Don’t you hate it when a book squanders a perfectly good premise? Orbital by Samantha Harvey is set in a single day aboard what is clearly meant to be, but I believe is never explicitly named, the International Space Station. We spend our time with six astronauts and cosmonauts as they circle the earth 16 times in a single day.
What a cool idea! What a cool setting! Sure, we’ve seen plenty of science fiction stories set on fictional futuristic space stations, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a general fiction book set on a current space station. It’s both grounded in reality, and completely alien from my daily experience.
The problem is that Orbital is so incredibly tedious in its insistence on being philosophical and introspective.
I’m not against the idea of a slice of life story, especially when that life is taking place in orbit. But we’re served up six slices of life in approximately 130 pages (based on the page count on my ereader). We don’t get a lot of time with any one of these people, and so even though we spend a lot of time in their heads, I felt like they didn’t feel like distinct and unique characters. It doesn’t help that the narration often takes on a distant and omniscient third-person viewpoint and shares how all six of them are having similar thoughts or similar experiences, or it becomes even more distant to wax philosophical without tying that philosophy to any one character. It also didn’t help that as far as I could tell, every character on the space station is cis and het, and I knew I had far queerer books waiting to be read.
The thing is, there’s a seed of a really good story. I’m going to spoil the only two things of note that happen in Orbital. Japanese astronaut Chie learns that her mother has just passed away, and the team is tasked with recording the view of a powerful typhoon developing in the Pacific Ocean. If this book had really focused on Chie, it could have explored themes of what we miss out when we choose to move away from family, and the sacrifices we make for our career or other dreams; it could have contrasted Chie’s personal loss against the impending large-scale loss threatened by the storm. But instead her story is given equal billing to people just having a normal day.
Honestly this felt like a short story worth of material stretched across a novella length work, bulked up with run-on sentences and lists (do I really need to know every single thing being swept along by the typoon?). The book felt far longer than it was and was a real slog to get through. The only reason I pushed through was that I needed it for a specific book bingo square and had waited so long to get it from the library that I didn’t have time to find a replacement.
Orbital won the Booker Prize last year and showed up on Best Of lists, so obviously I’m in the minority here. Probably if I read more so-called “literary fiction” I’d be eating this up, but I’d also argue that this sort of self-important work is why so many “genre fiction” readers think they hate “literary fiction.” If this was the first time I’d stuck my head out of a sci-fi and fantasy bubble, thinking this was a sci-fi adjacent work, I’d be pretty disappointed, but luckily I’ve read books like Sister Snake which have shown me there’s good stuff to be read over in the “literary” world.
CWs and TWs: This book contains mentions of illness, parental death, natural destruction, and the vaguest sexual content.
Source and Format: I borrowed the ebook from Seattle Public Library.
Reading Challenge Prompts
Brick & Mortar: Won an Award. As mentioned in the main body of the review, this won the 2025 Booker Prize. The thing is, when it comes to awards in the genres I usually read (such as the Hugos and Nebulas), I’ve probably either already read all the recent winners (and most of the short list, too) or had a really good reason for not reading it. So I had to step out into the world of more general, more “literary” fiction. Even though I haven’t read it, I think I agree with the people who said James should have won instead. It sounded like a book that had a lot more to say, whereas this book felt very safe and not just apolitical but anti-political. Yes, yes, all our human differences and borders seem insignificant when you go to space, but unfortunately, the fascists down here are trying really hard to make them significant in a negative way.
Reading Challenge Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 6 of 25, no bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 8 of 25, no bingos.
Book Riot: 10 of 25.
Physical TBR: 2 of 12.
Brick & Mortar: 20 of 25, 4 bingos*.
*I’ve completed several of the non-reading prompts, hence the mismatch with the number of reviews!
World of Whimm: 10 of 24, no bingos.