“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.”
“Trivial and momentous at once” feels like an appropriate descriptor for Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital.” The book details a single day in the lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Over the course of 24 hours, the characters orbit the Earth sixteen times, witnessing sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Most of the day’s events are mundane: the characters collect experimental data, work out on stationary bikes, eat food out of tubes, repair equipment, and watch movies. But the momentous is mixed in among the trivial. One astronaut receives word that her mother has died. Another worries for the safety of friends back on earth as the crew tracks a massive typhoon across the Pacific. At the end of the day, they settle into their floating sleeping bags, ready to do it all again tomorrow.
I tried to describe this novel to my book club, and found that I could really only explain what it isn’t. It takes place in space, but isn’t science fiction. It is completely absorbing, but doesn’t have much of a plot. What it does have is gorgeous prose that makes the experience of space travel feel both cosmic and deeply personal. I have never learned how to move in zero gravity, or looked from orbit at an Earth “shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want.” But I have experienced grief and boredom and wonder. I have felt the need to keep moving during tragedy, because “when the planet is galloping through space and you gallop after it through light and dark with your time-drunk brain, nothing can end.” Harvey’s astronauts are living through moments that are “both repetitive and unprecedented,” but not because they are in space. It is because they, in all their contradiction, beauty, and messiness, are human.