No Place Like Home

A luminous, disorienting meditation on time, distance, and the fragile beauty of Earth seen from space.

Orbital. 

Samantha Harvey. Dublin: Vintage, 2024, 136 pages, €10.80

Two years before the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC by the Romans, Cicero wrote an incredible short track called The Dream of Scipio in which a Roman general named Scipio Aemilianus is visited by his famous grandfather Scipio Africanus. Cicero transports Scipio, the grandson, into the stars to see the coming conquest of Carthage, and Scipio sees Rome, too, as a small blip on our planet. He sees our climate and pontificates about our place amongst the stars.

Reminiscent of The Dream of Scipio, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital takes place outside of our atmosphere, but we are not floating with Scipio or receding from our planet as Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus would have it, rather we are revolving on circular loops at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour in a spaceship capsule with four astronauts and two cosmonauts* hurtling and spinning through nothingness: “There could be no end, there can be only circles.” (p.14)    

The duration of the short book is over one day of Earth time, so what we know as 24 hours. However, time morphs, melts, and slurs together as the capsule speeds around our planet, experiencing repeated days and nights. Time dissolves in space. Space is everywhere and nowhere. The travellers are discombobulated, estranged from Earth, disassociated by the distance. One orbit takes 90 minutes, which makes 16 orbits of the Earth in 24 hours – sixteen days condensed into one day.

This is a vertigo-inducing cosmic ride. There is the acute claustrophobia of not being able to move around naturally inside the capsule, juxtaposed with the paradoxical freedom of not being on Earth. The ultimate escape is an illusion; the lack of natural air is real and nauseating, and the surreal contrast between the abstract speed outside and the floating lack of freedom inside – while still somehow being tethered to Earth’s gravitational pull – creates a disorienting tension. The experience is jarring.

And compels questions that are difficult to answer: How can an object going at that speed still be in orbit of our planet? How does it not unsling and fling itself into outer space to chase some other stars? How can an astronaut step outside the capsule for a spacewalk and not be obliterated by the sheer g-force? How does one walk in empty space? If space is nothingness, then how can this capsule move through it with such precision? What does it feel like to have no body?

The travellers do exercises to maintain their muscle tone. They do tests on mice to see the effects of timelessness. They record what they see from the porthole of the spacecraft and report on the climatic changes they see, such as gathering swirls of white and pink and grey clouds (like cotton candy from up here) that form mega hurricanes and cyclones, then typhoons and tsunamis that they can only imagine, and cannot stop, what’s coming down there on Earth.

And the indifference that distance causes when seeing things from such a vantage point in space. Harvey pontificates too about the future, the past, grief and love, loss and recovery, but she does it through the main characters and threads their stories together in masterly fashion, weaving their views and lives into converging and acquiescing to the awe of “the ever-electric blue pull of the earth.” (p.32)

And we see the tremendous amount of space trash, too. The lower earth orbit is the “the busiest and trashiest stretch of the solar system” (p.131) with hundreds of millions of old satellite debris pieces floating around, enveloping our planet in pollution that we cannot be bothered to clean up because we cannot see it from Earth and because they too are traveling at “twenty-five thousand miles an hour and sandblasting the veneer of space.” (p. 131).

But we return each time to the awe of seeing our planet in constant movement, always in action: the sheer amazement of witnessing the airglow of auroras, when that gap between the atmosphere and earth permits the magical play of light that:  

"... gains edges and limbs; folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. At the top of the towers is a swathe of magenta that obscures the stars, and across the globe a shimmering hum of rolling light, of flickering, quavering, flooding light, and the depth of space is mapped in light." (p.41)

Harvey’s Ortibal is a 24-Earth-hour-trip or ‘one day in the lives of 6 astro-cosmonauts.’  Like Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, this is not a novel with an end or beginning; it’s a bundle of revolving views that give vantage points onto the beauty and pain of being on our planet. It’s not a call to climate action, it’s simply an ode to our world, a testament of having been.

Harvey’s Orbital is… not a call to climate action, it’s simply an ode to our world, a testament of having been.

[*Astronauts and cosmonauts are the same thing, ‘astro’ is the Greek term for ‘stars’ that is commonly used, whereas the Soviets/Russians used ‘cosmos’ from the Greek for ‘universe,’ so the two cosmonauts in Orbital are Russians.]