Samantha Harvey (2024) Orbital.

 Samantha Harvey’s 136 pages novella, Orbital, won the Booker Prize 2024. It was whittled down from 150 books. I’d picked it up before her fifth novel sold millions and started reading it. But then put it down, largely unread.

Hmmm, I thought, pop. David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust has already covered this, Starman, circa 1969 and the moon landing. ‘Hear I am floating in a tin can. Far above the sea. Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do…’

Then there was Ernst Hemmingway’s novella. The Old Man and the Sea.

Orbital has up and down moments too. 250 miles above earth. Six hours in a guided missile to reach docking. The two-hour purgatory of waiting inside the craft for pressure equalisation. Taking events in a space station over a single day. No fish apart from those on the menu. But there are eight white mice. Four astronauts and two cosmonauts. Two women (English and Japanese) and four men. The feeling of déjà vu among the crew.

The common theme: ‘Don’t squander a life so miraculously given’.

Chie, the Japanese astronaut, looks at a photo she’s carried from the earth. Her mother survived the splitting of the atom over Nagasaki. It was an image of her mother pointing at the moon after the first moon landing in 1969.

Her mother seems to say, ‘Here are some men reaching the moon—do you see a single woman among them, much less a non-white, non-American woman, do you notice this is a collection of men in the full prime of their masculinity [fighter pilots] with their rockets and thrusters and payloads and the eyes of the world on them’.

Yet, Chie, a Japanese woman, is circling the world. She is part of the American, British, Italian, Japanese and Russian collective that maintains the space station and observes Planet Earth from the outside.

Internal cameras monitor them. It is recorded that Russian cosmonauts use the American toilet. American astronauts use the Russian WC. A Japanese woman uses the European toilet and an English woman the Russian WC. All of which costs tens of millions of dollars, Yen, Euros or Pound Sterling to maintain. They also eat each other’s food.

‘…in flagrant disregard of…edicts’.   

The Americans have a pretty simple selection procedure. They just send Tom Hanks. In the interest of diversity, when they can’t send Tom Hanks, they just send somebody like Tom Hanks, ‘shot into the air on a kerosene bomb. And then through the atmosphere with the equivalent weight of two black bears upon them.’  

Now we’re re-entering the era of the moron’s moron Trump, perhaps the rapist, draft-dodging, insurrectionist crook will ask his good buddies Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk which of his running dogs should be sent into space. After all, Musk has at a conservative estimate $3 billion worth of government contracts. That’s the same government they promise to slash and burn. Perhaps for the sake of humanity, they should both fire themselves into space.

There’s a class system on the space station. The untouched and untreated mice, the flabby precariat. ‘It’s as if they’re souls are collapsed.’ Mice injected with decoy receptors. Then there are the big boys, the genetically modified mice, that don’t shy away from human touch. Chie, during her rotation, comes clean to the mice. ‘I’m sorry, she whispers, but none of you get out of this alive…You’re all toast.’

Whisper it, earth is also in the firing line. This can be seen clearly by those orbiting it.

Being on a space station makes you younger. By a fraction of a second, but hey, every little bit helps. I’m sure Musk will explore how to market it as an anorexics paradise and bill some government department for his genius and largesse. Food is tasteless. Exercise is mandatory for two hours a day. Muscles disappear and man and women become amorphous. Elongated tadpole heads and bodies. Outreach Mars and an eighty-hour week sounds familiar.  

Shaun, the America astronaut, when he becomes disorientated—easy to do when over 70 million of his fellow citizen vote for a fascist dictatorship and a leader that has no redeemable qualities, not even common sense—remembers when he was fifteen and being introduced to Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (The Ladies in Waiting). The subject of the painting changes depending in the way you look at it. Who is in the frame and who is out of the frame, including the artist, writer or God and the increasing belief we’re all toast with the Doomsday Clock moving even closer to midnight or Ground Zero? Planet Earth will keep turning, regardless. Read on.      

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