A Book Lifting Your Spirits 250 Miles Above Earth

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. If you want a book that will lift you out of this world, I have one for you.

It’s called Orbital, and it’s by Samantha Harvey. It’s a deeply imagined book about the moment-to-moment

Experience of living on a space station, circling 250 miles above the bright blue orb of Earth

In the vast blackness of space. And the author, Samantha Harvey, has been lauded as this generation’s

Virginia Woolf, and she’s also been described as the Melville of the skies. And I can see why,

Because her book isn’t so much science fiction, it’s rather what she likes to call a space pastoral

That is essentially nature writing, but about space. And the result is a sensuous meditation

On a single day’s time in orbit on a craft that’s traveling at 17,500 miles an hour,

Which means that, as she puts it, the whip crack of morning arrives every 90 minutes.

And this book is a great combination of both mundane and majestic. There are all the little

Adjustments to microgravity, the sinus headaches and sleeping in a bag tethered to a wall,

Drinking juice through a straw, and then the continuous hum of all the machinery.

And all of this is unfolding against breathtaking views out the windows.

For example, when one of them goes out on a spacewalk, she ponders the sight below.

She writes, no glass or metal between her and this,

Just a spacesuit filled with coolant to ward off the sun’s heat.

Just a spacesuit and piece of rope and her slender life.

Just her feet dangling above a continent.

Her left foot obscuring France.

Her right foot Germany.

Her gloved hand blotting out western China.

And in fact, a lot of this book isn’t so much about adventure, but emotions.

For example, the four astronauts and two cosmonauts, before they go up there,

They’re warned about what happens when you have this repeated exposure to the seamless earth.

She writes,

You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders, except those between land and sea.

You’ll see no countries, just a rolling, indivisible globe, which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war.

And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once.

Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. And then she

Writes that the inevitable result of that is this overwhelming feeling of needing, as she puts it,

To protect this huge yet tiny earth, this thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. And Grant,

It just goes on like that. It’s not a very long novel, but it’s just sort of this meditation

On being in space that’s really gorgeous.

It sounds so lovely.

And so it’s not nonfiction.

It’s fiction.

Oh, it’s definitely fiction.

But she’s watched thousands and thousands of hours

Of the broadcasts from the space station.

And she deeply researched it.

And, you know, it’s not so much an adventure in outer space.

Things do happen with the characters.

But I keep coming back to the word meditation.

It just took me out of this world for a while, and I really loved it.

There was something so perfect about that two-word description that she used that you mentioned, space pastoral.

That says so much to me.

Yeah, it’s a poetic take on what it’s like to be in outer space, and I just thoroughly enjoyed it, as you can tell.

Well, Martha, you’ve done it again.

You put another book on my to-read stack.

Yay! I think you’ll love it.

I really do.

I think I will, too.

And that book, again, is Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

We will link to that on our website at waywordradio.org.

We’d love to know what you’re reading and what you recommend to us.

You can send those recommendations to words@waywordradio.org

Or leave us a message at 1-877-929-9673.