Orbital by Samantha Harvey
A Book Review
Where I live in Colorado, at the foot of a towering fourteen-thousand foot peak, there’s a phenomenon that the locals all comment on. You’ll hear them whenever they visit friends further east in town—the mountains really do look best further away. It’s not that it isn’t scenic up close too, but you lose the grandness and prominence because you’re a part of the rising foothills.
This is what Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was for me. A stepping back, a reminder of the beauty of Earth that gets lost so many times to war, famine, climate change, political unrest, borders that aren’t real, and what we can otherwise only see directly in front of us. This book is the bigger picture, the grand view. It is astounding, frequently beautiful, revelatory at times. There are times when a book slaps you across the face with how good it is, how necessary it is right now, and how you never would have guessed it. That’s what Orbital was for me, and I loved it.
The novel is plotless, and also somehow, full of plot. Simultaneously about a day in the lives of six men and women orbiting above Earth in a space station, and also about everything that it means to be a human being living on a blue dot adrift in the universe. A friend commented to me that it’s about “everything and nothing”, and I couldn’t have agreed more. In two hundred pages Samantha Harvey has accomplished more meaning than I thought possible.
There were times reading this that I put the book down in awe. That’s a thing I only do once in a while, when the prose is so excellent that it makes me wonder if I will ever write a sentence that beautiful. I read passages aloud to my wife, giddy. I underlined and bracketed things. I re-read my favorite bits, and dissected them. I am certain that this is a book of space poetry, not a novel. The following was one of my favorites.
We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.
Please, if you read one book this year, read this. I cannot recommend it enough.
I primarily don’t send book reviews out to subscribers anymore, but please excuse this one time that I do. It feels important and I really want you to read it. I want to give
a heartfelt thank you for recommending it. She runs a fantastic little Substack about books and story that I’d really recommend.
I downloaded the ebook before it was published and loved it. I never thought it would make a splash, but a year later I see it on the best-seller list and then it gets a Pulitzer nom, and I’m thinking, Okay, beautiful books of deep poetic thought CAN be popular! It has helped me keep writing what I like and what I want to read instead of what I think others might like.
I thought it was really good, and then I got to the coda, which blasted it to excellence. Deserved all the flowers it got.