Lost in Space-Thought

27 Apr, 2025

I’m trying to nail down what it was about Samantha Harvey’s Orbital that didn’t grab me the way it did the judges of the Booker and Hawthornden Prizes, much less the writers of the many positive reviews it’s received. It’s not a bad book by any means—but much to my surprise, I was left indifferent by what seemed more like extended musing and less like a story.

Why surprise? Because fan that I am of slow cinema and novels that would probably not be considered plot driven—Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Woolf’s The Waves, Murnane’s The Plains—you’d think that being dropped into the minds and conversations of a half-dozen astronauts drifting around in a space station would be my jam. How not to love it, when the slow and eerie Solaris, both book and (Russian) film version, is an essential part of my own canon?

Oddly enough, and I’m completely blown away by the fact that I’m about to side with any number of self-appointed writing gurus, I think it really does come down to, not exactly lack of plot, but of conflict.¹ Everyone floating around in Orbital has their own thoughts and personal difficulties they’re dealing with, but they’re all overcome by the wonder of being where they are. A quick look outside at the painterly vision of continents passing below, and everything becomes suspended in another round of meditation. That in itself is hardly regrettable; if anything, we need more pausing and looking at and thinking about the place we live. But I sense it’s this tendency to keep going back to the sights beyond the station and the ruminations they give rise to that Harvey thought might hold this book together: the particular ways these individuals from different parts of the earth fall into amazement, or lament, or distance themselves via various mental or emotional habits from the dissonance that crops up between the incredible synoptic views they have of the planet and their knowledge of the existence-threatening chaos and—hey!—conflicts happening down below. Any tensions that might have emerged between the Russian cosmonauts and the four other astronauts were either never there in the first place, or have been quickly resolved in the light of their collective understanding of how insignificant nationalism or rigid patriotism is when faced with their unique position.

The problem, I think, is that the conflict on earth is kept safely at bay, even as it’s not denied. There’s nothing left for the characters to do but marvel and think quietly to themselves about Bigger Questions as they go about their tasks. I think we’re then meant to marvel as well at how petty our differences are when we step back from them.

But let’s go back to Solaris, a tale of a few earthlings being subjected to a gaslighting planet whose ocean produces strange and gorgeous temporary sculptures and must somehow be sentient, even if we can only speculate that that’s the case. You could probably spend a whole day or lifetime orbiting around that planet in awe, musing about, in these characters’ cases, a dead wife or your ruined career or secret perversions: all things that don’t matter or make any sense in this new world. And that wondering would be a valid thing for a person to do, if not of especial interest to anyone else. What makes us interested, though, in this planet and the personal travails of the individuals stuck on it is the way that they feed and become inextricably intertwined with each other: the way, for example, Kelvin’s dead wife appears and refuses to be dispensed with, gaining more and more of an independent personality each time she comes back. The way the planet refuses to lurk in the background, in the mere view, of these invading humans’ actions; the way the humans can’t separate their thoughts or daily activities from what the planet happens to be doing. Orbital’s astronauts, of course, also can’t fully separate themselves from the earth in terms of simple survival—but as they hover over it, they can go about their work undisturbed by any earthly or galactic attempts to get inside their heads or mess with their experiments.

Maybe you’ll be more into the novel if you’re jazzed by ekphrasis; the book is filled with regular descriptions of continental-scale landscape, as in

Off to starboard are the shores of Malaysia and Indonesia where the sand, algae, coral and phytoplankton make the water luminous with a spectrum of greens…. As they ascend India’s coast the clouds are thinning; morning strengthens, is briefly stark, and then a haze moves in at the Bay of Bengal, the clouds wispy and numerous and the Ganges silt estuary opens into Bangladesh. The umber plains and ochre rivers, burgundy valley of a thousand-mile ridge. The Himalayas are a creeping hoar frost; Everest an indiscernible blip. Everything beyond them, which caps the earth, is the rich fresh brown of the Tibetan Plateau, glacial, river-run and studded with sapphire frozen lakes.²

