Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis.
While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.
Orbital was written during lockdown when the meaning of home (for those lucky enough to have one) changed forever. There’s a sense in which Harvey’s six astronauts return us to that moment when our homes became prisons and we were forced to contemplate the global effects of a virus that had no respect for national boundaries.
