An alien observes the little H-shaped space station orbiting an increasingly dilapidated earth and wonders, What are these humans up to?
“Why do they go nowhere but round and round?” it asks, proverbially.
It’s a good question. One that the astronauts on the space station often wonder themselves. Life in orbit is physically cramped and mentally discombobulating. It eats away at the astronauts’ bones, weakens their muscles, bulges their eyes, does things to their heart cells that they’re only just beginning to discover via petri dishes in microgravity. As they float isolated above the world, their parents die. Their spouses cheat, fall out of love. A friend is swept up in a mega-typhoon.
So, why do they go round and round? The answer is obvious. It stares back at them through one of the station’s portholes with eight billion pairs of eyes, not a single one of which is visible as the astronauts fly over at seventeen thousand miles per hour. And seeing the answer down there on earth, they also notice the answer in here—in the “floating family” whose recycled air they breathe, whose recycled urine they drink—are the only company they’ll keep for nine months.
Because, to answer the alien’s question, the reason for their ceaseless orbiting is understanding. It’s the very same objective as Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s 2024 Booker Prize–winning novel, that the alien and astronauts come from. For all modern novels, in fact, and for all space exploration, the point of these repetitive endeavors is to try to understand the fundamental question of what being human even means. It’s the search to get to the bottom of ourselves and find our place as individuals within the larger puzzle of our species.
Within this quest to understand, there’s a paradox. Orbital brilliantly reminds us—for we know it intuitively but tend to forget when it matters—knowing the answer to the alien’s query doesn’t stop the astronauts from asking the question again. In fact, the more they know the answer, the more the question needs to be asked. Because true understanding is a moving target. As deep as we delve, through either science or literature, we never get any closer to knowing what it means to be human. Or, put another way, we “polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are.”
We keep trying to understand. Otherwise, what’s the point of being here?
*
The modern novel, the writer Jay Cantor once told me, can be defined as a book whose theme is present in every paragraph, if not every sentence.
While you could generally argue against Cantor’s definition, it can’t be denied of Orbital, specifically. The book is a mostly plotless meditation on the ways that technology, by providing us with never-before-seen views, shapes our inner monologues. And it’s about how, despite or because of these advances, isolation is the defining emotional experience of our age.
Orbital’s thesis, as Cantor suggests, is stated in its opening line: “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone.” This is the same as the paradox of understanding that the observant little E.T. can’t figure out. The human condition, the book says, is to be trapped within your own consciousness, alienated from others even as you move closer to them. If we could solve this problem through scientific study or otherwise, the astronauts come to believe, then we could solve all our earthly problems: climate change, war, even grief.
But from this profound first sentence, what happens in the book is not much. There are six characters on the space station—technically, four astronauts from the U.S. and Europe and two Russian cosmonauts—who spend most of their time looking out the window as cities, deserts, and oceans pass below them. B-plots include four other Americans rocketing to the moon, much to the orbiters’ jealousy, and the growing typhoon that they’re asked to track. The rest of the time, the characters eat, float, think, and perform their scientific missions. They track fungus, observe mice learning to navigate microgravity, grow wheat and protein crystals, test the heart cells. Everything they do is in preparation for a future mission at a time when humans might have to abandon earth. It’s all the push-pull of exploration. When a discovery is made that brings humans one step closer to escaping earth, that discovery begets new questions and further dividing avenues of study.
It’s in the view from the window that the book’s much lauded prose shines the most: “Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt.” Or, another personal favorite: “From the space station’s distance, mankind is a creature that only comes out at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filaments of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.”
Again, as always, even in these bursts of poetry there’s a pushing forward at velocity toward the object of study and affection without ever approaching it any closer. The astronauts can look at all people on earth and not even recognize them as existing. Observe but not see, which is to say, not know. One species, so together, so alone.
*
While “free of plot” (or even “barely a novel”) Orbital’s strength of purpose connects singular moments into a powerful and relatable whole that’s often literally breathtaking as sights you and I will never experience are refracted into emotional experiences we can identify in our own lives. A lump on Anton’s neck, for example, reminds us how our neighbor may be hiding deep pain when we stop them in the street. Falling asleep among friends during a movie night has happened to all of us on earth, an experience that’s embarrassing while also revealing the odd, unseen contours of friendship.
But to me no scene exemplifies the themes of the book better than Roman’s brief, heartbreaking radio call with a Canadian woman named Therese.
Like many, the scene comes out of nowhere. It takes place during Orbit 10—each of the book’s chapters is a full or partial orbit; 16 to a day—and, as they usually are on the small ship, the six characters are solo, all within personal chores or reveries.
Roman is one of the two Russians, and his defining feature is that he’s a ham radio enthusiast. This is because his idol, Sergei Krikalev, was one too. (In real life, Krikalev was stranded in orbit in the MIR space station when the Soviet Union collapsed. During his extended orbiting, Krikalev would talk to amateur radio operators—in particular, an Australian woman, Margaret Iaquinto, who would send him vital information when his new government wouldn’t.) Roman even has an official headshot of Krikalev hanging in his berth, the photo described as having a “Mona Lisa smile.”
The conversation with Therese is Roman’s third try to reach someone, the radio as much his attempt to get closer to his hero as a way of making himself feel less alone. His first try is a complete failure—all static, an unanswered hello—and the second goes slightly better when he has the kind of broken conversation you might while driving through a tunnel. Though failures, these two partial scenes are important—they represent the trying and failing required of all scientific, as well as artistic, endeavors—a metaphor for the entire mission and all the micro-missions within it.
