Samantha Harvey’s Orbital offers a beautiful window into the mind of an astronaut

 

At a time when Indians are celebrating the return to earth of Sunita Williams, my mind is still afloat with the thoughts of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
 
Don’t get me wrong: the space station I’m talking of is from Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker prize-winning novel.
 
And what an amazing book it is!
 
Like millions of Indians, I’ve enjoyed Williams’s videos of her extended stay on the ISS. But after reading Orbital, I can happily say that I’m “witness” to much more.
 
First and foremost, the wondrous, all-too-human thoughts of Anton, Pietro, Roman, Shaun, Chie, and Nell—whom Harvey has compared to the spaceship’s heart, mind, hands, soul, conscience, and breath.
 
But embodying what goes on in their minds and hearts, I suspect, is the author’s own voice. A voice so beautiful and enchanting that the Guardian called Orbital “an uplifting book, in every sense.” 
 
When I started reading the book, I picked up a pen to mark a few lines or paras I particularly liked. By the time I finished it, however, the markings engulfed much of this tiny treasure (it’s less than 140 pages but its scope and imagination are vast).
 
The best parts I liked concern the sheer beauty and uniqueness (thus far!) of the pale blue dot we call Planet Earth—our only home in a seemingly endless universe, not counting the astronauts’ occasional sojourns outside. And I completely second the spacefolk’s thoughts, echoed so poignantly by Harvey in her book, about how the humans’ non-Sapiens behavior is ruining it beyond repair.
 
When the astronauts arrive on the spaceship, the lights of the “night earth” impress them most. As Harvey writes: “From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone…The night’s electric excess takes their breath.”
 
After a week or two of “city awe,” however, the astronauts’ senses begin to broaden and deepen and it’s “daytime earth” they come to love, the author notes. 
 
With the space station orbiting the earth at over 17,000 miles an hour, there’s a new daybreak for them every ninety minutes. And the kaleidoscopic play of night and day casts a mesmeric spell on how they observe the earth.
 
“It’s the humanless simplicity of land and sea. The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself. It’s the planet’s indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language. It’s the black hole of the Pacific becoming field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges; then the spindle of Central America which drops away beneath them now to bring to view the Bahamas and Florida and the arc of smoking volcanoes on the Caribbean Plate. It’s Uzbekistan in an expanse of ochre and brown, the snowy mountainous beauty of Kyrgyzstan. The clean and brilliant Indian Ocean of blues untold. The apricot desert of Takla Makan traced about with the faint confluencing and parting lines of creek beds. It’s the diagonal beating path of the galaxy, an invitation to the shunning void.”
 
The love for a shifting, turning, breathing earth is also accompanied by the realization of how human choices and politics have wreaked havoc.
 
“Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or retreated or disintegrating glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush…or the altered contour of a coastline where sea is reclaimed meter by painstaking meter and turned into land to house more and more people…or a vanishing mangrove forest in Mumbai, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses whose plastic makes the entire southern tip of Spain white in the sun.”
 
When they look upon the earth, Harvey writes, the astronauts come to see the politics of want, of growing and getting—a “billion extrapolations of the urge for more.”
 
Inside the spacecraft, the astronauts go about their duties with mechanical precision—often marveling at the meaning of it all. They tend to mice and plants brought along for scientific experiments, do the chores of maintaining the ship, and engage in small talk like most people would do back here on earth.
 
On occasion, Harvey skillfully melds sensitive moments with the critical realities of living in the extraordinary environment of a spaceship. For instance, when Chie shares a memory of climbing a mountain with her mother (who recently expired in Japan while Chie is here on the station), Anton finds himself crying. His tears form four droplets which float away from his eyes—which he and Chie “catch in the palms of their hands.”
 
Liquids are not to be let loose on a spacecraft.
 
Harvey narrates the life and challenges of astronauts in a way that stays with you long after you have read her words.
 
“Up here in microgravity you’re a seabird on a warm day drifting, just drifting. What use are biceps, calves, strong shin bones; what use muscle mass? Legs are a thing of the past. But every day the six of them have to fight this urge to dissipate. They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run eight miles inside a slick metal module with a close-up view of a turning planet.
 
Sometimes they wish for a cold stiff wind, blustery rain, autumn leaves, reddened fingers, muddy legs, a curious dog, a startled rabbit, a leaping sudden deer, a puddle in a pothole, soaked feet, a slight chill, a fellow runner, a shaft of sun.”
 
One of the astronauts, Shaun, once receives an editorial email asking his views about an imminent moon landing. The question posed is this: With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?
 
While Shaun answers the email in the customary and predictable way (“There’s perhaps never been so exciting and pivotal a time…”), he turns the question to his fellow-traveler, Pietro. The answer Pietro gives is more pointed (and perhaps apt, given our current situation): “With the gilded pens of billionaires, I guess.”
 
The gilded pens of billionaires indeed seem to be writing our future in space, perhaps without as much thought as should have gone into it. And often in a “tearing” hurry.
 
Which is why we must take a pause and go with Harvey on a considerate “Orbital trip”. The book doesn’t have all the answers—but at least it compels us to ask some questions that urgently need to be asked.