Elaine's Reviews > Orbital

Booker Book 8 of 13: 8/10. I love it when a book that is not something I would normally like at all ends up seducing me. Such is the case with Orbital. This is not a novel, and it is barely fiction. The six astronauts on the space station have lightly sketched characters, although for some the sketching is so light that the morning after I have trouble linking backstory to character. The real main character - the only main character - is planet Earth, lovely damaged magisterial Earth, seen over and over again from lightly shifting angles as the Space Station completes its 16 orbits a day.

Harvey imagines vividly what it is like to see earth from this vantage point, and her prose is gorgeous. She touches on the mysteries of space and the vastness of time and space, and at the book's core, there's the tragedy of human destructiveness. The environmental disaster that is Earth is touched but not dwelled on, which somehow makes it all the more devastating.

Well, I usually don't like books that don't have characters or plot, that are episodic and repetitive, but Harvey does this so well, and gets so neatly at the heartbreak of the current moment with a gentle optimism that comes from taking the very long view.