[I read this 2024 novella in two halves, writing about the first half before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
21 February 2025
Orbit -1 to Orbit 6
It’s short, it’s highly readable, it reminds us of some big subjects that concern us all—what’s not to like? My concern, 60-odd pages in and already half-way through, is whether it’s going to end up being more than the sum of its parts. They’re excellent parts, and Samantha Harvey has obviously planned this carefully, but how far is she going to go with it? It’s a mind-bogglingly vast and beautiful planet we live on, but it’s fragile and we’re making a mess of it. Yep. So, I’m wondering, what are you going to tell me now?
Harvey’s crew of six space station astronauts are looping around the world sixteen times a day. It revolves beneath them, so their path progresses to the west every 90 minutes. So a new dawn races towards them every 90 minutes, and a new dusk descends staggeringly quickly. Except it isn’t staggering for these people any more, just part of a routine in the 24-hour daily timetable they are glad to adhere to. We’re witnessing the events of a single day and, for a little added interest, the wide-ranging thoughts of the crew.
Harvey creates a convincing mise en scene. The crew’s routines, from getting up and having breakfast to the scientific procedures they fulfil, glancing references to food sachets, drinks containers and how desk accessories—and the crew themselves—need to be anchored… and so on. They have to perform vigorous two-hour exercises to ensure they will still be able to stand after nine months of near-weightlessness, but the absence of gravity plays strange tricks on the mind. You can’t automatically locate where your limbs are without checking, and orientation within the confined spaces doesn’t come easily. There are four men and two women, all young enough and strong enough, and all professionals. They can’t help regarding one another as family, because what else can they do when real families could not be further away from them? We get it.
They are 250 miles above the Earth, but their home planet has never felt closer. It’s always there, filling the windows on one side of the space station, and it’s never, ever the same. Its hugeness reminds them all, individually and collectively—the point of view ranges easily amongst them, and we’re happy sometimes to believe they are all thinking the same thoughts—just how tiny we human beings are. Simultaneously, through the opposite widows, the vastness of space reminds them that the gargantuan mother-ship of their home planet is really no more than an almost invisible speck. We know the statistics, but it’s engaging for a writer like Harvey to take the time to give us these powerful reminders.
But I was saying that it’s the thoughts of the crew—to say nothing of the visceral, intimate interiority of their physical beings—that makes this narrative more than just a re-packaging of the research that Harvey has done. But it’s a pity that in only 130-odd pages and with a lot else going on, there isn’t going to be enough room for developing fully-rounded characters. None is particularly memorable, except for occasional specific details about their biographies. As Chie, the Japanese woman, quietly grieves over the death of her mother within the last few days—yes, really—we get the mother’s back-story and her importance in getting Chie to live with an independent outlook and ambition. The Italian, Pietro, looks down at the super-typhoon that’s developing, and which they are told to photograph extensively, and thinks of the Filipino fisherman who will be caught beneath it. He met the man on his honeymoon, and was able to do him a favour, so they have always kept in touch. The warning Pietro sends him, to get out of there, is as useless as he feared it would be. Where can a poor fisherman go in twelve hours?
One of the Russians, Anton, has his own memories of his father’s obsession with the moon landings—I didn’t mention that the first mission to the moon in decades is being launched this very day—and how the stories he told Anton were imaginary, of the Russian moon missions that never happened. I wonder if we’re to realise that the ambitions that lead to these people’s presence on the space station might be based on little more than childhood fantasies. Chie doesn’t even know what exactly her mother meant when she spoke about how, so far, men have always made the running. Was it really a warning about how she shouldn’t be unrealistic in her hopes? After all, her mother was not at all ambitious. Meanwhile the other woman, Nell (I think—they are already merging into composites in my head), remembers how she obsessed about the Challenger and especially its women crew members, and was devastated by the disaster that befell it.
Things are happening on this single day. That typhoon and Pietro’s highly implausible link to it. The launch of the moon mission, and the crew’s envy (or not—there’s something hugely satisfying about staying in such relatively close orbit). The rawness of the mother’s death. And one of them, Anton, decides to try out the old-fashioned shortwave radio he’s brought to make contact with anyone on the ground who has similar equipment. He expects nothing, but as their orbit leaves Australia, he hears a remote voice… but the sound is too poor for conversation. Maybe we’re being invited to wonder how real are these imagined ties with the mother-ship, Earth. Maybe they’re having to learn what we all know—a fact not disproven by their constant close contact with one another—that however close we feel we are to other people, in reality we’re always alone.
