January 28, 2025

On the typhoon in Samantha Harvey's Orbital

WHM considers his changing emotional reaction to death and destruction in fiction with a close reading of Orbital of Samantha Harvey.

Hello. It hasn't been very long since I last emailed you, but a) I have something to say already, and b) since this newsletter is moving from quarterly to every other month, I decided it was just easier to begin the new schedule with the start of the new year.

I hope you're finding and making art that speaks to you and to others.

In keeping with my expressed desire in the last issue of this newsletter to write more criticism, I'd like to explore something I've been thinking about for a few years, something that's been troubling me even though I'm not sure it should: death and destruction in fiction.

Death & Destruction in Fiction

Note: Orbital can't be spoiled in that it doesn't really doesn't have a plot. However, the following may influence how you view it, which is what criticism is supposed to do. But you may want to read the novel first. (It's very short).

There are two narrative strands to Samantha Harvey's Booker prize-winning novel Orbital, neither of which directly impacts the main characters, (which is part of the point): a trip by other (private company-funded) astronauts to the moon and a massive typhoon that slowly develops then sweeps across inhabited parts of the earth.

Neither are really much of a plot, but they do provide some forward movement that intersects with the monotony of the orbiting astronauts who are the main characters of the novel. They provide something below (the typhoon) and beyond (the trip to the moon) for the astronauts to track. To countdown to.

I'm not bothered by the overall lack of a plot in Orbital. But I did react somewhat negatively to the depiction of the typhoon. I think I'm being over-sensitive.

I decided to explore that reaction and write about it.

I'm pretty sure I first noticed this sensitivity (or over-sensitivity) with the film Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the visceral reaction I had to seeing the city of Sokovia being ripped out of the earth, raised up in the air, and then destroyed before it could smash back into the ground (yes, the thing that named the thing —the Sokovia Accords—that later became a punchline in popular culture). Some of the Avengers did their best to evacuate the citizens of that city, but just watching what happens to Sokovia on the big screen, I became very aware of all those citizens who likely didn't make it out of the city in time.

That didn't keep me from watching the subsequent MCU films all the way up to Avengers: Endgame (and a smattering beyond that), of course. But I remember also being bothered by the destruction of Asgard in Thor: Ragnarok and of the cruelty of the Snap and how little the human repercussions of that event impact the subsequent stories, etc. Oh, sure there are nods here and there, but only when convenient, and always through the point of view of the superhero.

My emotional reaction to those large-scale events has made even more attuned to smaller ones.

Let's say a superhero throws a car at a villain and the villain dodges it (or vice versa), and it slams into a high rise office building,

How many people died as a result?

Does it matter?

It's fiction. No one actually died, right?

Right.

I really began to notice this response to death, especially large scale death, being depicted in fiction when I bounced off This Is How You Lose the Time War.

It was such a highly praised novella written by writers whose work I enjoy and who speak and write so thoughtfully about fiction.

I went into it with high expectations.

I have no idea if it meets those high expectations because as I got two, maybe three, chapters in, I realized I couldn't focus on the relationship between Red and Blue because the setting in which they're communicating is one of ongoing massive scale death and destruction due to the war they're on either side of. That's probably part of the point. But I found I couldn't keep reading far enough to get to that point. I was so distracted by the mountain of skulls in the background I couldn't invest any feelings in Red and Blue.

And this is not to pick on Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War just happens to be one of the titles where I most noticed this reaction I was having.

Part of it may be to all of the violence of the world that now includes the genocide in Palestine, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the ongoing conflicts in Sudan and the Congo, the yearly natural disasters across the U.S. and the rest of the world that lead to loss of life and home.

But, of course, those are just recent examples of many throughout this century and the previous two (and beyond). Horrors abound, death is rampant and has always been so, and I don't begrudge anyone the art they need and desire, nor the ability to bracket off those horrors. Not every work of art needs to directly address the mass death and destruction of our time and throughout human history. Most probably shouldn't.

And fictional death is just that: fictional.

Heck, in the first short story of mine that was published in the field I killed off the entire population of a space station.

I'm just having, have been having, a hard time with some fictional works that use mass death and destruction—or the prospect of it—as a backdrop.

Which brings me to Orbital.

The Typhoon in Orbital

I really enjoyed Orbital. I love Harvey's prose, all the detailed descriptions of the six astronauts activities and interactions on the space station. The way it shifts among their points of view. The rhythm of it being told through the orbits the station makes around the earth. The fact that there isn't a plot except for these two developing and then happening events the astronauts are tracking—a typhoon that's forming and a rocket trip to the moon funded by a billionaire.

Both of those seem so very apt, so on theme to what (science) fiction should be right now.

