Orbital by Samantha Harvey wins the 2024 Booker prize – a short but powerful story urging us to save the planet

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis.

While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.

Orbital was written during lockdown when the meaning of home (for those lucky enough to have one) changed forever. There’s a sense in which Harvey’s six astronauts return us to that moment when our homes became prisons and we were forced to contemplate the global effects of a virus that had no respect for national boundaries.

On the International Space Station, borders are only visible on the side of the Earth that is under night and only really as clusters of artificial light which shows cities. Rivers are “nonsensical scorings … like strands of long fallen hair” and “the other side of the world will arrive in 40 minutes” blurring it all.

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Russian cosmonaut Anton contemplates US astronaut Michael Collins’ iconic photograph of Apollo 11 leaving the surface of the Moon in 1969 with the Earth beyond. He thinks “no Russian mind should be steeped in these thoughts”, but he is captivated by where the people are in the photograph. Is Collins the only human not to appear in it? Or is he the only human presence we can be sure of?

Shaun has a postcard of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, sent to him by his wife. The painting’s complex composition has been said to create a unique illusion of reality where it is unclear who the subject is. Is it the viewer? The royal child? King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain who are depicted on the wall?

“Welcome,” Shaun’s wife writes on the postcard, “to the labyrinth of mirrors that is human life.” The Italian astronaut Pietro solves the labyrinth with the simple observation that the dog at the child’s side must surely be the subject of the painting. “[It is] the only thing… that isn’t slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities.” Humans, Shaun concludes, are no big deal.

While we gaze at ourselves and try to “ascertain what makes us different” from a dog, which as French theorist Michel Foucault also observed is the only object in the painting that has no function other than to be seen, it reminds us that our differences are negligible. As Shaun concludes, we are also animals fighting for survival.

In 16 orbits, the Earth on its tilted axis delivers a succession of landmasses that the astronauts can name but are de-familiarised by distance and momentum. The Pyramids, the New Zealand fjords, and a desert of dunes are “entirely abstract [and] … could just as easily be a closeup of one of the heart cells they have in their Petri dishes”. Japanese astronaut Chie’s laboratory mice – the canaries in the coal mine of their endeavour – finally learn to negotiate micro gravity “rounding their shoebox module like little flying carpets”. And, on a spacewalk, British astronaut Nell looks back at the “vast spread of the space station and, in this moment it, not earth, feels like home”.

This disassociation from the planet is common among returned astronauts who often report a feeling of closer affinity with their spacecraft. Harvey’s evocative prose describes the tension between a longing for the planet they think of as “mother” and the ambition to leave home forever. At one point Shaun wonders why they are trying to go where the universe doesn’t want them when “there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does.” But later he expresses frustration with the necessity to orbit two hundred and fifty miles above the earth. The moon, he reckons, is just the start.

What Harvey’s novel so skilfully exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis. The future of humanity is written, Shaun tells Pietro, “with the gilded pens of billionaires”. So while an unprecedented weather event threatens life below, the six astronauts and cosmonauts are rigorously documenting “their own selves”, taking “blood, urine, faecal and saliva samples” and monitoring “heart rates and blood pressure and sleep patterns” to satisfy some “grand abstract dream of interplanetary life” away from Earth.

Orbital is a slim volume of 135 pages but the economy of Harvey’s writing manages to convey a whole universe of meaning. She taps the contemporary zeitgeist of planetary insecurity alongside the span of history from Las Meninas to the spectacle of astronauts “imagineered, branded and ready”, prepared for consumption by “Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney.” “They’re humans,” writes Harvey, “with a godly view that’s the blessing and also the curse.”

Hollywood aside, I was reminded more of John Carpenter’s budget film Dark Star where bored astronauts on an interminable mission to destroy unstable planets are fixated on their dwindling supply of toilet paper. There is a sense, in Orbital, that the mundanity of decay is already overwhelming the spectacle of orbit. The module is “old and creaky” and “a crack has appeared”. The International Space Station is, after all, due to be decommissioned in 2031. Harvey has written a novel for the end of the world as we know it. The hope it offers is that we might learn to know the earth differently, while we can.

Debra Benita Shaw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.