Still, I can’t help comparing something like this view-of-planet-as-through-line with an unexpectedly riveting film like Koyaanisqatsi. Free of narration or dialogue, here we get Philip Glass’s music over about an hour and a half of incredible cinematography moving from and according to the slow time of land and sky to the insane crush, destruction, and speed of then-contemporary (1982) existence. I suppose the film could be said to be a painterly, compressed projection of planetary history—but that’s only a surface-level account of what’s going on here. Uncommented-on conflict emerges as soon as humans enter the picture. We are the conflict, or the source of it: humans as bringers of internal strife and destructive imbalance vis-à-vis everything else. It’s something Harvey hints at, but in the language-free movie, the beautiful views don’t allow for any distance from the madness; instead, they only fuel the discomfort we have to confront: the conflict within our viewing selves about our unavoidable role in all this movement. Adding words to the mix, especially when put together in an overt attempt to have us philosophize about what we’re seeing, would come down to heavy-handed ruin of the project.

Wikipedia categorizes Orbital as “philosophical fiction,” and it may be what seems like Harvey’s unhidden aim of being more thoughtful or meditative than “novelistic” that’s keeping me unable to feel involved in the book.³ Here, Seamus Heaney may best be able to identify the source of my discomfort. In discussing how John Clare’s early work was trapped in the time’s conventions about what qualified as good poetry, Heaney tells us what those conventions entailed, via a letter from Clare’s publisher, who “urged Clare to ‘raise his view’ and ‘speak of the Appearances of Nature… more philosophically.’” And Clare could do that. But in consenting to this demand, his poetry was no better or worse than anything his contemporaries were writing; enjoyable for average readers, but forgettable outside of that circle or the time and place in which they lived. As Heaney says, Clare’s poetry at this point in his career “moves fluently and adequately but it moves like water that flows over a mill-wheel without turning it.”⁴

When Clare ditched those standards, though, making use of the everyday speech typical of his region and focusing on the swift action of field mice or the buzzing, interconnected life of creatures big and small around a single pond, the poetry began to pop. It only happened when, as Heaney says, Clare wielded not only “the mechanical gears of a metre… [but] also the sprockets of our creatureliness… meaning[ing] that on occasion a reader simply cannot help responding with immediate recognition to the pell-mell succession of vividly accurate impressions… [to] an unspectacular joy and totally alert love for the one-thing-after-anotherness of the world.”⁵ Harvey’s continents and storm-system-wide one-thing-after-anotherness are too big and spectacular for most of us to grasp, much less relate to—and that’s probably a big part of her point. In not only having those vast surfaces roll out before us, though, but in offering along with them “more philosophical appearances of nature,” there’s nothing to do but be suspended along with these orbiters if we can—because in spite of massive amounts of description that aim, I think, at show-don’t-tell, there’s no place in this book where I “simply cannot help responding.”

There’s no turn of the mill-wheel in Orbital; no reason to care about the situation as a whole, unless you enjoy dropping in on the conversations people have with their own minds, or are into weed-filled states in which everybody’s last observation about every single thing is riveting. When a crack appeared on the outer surface of the station, my thought was that the moment of tension had finally arrived. Aha! They’re all going to be taken out by delayed maintenance, regardless of how any of them feels about it! It shouldn’t be a spoiler by now to reveal that this disaster did not occur.

Maybe Harvey approached her project in a spirit legitimately fed up with the blippy nature of contemporary attention spans and a growing unwillingness to think or to string two sentences together on our own, letting AI do that task for us, and do it quickly. And on that level, I’ll applaud this slow speculation on what it might be like to drift over your home planet, disconnected even from a stable place to stand. But after spending time in this world, I’ll have to admit: I’m feeling unusually vulnerable to the “Bif!–Pow!–Shazam!” call of one-dimensional heroes and villains. Even I, it turns out, need some narrative movement now and then. I’ll leave the story-free call of this version of space to others, and stick for the near future to the solid ground of one damn thing after another.

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