When he does finally connect, Roman reminds us that he can only talk to Therese for a few minutes before he loses the signal due to the speed of his orbit. He’s impatient to have a serious conversation, and his impatience is touching; you can feel his excitement in the way he pushes past her small talk, not wanting to waste time. Right off, Roman tells Therese to ask him a question, and the one she asks is far from what he’s expecting.
“Do you ever feel crestfallen?” she says. It’s a word he doesn’t know in English, and he needs her to explain it.
“It means, do you ever wonder what is the point?” she says. “Because I saw pictures of where you all sleep up there and it’s just sleeping bags hanging in a little phone booth, and they looked so unwelcoming. So – absurd, if you don’t mind me saying. And I wondered, did you get up there after all that effort […] and think, is this it? Didn’t it seem like an anticlimax? Do you know what I mean?”
It’s not at all the kind of question he was hoping for, but Roman isn’t offended. He gives it serious, if quick, thought. No, he concludes. Remembering the first time he witnessed the way his “lifeless” sleeping bag “billows like a ship’s sail in a perfect wind,” he tells Therese she’s exactly wrong.
“You know, then,” he says about seeing the bag, “that so long as you stay in orbit you will be OK, you will not feel crestfallen, not once. You might miss home, you might be exhausted, you might feel like you’re an animal in a cage, you might get lonely, but you will never, never be crestfallen.”
Miraculously, she gets it. “It’s like the spirit goes in you, then, not out of you. […] Like your sleep bag is alive,” she says.
He agrees. That’s how it is. These two strangers, across an almost unbelievable divide, have achieved mutual understanding. Through Therese’s probing, Roman discovers feelings he’s never put into words. Meanwhile, she sees him more clearly than before, and in conflict with her prior assumptions. The fact that she can take his description and turn it into her own words is the creation of new knowledge, and that’s the point of the experiment—any experiment. What we’ve just witnessed is the unfolding of empathy. Through inquiry, Roman and Therese are closer to understanding another person, and one person closer to understanding the entire human condition. For a moment, they are together.
In Orbital, being together also necessitates being alone. Like some cold law of physics, as soon as anyone in this book connects with an object, that object is repelled. Every moment of closeness leads to its opposite moment of distance. The shuttle is always the same distance from earth’s edgeless edge.
After listening to his answer, Therese is now ready for her confession. It’s her turn for Roman to understand where she’s coming from, and to extend some empathy back in her direction. If they can see each other, and see themselves through the other’s eyes, they’ll make a meaningful connection that will benefit them both.
Therese speaks first:
I wish it were night so I could look up and see your light passing overhead.
We’re passing nonetheless.
My husband died, this is his radio—
I’m sorry Therese, we’re losing signal.
In the summer, he died.
I’m sorry, Therese—
Hello, are you there? Hello?
Time’s up. The ship has moved too far away and Therese speaks into the void. The scene ends in blank space. In this achingly human moment, each of them is suddenly alone, their spoken words flying past each other in a vacuum, missing their targets.
The resulting sadness might confuse our alien observer, but as painful and destinationless as the conversation is, we terrestrials get it. We have to try, even if we can’t get there.
*
The radio conversation happens about two-thirds into the book, yet it informs everything we’ve read so far, and everything that comes after. But how? Why does this one scene stand out among the rest?
Partly, it’s because the prose of the book is lyrical and philosophical. The plainspoken dialog between Roman and Therese, which includes no internal monologue whatsoever, stands out in contrast. While the book is full of poetic language—“the whipcrack of morning,” “the expanding green-blue geometries of evaporation ponds where lithium is mined from the brine”—the conversation between Roman and Therese breaks down language itself. Not only does she literally have to define “crestfallen” for him, but they together deconstruct, in the Derridean sense, the word into its connotative essence, proving that each’s personal understanding of the word is truer than its dictionary definition.
This is a breakdown of the book’s theme on the word level: language is the tool we use to try to understand each other. And though it’s all we’ve got, it’s imperfect even to the novelist. If we could only just explain what we meant, maybe we’d stop causing each other pain. Maybe we wouldn’t have to leave earth. This is something the astronauts can literally see: from space, no borders exist, earth blooms in abundance. And yet they know that conflict and misuse are pushing humanity toward mars and its fantasy of unity.
There’s always something missing at the center of language that prevents ultimate connection, the book says. Roman misses Therese’s meaning, and he can’t actually see her for what she is—a person in mourning, a widow, one who is crestfallen. A person who could be made briefly better by another’s gaze, if he weren’t so goddamn apart.
The book is a mirror reflecting a mirror; a repeating, infinite view where one piece is always missing. As Cantor suggests in his axiom, every moment contains the incomplete whole.
Of course, our little alien watcher is another fractal, too. Its purpose is to shift the book’s point of view to observe the astronauts with the same level of abstraction that the astronauts view the earth and the people on it. The alien’s question is their question. It wants to know them, but it can’t really understand.
Early in the book, we learn that Roman, more than any other character, is obsessed with tracking the mission’s progress. Roman doesn’t just keep count of the number of days he’s been in space but also things like the total hours of morning exercise completed, number of morning and afternoon meetings, sunrises, sunsets, miles traveled, t-shirts changed, and times he’s brushed his teeth. The obsession is Roman’s personal fight against succumbing to the alien’s skepticism. By exploding the mission into its minutiae, he’s able to keep track of his place in time and space, and reminds himself that even when it feels like we’re spinning in circles, we’re making progress.
Yes, Roman would tell the alien, we’re going round and round, but we’re still moving forward. We’re pushing, trying harder, finding more, getting closer, creating new points of view. This is the point. To see what we can gain on the next trip around. To find out how much we can learn about ourselves, each other, our place in the universe. We try again to bridge the gap, if we can. And if we can’t, at the very least we learn to acknowledge the distance so that next time it might not cause so much pain.
