Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Orbital invites readers into the intimate spaces, musings, aspirations, and ambitions of six astronauts and cosmonauts bound by the shared circumstances of their joint space journey. As they pursue their respective missions at a remove from the activities and concerns back on Earth, space opens for a deeper exploration of their attachments, motives, and care for each other and for the planetary home to which they one day will return.
The International Space Station (ISS) and the diverse roster of scientists convened to live and research there offer a compelling metaphor for the shared experience of first-year students who convene to live, learn, and grow as a campus community at BU. Through the thoughts and experiences of Orbital’s characters, author Samantha Harvey opens an expansive meditation for all BU community members to evaluate and revalidate the personal commitments that drive them to invest so much in the life of the mind and in the global reach of the research performed here.
Discussion Guide
1. Author Samantha Harvey employs a nontraditional approach to storytelling across the 16 planetary orbits that comprise a single Earth day. What impact does the book’s narrative structure have on the reader’s experience?
2. The characters of Orbital’s space station are exceptional and driven by a desire to engage in work that matters, to satisfy their curiosities, and to meaningfully deploy talents honed over decades of dedicated work and study.
[T]hey don’t come into space to be encouraged. They come out of a drive for more, more of everything, more knowledge and humility. Speed and stillness. Distance and closeness. More less, more more. (pp. 38–39)
And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe. (p. 126)
Based on your own experiences, what connections have you observed between effort and destiny? Among ambition, achievement, and fulfillment?
How do those who achieve their goals evaluate the many trade-offs and lost opportunities along the way?
3. Orbital invites several examinations of the role of perspective on identity and meaning:
The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph [of Earth from space] is the photographer himself – his eye at the viewfinder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release. In that sense, the more enchanting thing about Collins’s image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he is really the only human presence it contains. (p. 64)
There was a lesson at school about the painting Las Meninas, when Shaun was fifteen. It was about how the painting disoriented its viewer and left them not knowing what it was they were looking at.
It’s a painting inside a painting, his teacher had said – look closely. Look here. Velázquez, the artist, is in the painting, at his easel, painting a painting, and what he’s painting is the king and queen, but they’re outside of the painting, where we are, looking in, and the only way we know they’re there is because we can see their reflection in a mirror directly in front of us. (p. 8)
Consider the value of perspective in inquiry: What kinds of thinking are unlocked when we choose to challenge assumptions and consider other viewpoints?
4. The mother of one of the main characters, Chie, passes away while her daughter is aboard the ISS. Chie calls to mind her mother’s cautions, having lived through the atomic bombings of World War 2, serving as a reminder of the perils inherent in scientific progress:
[L]ook at these men going to the moon, be afraid my child at what humans can do, because we know don’t we what it all means, we know the fanfare and glory of the pioneering human spirit and we know the wonder of splitting the atom and we know what these advances can do…but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day… (pp. 90–91)
What responsibilities do we, as humans, assume as we make advancements in knowledge and technology?
5. Harvey’s novel is filled with references to the precious natural ecosystems present across the globe, to the toll of human progress and politics on them, and to the responsibility of humanity to care for a sustainable future for Earth’s environment:
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? (p. 108)
How does Orbital comment on the relationship of life on Earth to environmental sustainability? How do these themes connect with broader narratives related to futurism, investment in space exploration, and human habitation beyond Earth’s atmosphere?
6. The astronauts of Orbital’s space station achieve enough distance from the rhythms and realities of planetary life to unlock existential meditations on their place in the universe and on the temporality of all things:
So many astronauts and cosmonauts have passed through here, this orbiting laboratory, this science experience in the carefully controlled nurturing of peace. It’s going to end. And it will end through the restless spirit of endeavor that made it possible in the first place. Striking out, further and deeper. The moon, the moon. Mars, the moon. Further yet. A human being was not made to stand still. (p. 202)
From Alexander Graham Bell to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Helen Magill White, the first woman to earn a PhD in the US, consider how many brilliant and influential minds have passed through the corridors of our University as students and scholars. How are our experiences informed by these individuals and the legacies of those like them?
7. The narrator reflects:
[I]t isn’t so much that they don’t want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded – grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself. (pp. 17–18)
In what ways do the characters’ relationship to Earth shift? How does that affect their understanding of home and belonging?
8. Contemplating the characters’ evolving perspectives, the narrator states:
When they look at the planet it’s hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it’s as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with. (p. 109)
How does observing Earth from space contribute to the crews’ feelings of detachment? What might this suggest more broadly about human experience?
Page numbers reflect the paperback edition of Orbital (Grove Press/Grove Atlantic, 2024).