Nataliya's Reviews > Orbital

It seems that to turn a narrative set on the International Space Station — in low Earth orbit, with six people in a few tiny modules surrounded by cables and Velcro and darkness and stars and immense yet tiny planet Earth below — into literary fiction it takes removing the plot and leaving just inner dreamlike monologues and musings unable to escape the pull of Earth and humanity. It’s about our human earthly troubles, loneliness, connections, very contemplative and reflective and ultimately hopeful.

“Hello, are you there? Hello?”

Stripped of plot, this is really a very long essay that could have just gone on and on, as the lack of narrative structure other than dividing the book into multiple orbits of Earth over a day does not call for any ending or closure or a stopping point. Usually I’d have my eyes glaze over when confronted with such slow and dreamlike rumination on humanity, but I suppose the periodic injections of space station routines (bagging up waste to burn up in space? muscle atrophy from microgravity? Velcro-ing chopsticks to the table?) made my attention perk up, helping to refocus. I’m just nerdy that way. (Maybe that’s what Kafka needed to get my attention - a spacesuit).

“Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived their lives and their hope does not make them naive. So what do they do? What action to take? And what use are words? They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.”

(Of course I immediately subscribed to YouTube NASA channel. And viewed live feed of Earth from ISS. Seriously, that’s hypnotic).

Borders are (mostly) invisible from space, and we are all passengers on this tiny blue dot which we cannot leave fully, ever. It’s all a matter of perspective, and it’s humbling realizing your insignificance in the light of something immensely and overwhelmingly amazing. “They’re humans with a godly view,” indeed.

“Some alien civilisation might look on and ask: what are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round? The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.”

And yet this book is a bit long for its short length, in its slow movement through 16 Earth orbits in a day, and like that “godly view” it’s both a blessing and a curse. As much fun as an extra-long contemplative meditation can be, at some point the need arises for something focused somewhere else, something outside the space inside the six crewpersons’ heads (and maybe do something, anything, to help me connect with any of them just a little bit), and something to make time pass in a way that seems more real and less obsessively nebulous, even if the writing is quite lovely.

“The surprising thought occurs to them sometimes: they are encapsulated, a submarine moving alone through the vacuum depths, and when they leave it they will feel less safe. They will reappear on the earth’s surface as strangers of a kind. Aliens learning a mad new world.”

3.5 stars. I’m glad space stuff is coming into the literary fiction world, even if it’s just a framework for now.

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Also posted on my blog.