5-Page Book Club: Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Booker Prize Winner)

Cataloging the impossible

“Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one.”

Welcome to 5-Page Book Club, in which we read five pages of a novel to see what we can learn as writers.

Today, let’s discuss five pages of Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a short novel about a day in the life of six international astronauts circling Earth on a space station. Orbital recently won the Booker prize. The judges had this to say about awarding Harvey’s writing: “With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”

You can read the first five pages of Orbital here for free.

Describing Impossible Sights

Harvey has the task of describing what none of us has seen, except in photographs: the view of Earth from space. In the excerpt linked above, which is not taken from the very first pages but from a section that starts a few pages after, Harvey sometimes leans heavily into imagery.

Into view edges a giant city nebula among reddish-rust-nothing; no, two cities, Johannesburg and Pretoria locked together like a binary star.

As astronaut Roman looks through a window on a space station, he sees what is at first difficult to make out: two cities lit up at night on the earth’s surface. What would it be like to see cities from so far above the earth? Like looking up at the night sky, at impossibly-distant stars. Only this time, the view is backward. Roman is in the stars, and the stars, to him, are cities.

Where are we, where are we? Where on earth.