Orbit 7 to Orbit 16—to the end
I don’t want to sound bored, but Orbits 7-11 are pretty much more of the same. The crew’s artificially imposed day has brought them around to a notional late evening, and until then we’ve been sharing their routines, memories and musings while from time to time the narrator—let’s call her Samantha Harvey—lets us in on a few philosophical points of her own, or describes what can be seen on Earth if you happen to be looking. She likes that neutral second-person form: ‘You’ can see this landmass or that mountain range, catch a glimpse of the eighth, or ninth, or tenth dawn of the day… and so on. It’s engaging because, in an impressive feat of imagination, she is able to convey both the extraordinariness of it all, and the mundane reality of the lives of the crew.
Orbits 12-16 are a little different, because the crew are asleep. The chapters are short, but Harvey has to fill them with something. So she does, ringing changes of how she describes the magnificent, ever-changing vistas the crew aren’t seeing, or ranging more widely across space with the lunar astronauts, or visiting the dreams of the sleepers. But she’s sticking to her self-imposed challenge, giving us exactly 24 hours in the most extraordinary confined space imaginable. As the crew begins to wake, it’s over.
But that’s on Orbit 16, and before that, even before this second half, Harvey has a lot of material to cover. I can only imagine that she had a very strict agenda of what she wanted to tell us about—the contents, I think in my more cynical moments, of one of those popular non-fiction guides to the space station that no doubt exists somewhere. I can imagine one of those impressively illustrated encyclopaedia-style books for children and young adults. (I haven’t read it, but this looks like the kind of thing.) Here is the space station, with its separate parts joined together in these stages. Here’s the training procedure, the trials underwater and in claustrophobic cave systems, the day of take-off and arrival for the next round of astronauts. Here’s why space-walks have to happen, usually for routine maintenance purposes, and these are the safety measures that have to be undertaken. Here are the sleeping and toilet arrangements, the stocks of food, the storage for experimental material, including live animals such as mice….
All of these, and plenty of others, get their place in the sun. Or in the near-total darkness of space. Perhaps it’s just a whisper of a thought somebody has when the mice first realise that they don’t have to keep clinging on to the wires of the cage bars, as they learn to let go and make their way as best they can, in mid-air, just like the crew. Or Harvey might spend a whole page or more on somebody’s vivid memory of that first arrival, on hold outside the space station, waiting for the internal procedures to be gone through before being allowed inside. Or she might just tell us. There’s a lot of telling in this book, and I’ve no particular problem with that. It’s as interesting as one of those illustrated books, with the hoped-for bonus that come with this being presented as real, lived experiences. It’s like being there, isn’t it?
If only. Maybe it’s to do with Harvey’s ambitious decision to have her omniscient author visit the consciousness of six different people, often, that makes it impossible to have any real indiviuality. Usually, it doesn’t matter who is having the memory of a particular aspect of the story so far. They’ve all had the training, they all have to live with the idea of separation from everything familiar, they all… etc. Do those little individual foibles or specific experiences help to make them more rounded? For me, no, but it isn’t surprising. Pietro likes the idea of the station’s interior being made cosy, like a farmhouse. Chie makes lists of what angers, or annoys or, sometimes, gives her a sense of happy anticipation about what she will be able to reconnect with at home. Anton has his frustratingly brief snatches of half-decipherable short-wave radio chat, Pietro (again) has his fisherman—who doesn’t die, our kindly narrator tells us, and nor does anybody in his family. Bless.
Big themes float around in the microgravity of the station. Our common humanity that makes distance and difference seem irrelevant. The way that it’s only at night that the blazes or ribbons of light make the world seem undeniably inhabited—very little evidence of mankind is visible from space during daylight, as borders and political differences seem to have no reality. It’s a nice thought… but we’re not going to take any lasting comfort from such an idea. In 2025, as I read this, the idea of mankind’s universal and shared insignificance doesn’t make the world seem better, not even for a single orbit of the space station. Or a millisecond, if I’m honest.
I mentioned those sleepy-time orbits. In one of them, Harvey happily describes all ‘you’ can see on earth during the station’s 90-minute passage above it. It’s very pretty. In another, she takes us through the whole of time and space from the big bang to the present, fitting it into the time-scale of a single year (not at all an original conceit, but never mind). The birth of our own solar system, for instance, comes in at the end of August, and its inevitable death will come in not many months’ time. In another chapter we’re with the moon astronauts for a moment, as Harvey speculates on the kind of future we all thought was inevitable during the 1960s space race. And threaded through them all are those deep thoughts about life, the universe and everything….
How about, for instance, the whole space station project—and by implication, the whole history of mankind’s so-called progress? We’re in the sleeping consciousness of one of the crew: ‘Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.’
Lots of sleepy paradoxes there, but… but well, you know. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon or an evening reading aHarvey’s little thought experiment, but I can’t imagine taking much away from it that’s truly new. Maybe the relentless turn of the ocean and continents, and of the mind-boggling, commonplace routine of the daily rising and setting of the sun. Yes, that will have to do.
We can read it for you wholesale 