And yet, I had a hard time, at points, with the depiction of the typhoon.

In the very first pages of Orbital we learn that a typhoon has formed in the "warm waters of the Western Pacific" (page 2).

By page 34 the typhoon has become a category four and the astronauts are instructed to photograph it to help meteorologists and government authorities figure out its' path and plan for disaster response.

On page 55, partly due to the images the astronauts in orbit have taken, people who are in the path of the typhoon are told to evacuate (where do you evacuate to when you live on an island?).

By page 115 it has grown in size and intensity, and some meteorologists think it's become a "super-typhoon."

On page 142, Pietro, one of the astronauts, reads his news feeds and discovers that that debate is now over: "Meteorologists have decided upon calling it a super-typhoon; they speak of its rapid intensification that's left everyone ill-prepared, and of the increased regularity of storms like these."

Up until this point in the novel, the typhoon has been an abstract thing—something the astronauts were monitoring: this shape, this swirl of clouds they'd look for and see, although it was only perceivable on some of their orbits. It serves, in the novel, as a reminder of the distance between them and the rest of humanity, of their inability to affect or be affected by anything down there, down on the earth, an earth they can communicate with but understand mostly by watching it as the hurtle around it and sometimes photograph it (sometimes officially; sometimes for their own private records).

Harvey's descriptions of the earth as the astronauts experience it from their station are lovely. We see it all from space: weather, cities and their lights, various geographic features, various oceans and other bodies of water—there's a love in spite of the distance, but also an awareness of how fragile the earth—its' ecosystems—are. To a certain extent, Orbital is climate fiction, as the sentence from page 115 that I quote above suggests.

So why, then, does the depiction of the typhoon Orbital bother me? (And, again, I'm not sure it should.)

I think it has to do with focal point of the depiction. It's always either zoomed out or zoomed way in.

After Pietro reads about typhoon being re-categorized as a super-typhoon, he remembers "the Filipino children he and his wife met on their honeymoon, the fisherman's children" and wonders what will become of them when the super-typhoon slams into the Philippines. This is a natural response to such disaster. We think first of those we know who might be or have been affected by it. Humanizing a large-scale disaster by focusing in on an individual or handful of individuals is tried and true narrative approach, whether in fiction, film, news reporting, or fundraising.

And because I've come to like Pietro from the first 100 or so pages of the novel, I do feel his concern for the family and a the frustration of being so far away and not being able to do anything.

At the same time, I also feel the manipulation of the narrative here. Perhaps all the more so since it switches omnisciently between the six astronauts and even a step out from them, portraying, at times, the space station itself as well as the earth, the typhoon, the rocket that eventually launches and travels to the moon. That Harvey doesn't confine the novel's point of view to her characters gives it an expansiveness that both increases and decreases the distance inherent to the main setting being a space station, tethering it or contextualizing it within human (earth) society. She seems to want to say something about humanity's relationship with the earth and within the galaxy.

And I think she largely succeeds at that.

But not all of the details hang together for me when it comes to the emotional experience of reading the novel.

For example, on page 161 Shaun, the only religious believer of the astronauts says a silent prayer and includes "those in the path of the typhoon" in it. Later, he will dream of it, or rather he will dream of a "circular flame," a "doughnut of fire" that then "becomes a typhoon, a little spiral thing that looks just like a galaxy, and he's watching it distantly."

As someone who is quite familiar with Christian religious discourse and its' use in fiction, I found this symbolism opaque. It's a generic enough yet specific enough of a movement to support a variety of readings. It's also fairly empty. What does it mean for a flame (and whatever you want to say that symbolizes—an individual soul or consciousness? the spark of civilization?) to transform into a typhoon and then into a galaxy? In what context(s) does this symbolism find meaning?

It's not clear.

Maybe it doesn't need to be. But I found myself stumbling at points in the narrative over profusions of detail that seemed to hint at deeper and richer meanings that remained elusive. I have no problem—indeed, quite value—fiction that operates in that way. But I also couldn't escape that feeling that Orbital wasn't trying to be quite so elusive, that is was reaching for something that it couldn't quite get to (in my experience reading it). That it wants to say something profound about humanity.

A defect on my part as a reader, perhaps.

And also could be part of the point: Shaun's prayer may be sincere, but it doesn't do anything to change the danger the typhoon presents (or maybe prayer actually does—we'll get to that in a bit), and the abstractness of the way his subconscious mind processes the typhoon perhaps acts as a commentary on the way religion too often focuses on the abstract to the detriment of the material, societal, and environmental.

However, it's not just Shaun's point of view (whether conscious or dreaming) where I felt the depiction of the typhoon lapses into a symbolism or style I got hung up on.

