I READ ALMOST no science fiction, so I was surprised when my daughter handed this off to me after reading it for her book club; both the title and the brightly colored stars 'n' planets cover art say "science fiction here." But no--the novel is set on a space station, but Orbital is a fairly straightforward realistic novel about what people do on space stations. I thought it was excellent.
The novel is about a single working day on the station, which includes sixteen orbits of the earth, sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets. Four astronauts (from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Italy) and two cosmonauts (from Russia) make observations of Earth, conduct experiments, communicate with each other and with the people on Earth, reflect, remember, wonder...and that's the novel.
It's almost plotless. There are no aliens on board, no one is trying to kill anyone else on board, no one is falling in love with anyone else on board--no conflict, no rising action, no climax. Just how people live in a space station...which is perfect. The great novelists from Austen to Eliot to Joyce to Woolf to Wallace to Knausgaard (I'm willing to defend the latter two as "great," arguable though it might be), have always shown us that a lot is going on when "nothing" is going on, and Harvey does that here.
And the writing is wonderful--a little high cholesterol for some, maybe, but the lyricism of Harvey's prose was just what the novel needed to rotate the prism of the mundane so that one saw the light in it.
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