2 January, 2025 – Buninyong
I tried to read this in 2024 to mark a good few years of Reading Books by reading the Booker Prize winner in the year it won but bookshops were sold out! Foiled!
I tend to like the Booker winners. I don’t know if it’s a British thing. I like the Mercury Prize-winning music too. I find those prizes are a reliable way for me to discover new authors or artists that I like, and I like discovering new things. And as I have decided this year to stop letting algorithms suggest things that are similar to each other that make me sad and bored (bye to social media and streaming services), I am explicitly seeking out human-curated recommendations to discover new things.
This is my first book review after Instagram. I ported all the old ones over here one by one, I wrote some CSS to spruce it up and I told everyone on Instagram and tomorrow that account will be deactivated.
This is the first review written into Buttondown, and not a shit tiny Instagram caption on a phone keyboard I struggle to type on to be posted in between snippets of genocide, targeted ads, and influencer reels.
The world is weird enough down here, but from up there it must be so beautiful.
Orbital is a short novel about six astronauts on the space station. It’s set about now ish, watching the world from space. The astronauts are all from different parts of the world, each with their vignettes colouring them in a bit more. They reflect on their lives on earth, their childhoods and lives that led them to this place, mortality, and connection. They become a family, of sorts. They struggle to adjust and then adjust to space, knowing the inevitable struggle to adjust to Earth awaits them. They contemplate and are fascinated by zero gravity, and find ways to live with it. They gaze at the pale blue dot as they orbit it over and over, tracking a cyclone that hits the Philippines. They know, as we do, that the Earth’s weather is not normal, that humans keep industriously polluting the atmosphere, that the damage is enormous and devastating, but they also know that human life itself is rare, sustained by our miraculous atmosphere, by plants who evolved to create that atmosphere, which then created us, and all our wars and cities and personalities and pets and hobbies and gardens and shining city lights twinkling along coastlines visible all the way from space are all, in themselves, miracles.
It’s hard to grapple with the world right now. It feels hopeless watching LA burn, watching four cyclones pummel the Philippines in succession, knowing that the next US President will pull out of of the Paris Agreement. Watching a genocide unfold in real time, knowing that a ceasefire remains fragile and politically unlikely. Even the demise of the internet has me saddened, embarrassed by who we are as a species and what we’ve created. But sometimes you know, I feel like I drive out to the countryside, look out over a rolling landscape, watch a sunset serenaded by magpies and encounter an echidna quietly making his way and I realise that there’s so much here that is good, and rare, and beautiful, and maybe it’s all just a matter of perspective.
There’s a lot of this book that felt like In Ascension, another lyrical space voyage, and like Ted Chiang’s work. Literary sci-fi is still a genre I find so nourishing, and hope to continue to explore. 👩🚀
P.S. If you’ve subscribed to this, I’m actually going to send this review out as the first email. I’m amazed anyone wants to read my silly thoughts, so thank you 💞