Poetic stream of consciousness-y novel following six astronauts on a space station orbiting the Earth over one day of low earth orbits while they contemplate their lives, the world and the many people they’ve left behind.
I picked up Orbital because it’s a small novel that I could knock out in a day and it came highly recommended.
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital reminds me a lot of Jose Saramago’s work in form because Samantha Harvey doesn’t use any punctuation marks for dialog making the prose feel stream of consciousness-y. This makes me feel closer to the POV character’s thoughts than I would feel otherwise.
Where Samantha Harvey’s writing in Orbital differs from Saramago’s is in its content. Saramago is tends to make small changes to the way our world works and then works out how those changes ripple out through people’s lives on the page for our reading pleasure.s
On the other hand, in Orbital, Samantha Harvey seems more interested in describing the world as-it is (perhaps shifting the timeline forward a bit) and portraying multiple POVs to express the wide range of the human experience.
The hurricane caused by climate change in Orbital feels more like something that’s already happening to us today that we’re actively suffering from rather than a maneuver Saramago would make like “everybody on the planet is becoming blind” as some kind of metaphor for political ideology / faith gone wrong (see Blindness(José Saramago)).
In Orbital, Samantha Harvey doesn’t appear to be as militantly atheist as Jose Saramago does but the portrayal of Shaun makes me think that she problaby doesn’t believe.
I find it hard to believe (see what I did there?) that Shaun, as the only openly religious (Christian to be precise) astronaut on the crew, would go to space, watch as a hurricane rampages on the planet, killing uncountable numbers of people and start to subconsciously and consciously question his faith throughout all of the chapters dedicated to his POV.
That’s his main character beat. I found it both hard to believe and a missed opportunity to portray a character who believes in a higher power despite going to space.
One could argue that this new perspective Shaun has on the world could have a profound impact on his belief in God. But given that Orbital presents us with the POVs of six astronauts, I find it a shame that the only openly religious one’s only character arc is one of his faith being shaken to the core by the act of going to space.
Using a natural disaster to “prove” that an all powerful and benevolent God can’t exist is a common argument used in militant atheist spaces. Despite me agreeing with this argument in broad strokes, I find it hard to believe that Shaun wouldn’t have encountered it already in his life and built up some kind of religious argument against it.
Basically, I think there’s people out there who can believe in God and be astronauts and I would have liked to have seen that on the page even if I’m not a believer myself.