On page 176, which is the fourteenth orbit of the space station we've experienced in the novel, we find this sentence: "With untold peace and silence, the typhoon hits land."

On the surface this is simply another example of the narrative distance that exists throughout the novel, a reinforcement of the fact that, from the point of view of those in the space station, all they see is a swirling mass of clouds moving across the face of the earth.

And it's true that untold is an adjective often paired with natural disasters whose impacts are so immense they can't literally be counted, can't be fully told.

At the same time, untold is one of those empty terms that glosses over the work to be done, a way for everyday people to feel horrified of the immensity but keep it at a distance. A way to group all the victims together so we don't have to think about their individual plights.

Untold destruction of a place? The insurance companies probably have a sense of the destruction.

Untold victims of a war or a criminal enterprise or a serial killer or sex offender? The military or the police probably have some sense of the number, a ballpark figure, at least.

The telling, or at least the attempted telling of it, is the only way some sort of help and redress no matter how delayed and insufficient can happen.

But it's not just even the use of the word untold—it's the word paired with peace and silence. Peace and silence for whom? For the astronauts orbiting the planet? For those not in the path of destruction? Is this supposed to be irony? Irony doesn't seem to be all that operative in Orbital.

But maybe it is?

Less than 25 pages later, we get this passage post launch of the mission of another (private company rather than nation-representing) set of astronauts to the moon: "From an outside view you'd see the lunar spaceship tiptoe its ways through this field of [space] junk ... A full-throttle scarper in their billionaire's rocket, out and away, away from the junk, away from the breaking burning storming scintillating earth like fleeing the scene of a crime. Away from the plucking flinging brute typhoon and the houses barging down roads become rapids and calamitous ruin that can't yet be measured. Away from the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals..." (page 99).

This lunar trip, then, is symbolic of the way billionaires have removed themselves from the planet. Not literally (or at least not yet), but in an existence that is insulated from the storming, breaking, and burning.

Even here, though, the typhoon is anthropomorphized and the focus is on what it is doing to structures rather than to the human and animal population. A, perhaps, justified reaction by the planet given its' hostage status.

I don't object to any of this language, per se. But I did have an emotional reaction to it, a reaction to all the deaths that are implied. A confusion about what the text is trying to say about those deaths. A frustration that Harvey keeps invoking imagery that is highly detailed yet still abstract.

Now, I want to be clear: I'm not asking for victim porn. I don't want to see every horrible detail depicted in fiction. I don't need statistical tables. I don't need every first person account.

And, again, I do get that the distance is also the point. It's how the orbiting astronauts experience earth from their space station. It's how those of us on earth who mostly live in our screens (and that's most of us) also experience things. The modern condition is one of becoming aware of all the terrible things that are always happening and feeling helpless to do much of anything about it.

A few paragraphs later, the six astronauts sleeping, we learn that a message has popped up on Pietro's monitor: "his wife with a link to a news story about the terrible destruction of the typhoon, which will stay there unread until morning,"

Again, everything distanced. The destruction terrible, everything is always terrible. But who, exactly, is it terrible for?

Finally, towards the end, some of the typhoon victims are depicted (in passive voice):

"Forty or fifty bodies are sheltered behind the altar of a chapel which squats low among trees. Floodwater reaches to its roof. The mile of coconut plantation between here and the coast is submerged completely by the tidal surge, but the buffering of the trees has saved the chapel; by design it has no windows along its east elevation which is toward the ocean and those elsewhere are so far spared. The chapel door strains but holds under the burden of the water ... If the building can withstand the flood for another few hours until the water recedes they'll make it. They pray.

"It's the Santo Nino that's saving them, they're inclined to believe, Even the non- or less religious think it now ... they suppose they must be witnessing a miracle. They don't know how else the building could stand. It isn't possible. Far bigger and more robust buildings will have collapsed in the rampage of this typhoon. ..." (pages 203-204).

We then find out that the very fisherman, his wife, and children who Pietro met on his honeymoon and was concerned about are sheltered in the chapel and are safe, thus closing that narrative loop with a happy(ish) ending.

But what about all the others who aren't safe?

A couple of pages later: "The typhoon has smashed itself to pieces against the land. The islands are smaller than they were several hours ago, misshapen by flood. The worst is gone."

The amount of death and destruction implied by this narration made me angry in the way it encapsulates this thing that's been bothering me where the narrative seems to be using.

Is the fact that these folks huddled in a church are saved from the typhoon where others weren't simply sentimentalism? Or are we supposed to feel something more profound? Is it their prayers that save them or simply the way the church was constructed? Or is that some among their number met Pietro and so, narratively speaking, we need them to survive so the super-typhoon can tie back into one of the main characters?

