Orbital
Samantha Harvey
Having read it
★★★★☆
Creatively engineered words with some philosophies of reality and twists to literary expectations all of which add to good and uplifting perspectives but seems one that starts a little shakily, steadies itself for some observant views during its middle parts then finishes its closing ones a little perfunctorily.
Still, as there’s no equivalent of the Booker Prize for book reviews mine just finishes with: it’s a decent short read that intrigues and inspires, despite it feeling a little like a set of essays, sometimes, with allusions to narrative.
A good passage
This is a strange thing, it seems to her. All your dreams of adventure and freedom and discovery culminate in the aspiration to become an astronaut, and then you get up here and you are trapped, and spend your days packing and unpacking things, and fiddle in a laboratory with pea shoots and cotton roots, and go nowhere but round and round with the same old thoughts going round and round with you.
This isn’t a complaint. God, no, this isn’t a complaint.
A second good passage
[...] And his daughter is right to ask about progress, and he wishes he had not closed off the question with such certainty and sophistry since it’s a question that comes from an innocence of mind and begs for the same in its answer. He should have said, I don’t know my love. That would have been true. Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love.
But what he meant to say to his daughter – and what he will say when he returns – is that progress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends in the head where it tends to go wrong).
A third good passage
Everything, everything is turning and passing.
So Shaun thinks and as he slips the postcard back in its pouch he feels like laughing at the question before him. How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf. And isn’t it strange, how everything we do in our capacity as humans only asserts us more as the animals we are. Aren’t we so insecure a species that we’re forever gazing at ourselves and trying to ascertain what makes us different. We great ingenious curious beings who pioneer into space and change the future, when really the only thing humans can do that other animals cannot is start fire from nothing. That seems to be the only thing – and, granted, it’s changed everything, but all the same. We’re a few flint-strikes ahead of everything else, that’s it.
Chimps could do it if they watched us and learned, and before you know it they’d be gathering around fires and migrating to colder climes and cooking their food, and what do you know.He offers a prayer, for the lunar astronauts, for Chie in her grief, for those in the path of the typhoon. A memory comes of a time in a nature reserve in Laos and of hearing the territorial morning duet of gibbons, a haunting looping song that carried through the canopies. When he thinks of the six of them here, or the astronauts now going to the moon, he hears that haunting call – that’s what we’re doing when we come into space, asserting our species by extending its territory. Space is the one remaining wilderness we have. The solar system into which we venture is just the new frontier now our earthly frontiers have been discovered and plundered.