Book Review: Samantha Harvey’s Orbital
Orbital is the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize and the Hawthornden Prize; it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction.
I watched the Artemis II launch at 3:35 p.m. PST on April 1, 2026 in my classroom in a suburb of Portland, Oregon with 33 high school students. We sat, rapt, breathing as one creature waiting for the blastoff, a slight wire of anxiety stringing us together. When the countdown made it to “one” and the rocket sped through our atmosphere towards the Karman line, kids let out small laughs and sighs, turned to each other, turned to me. We spend so much of our lives looking down and away from each other, deep in our own news and dramas sent to us every minute through our devices. It was poignant to have a moment together looking up and towards. Communal awe still exists, and this sentiment is viscerally captured by Samatha Harvey in her compact and poetic novel Orbital, a well researched but fictional imagining of six astronauts on the International Space Station.
Orbital recounts 16 orbits around earth in the ISS (approximately 24 hours, at 90 or so minutes per orbit). Harvey tells the story in looping, lyrical prose that plays with the circularity of time for the astronauts: daybreak and sunset all within a 90 minute period, over and over. As the station glides around the earth, the narrative glides past the six characters multiple times: brief glimpses of their pasts, events happening to their loved ones on earth, their experiments and daily routines on the station, their dreams. Each story is an image floating by, much like the rolling globe beneath them. The mundanities of human life spin and spin with no resolution, passing clouds over the surface of the planet. Flashes of life on earth are described in prose that is almost dreamlike: Astronaut Chie’s mother slowly dying as her wooden Japanese house rots around her and she watches for the spinning light of her daughter circling in space; an unnamed fisherman friend of Astronaut Pietro’s on a small island off the Philippines deciding whether to evacuate for a stage 4 typhoon, which is being photographed from the ISS.
Harvey’s prose weaves and floats in sentences that sometimes last a page. There are lists that could feel like too much but instead build from specificity to universality, hitting a level of poetic detail that makes the reader eventually think, “yes, that.” Her book is so dense in images that it reads like a 207 page poem. That can, at times, be overwhelming as the characters spin in and out of focus, eclipsed by the lush descriptions of earth-from-above and the minutiae of space research aboard the craft. The “plot” includes the typhoon on earth, Chie’s grief, and the big-small feeling of being a human in an abyss. It would be easy for an author to lose the thread. However, as with a poem, the message woven from the strands of stories and images becomes bigger than each individual piece. The book leaves the reader pondering their lack of importance as an individual, but reconnecting to deep love of the earth, our home.
Recently, I’ve found it hard to love this planet. Perhaps it’s the actions of humans that make it difficult, or maybe it’s the fear that the earth itself is dying, and to love a dying thing means pain is imminent. At one point, Harvey aligns the path of civilization on earth to a human lifespan, saying, “...maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism” (43). This struck me as poignant—a bit too close to the experience of reading the news every morning; of spending hours with teenagers every day. However, this metaphor leaves room for humanity’s ripening into a reflective and constructive middle age, when it could understand the beauty that it has been given. Harvey brings this gift to the reader’s attention by making a book that takes place in space into a love letter to earth. In the final pages, as the astronauts sleep and an omniscient narrator continues to observe the marble of earth below, Harvey writes, “...the earth feels—not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses” (188). Over and over, through her own “flowing verse,” she reminds us that when we take the time to look up and out at our surroundings, we are blessed to be here.