vantage point above human society.

🌏 I think every one of us who has never left terra firma as they do, contemplates the fragility of human life in space. I appreciated the astronauts’ own surprise at not feeling that expected precariousness of being reliant on life support machinery, but then Harvey drives the point home that to be human (even with solid earth beneath our feet) is to fight against that same inevitable decay. 

🌏 The bits on the (apparently) crumbling portions of the Russian wing of the ISS, combined with the inner monologue of the cosmonaut, seem as close as Harvey gets to pointed social commentary.

🌏 I particularly enjoyed the portion detailing a space walk. We’ve seen footage numerous times. In fact, they occur with enough frequency that those of us who are Earth-bound have an almost blasé attitude towards what is still an incredibly courageous endeavor. Harvey gives life to what they might be thinking, feeling, seeing. To me, it returned a sense of awe to what these astronauts accomplish regularly.

🌏 Thanks to Harvey, I’m adding the man-made craters in AZ where Aldrin and Armstrong trained for their landing, to my must-see list.