BINGO: “O”
I’m in the middle of a Space Phase now, clearly, what with Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (gay and delightful) and Murderbot (🚨🚨🚨🚨 new murderbot short story today in the POV of ART 🚨🚨🚨🚨) and getting hooked on For All Mankind (midway through season 2, wish there were less Earth Drama and more Space). So it only made sense to pick this up, this tiny book from the Booker list which has not paid amazing dividends or anything, but see what it brought forward.
Here is the Booker Blurb:
Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.
I actually think this book is a great example of how prize winner books are praised for phrasing over plot, like nothing happens in this book (fine) but also you’re treated to Meaning by way of long lists of items lyrically strung together, and I’m not sure that hearing of mankind’s greatest hits and the illogical nature of borders as experienced by six (6) priviledged astro/cosmonauts orbiting our planet really does it for me. I know the world is weird, I live on it!
ALSO SIDE BAR, there’s a rather obvious historical error in one of the last orbits (the book is chaptered based on the 16 orbits the crew experiences over the course of one Earth day). Using the concept of a calendar, Harvey via her crew tries to illustrate that life on Earth is a miraculous microsecond on a grand cosmic scale. So you start with the big bang on Jan 1 of this hypothetical year (~14 billion years ago), a few weeks later you have the universe, takes four days from the start of the sun to the formation of the earth and one day more for the moon, etc. And so by the time you get the midnight–today–all of human history can be squeezed into seconds.
So she says:
Buddha came at six seconds to midnight, half a second later the Hindu gods, in another half-second came Christ and a second and a half later Allah.
And yes, I get that the point is that the delineation between these world religions that have fought and warred and consumed vast swaths of humanity is null but also Buddha is by definition younger than the Hindu gods??? The genesis of Buddhism was the disgust that Siddhartha Gautama felt at the corruption of the Hindu priestly caste and their disregard for the plight of the poor and disenchanted?? You cannot have Buddha before the Hindu gods???
Also: James should have won the Booker. that’s all.