Booker Prize 2024 winner | Review of ‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey: beyond the blue orb

When one thinks of space, it is hard not to be enamoured by its endless vastness. English novelist Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning Orbital, set in raw space that is “a panther, feral and primal”, reclaims the lesser-known side of this orbital romance, by taking out the fantasy from the genre. Harvey writes of the ins and outs of an otherwise uneventful day spent at the International Space Station, where the “latest six of many” astronauts/ cosmonauts witness 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, and a tropical storm emerges out of the Pacific. In another instance, an astronaut is asked for his inputs on a vital question: “with this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?” “We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We “must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop, it doesn’t know when to call it a day”, as Harvey puts it.