Orbital by Samantha Harvey Wins the Booker Prize

It’s not often that I find myself both rooting for a contender in the UK’s Booker Prize, and discovering that my choice has actually won, but both happened last night when Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was declared the 2024 winner. The Booker has a reputation for favoring the literary and quotidian—the stereotypical limpidly-written novel of middle-class ennui and middle-aged infidelity. This is neither unearned nor always a bad thing. Winners like Milkman by Anna Burns or Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo are surely among the top novels of the 21st century. But as a result its circle of plausible winners can often seem a bit limited. I think that most watchers of the award would have expected this year’s prize to go to Percival Everett’s James—in which an acknowledged master who has been experiencing a late-career resurgence on page and screen tackles one of core works of the American canon—or Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake—in which hot-button issues of climate change, inequality, and the suppression of protest are discussed through a seductive blend of literary style and thriller convention. (For a more in-depth look at the shortlist check out this excellent essay by Dan Hartland.) For Orbital, a slim, virtually plotless novella about a single day on board the International Space Station, to triumph over these heavy hitters is as unexpected as it is delightful.

It’s also a choice that gratifies genre readers like myself. Despite its stuffy reputation, the Booker has been showing more interest in the fantastical genres in recent years. The 2022 winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, is an energetic romp through 1990s Colombo that is strewn with ghosts evading an afterlife bureaucracy straight out of Defending Your Life or A Matter of Life and Death. Last year Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, which is basically a more literary version of Carl Sagan’s Contact, and which also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, was longlisted for the prize. And in 2021 the International Booker Prize, which recognizes work in translation, shortlisted Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which takes place on a spaceship orbiting an alien planet. Harvey’s novel, though set in the present day and featuring no fantastical elements, chimes with a lot of the concerns of modern science fiction (it makes for an interesting paired read with In Ascension, for example). It’s about people who dedicate themselves to pushing back the boundaries of science and human endeavor, and it takes a systemic, science-based view of the world that feels fundamental to how a lot of science fiction writers approach their subject. Not for nothing was it shortlisted earlier this year for the newly-established Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

My review of Orbital, published on my blog earlier this year, is below. Rereading it, I find that the novel has stayed with me all these months. I hope it finds even more readers, now that it has the imprimatur of both the literary and genre establishment.

More a prose poem than a novel, Harvey’s slim, evocative volume is a minutely detailed description of one day aboard the International Space Station. Divided into chapters according to the station’s orbits around the Earth (sixteen in one day), the novel delves into both the personal and the mechanical with equal degrees of sensitivity and emotional remove. We learn about the station’s routines, the compromises and indignities of life in zero gravity, and the mechanics of maintaining the station and caring for the—far from pristine, in fact practically messy—space around it. Back on Earth, a mega-typhoon is forming, which the astronauts observe with dismay. Meanwhile, passing by and beyond the station, a just-launched rocket bids to deliver the first manned lunar mission in decades.

Orbital shifts between the points of view of the station’s six astronauts—two Russians, and four American-backed from various countries. We learn about their lives—Japanese Chie has recently been rocked by the news of her mother’s death, and is musing about her parents’ history and how it inspired her to go into space; Englishwoman Nell exchanges emails with her husband even as she acknowledges that she has no idea what his life looks like, having spent only a few months together during the four years of her training. As they conduct experiments, perform repairs, collect garbage, and observe the aging station’s messiness and disrepair, they frequently muse about the contrast between the grandeur of space travel in the abstract, and its mundane realities. Their days are spent careening between awe at the sights they’ve seen and the experiences they’ve gotten to have, resigned frustration at the cramped, smelly quarters and physical discomfort of life aboard the station, and recognition of the tremendous costs they’ve accepted for this rare opportunity—separation from their families, long-term physical effects of low gravity and radiation. All of them are aware that they are doing something objectively absurd, but also can’t shake their belief that it is profoundly meaningful. Their intense disconnect from the Earth and the rest of humanity causes them to muse about their place in both, about humanity’s conflicting impulses towards destruction and sublime achievement, and about their own internal contradictions—as soon as they’ve achieved the thing they’ve been working towards for decades, they immediately turn back and think about what they’ve left behind.

Orbital, however, is not purely a novel of character. The narrative slips into the astronauts’ minds with ease, but it just as easily leaves them behind. It lets us see them as individuals, but just as often regards them as a singular whole, ultimately no different from any of the people who preceded them on the station, or who will follow them in the future—people who have probably had the same observations about how annoying it is to go to the bathroom in zero gravity, or the mingled freedom and terror of EVA. Just as frequently, the novel pulls back from character entirely, telling us about the workings of the station, the movement of the typhoon, or simply cataloguing the progression of those sixteen orbits and the parts of the planet they overfly.

With a god’s-eye view of the planet, Harvey muses poetically, and yet also with dry precision, about the image of the Earth from space, its shifting colors as the sun sets and rises, the landmasses that emerge and drift away, the typhoon as it forms and heads towards land. The narrative is full of geographical, technical, and historical detail, which creates a somewhat documentary effect, so dry and factual that readers will be expecting something dramatic to happen—for something to go wrong with the lunar mission, for the typhoon to have even more catastrophic effects than anticipated, or something even worse and more unexpected. There is a sense here of a calm before the storm. Eventually, however, one realizes that it is that calm—which is, of course, deceptive, concealing as it does ordinary human ferment and frustration—that is the point. As the station sails around and around the Earth, as its inhabitants are caught between wonder and tedium, and as the whole project of human spaceflight—of human endeavor, really—carries on, Orbital carries us confidently towards its conclusion, which is really just the beginning of another day.