But isn't the fact that the church was constructed at all and the villagers flocked there part of the point? The typhoon may be a ring of fire and also the galaxy, but what their faith has actually created materially is what saves them. And isn't the reason the narrative telling me just this slice of the story because one of the astronauts does have a connection to it? And isn't all that part of the point?

I don't know that there's enough in the text to tell me. There doesn't have to be, of course. This is likely all just a me thing. I'm not asking you to feel the same thing.

And I mean it's good that the typhoon is over. That "the worst is gone."

But maybe the worst is yet to come.

Or maybe the worst is, indeed, gone. But what about those who survived the worst? What do they do? What about those who were lost? How do we honor and mourn them?

I'm not sure what I'm asking Orbital to have done instead.

I vacillate between thinking that Harvey is fully in command of her narration and use of metaphor and adjective and the subjects and verbs she chooses to put on the page and wondering if, actually, we're seeing a writer reach for profundity they can't quite cohere.

I really don't know. I'm often okay with not knowing. I did fall under the spell of Orbital and really enjoyed that experience, but the more I think and write about the typhoon, the more I'm bothered by how it's depicted in the text.

I suppose what I would like is for writers to be less cavalier about what they depict/don't depict and how they depict/don't depict mass death and destruction.

I'm feeling these off-screen/implied in the narrative deaths more these days.

I'm not sure what that means for what I read and watch.

Or for what I write.

Azril in The City in Glass

Shortly after reading Orbital, I read Nghi Vo's novella The City in Glass.

The story centers around the demon Vitrine and her love of the city Azril, which she has helped shape and grow over three centuries, sometimes helping blossom, sometimes ruthlessly pruning, often introducing new cultivars to, sometimes sending cuttings away hoping they graft onto themselves other experiences they will bring back with them.

We see, as the book opens, Vitrine attending a festival she introduced and has shaped the celebration of over the years. She uses the occasion to revel in her beloved city, but to also subtly or overtly influence or test some of the celebrants.

But then four angels come and destroy the city and all its inhabitants. As they leave, Vitrine manages to mar, to curse, to bind one of the angels to her beloved, ruined city. The rest of the novel focuses on her relationship with this angel, her attempts to re-build the city, and an account of the past history of the city from its founding up until its destruction.

Although the metaphysics of the angels and demons are somewhat outlined—their powers, their relationships, the forms they take/are, although aspects remain mysterious—we don't get an overall sense of the religious system(s) and ideology(ies) they operate in (or whatever system it is they exist in). Indeed, one can read The City in Glass as secondary world fantasy, as science fiction, or as science fantasy.

But it is a work that begins with death, with the destruction of an entire city that, whether an act of god or nature or of some other major power(s), contains within its pages a pile of bodies.

I did not react to it the same way I reacted to Orbital or This Is How You Lose the Time War.

Why is that?

Primarily, it's because we do experience the aftermath.

We experience Vitrine's grief and anger. We see her take care of the bodies of the dead. We see her remember them. And when we focus in on individuals, we know that Vitrine may have had favorites, but she also loves every one who lived, who had ever lived in her city. Indeed, she literally inscribes their names on her heart. That is, an aspect of her demon-ness is that she has a glass cabinet in her chest. One of the items, the major item, in that cabinet is a book in which she writes the names of those who are born in or immigrate to Azril.

And as she rebuilds Azril, over many years, we come to understand, as Vitrine comes to understand, that while it won't be, can't be the same Azril it was, aspects of it will re-emerge, changed, of course, because the past remains the past, changed but present because the city is still where it is and because Vitrine remembers what it was.

I won't go into detail on what those are. This has gone on long enough, and it's a pleasure you should experience yourself.

And The City in Glass is not Orbital; Orbital has its own pleasures and has other ambitions.

I wouldn't even say that The City in Glass is "better" or "more fully realized" than Orbital. They're very different reading experiences.

All I'm saying is that I experienced the destruction of Azril different from the super-typhoon that hits the Philippines. And it's not because one location is fictional while the other is not. And it's not because one is reinforcing themes of distance while the other is focusing on themes of closeness and intimacy (there's this whole thing with Vitrine and the angel she has cursed).

Or not just because of distance/intimacy.

It's the relationship of the narrative to the dead.

When the monster emerges from the bay and crushes vehicle after vehicle as it makes its way across the city or the alien villain's energy beams rip open the earth and buildings and vehicles fall into the abyss, I suppose I'm relieved that our main characters are still alive. There is no story without them.

But these days, indeed, increasingly over the past decade or so, I've found myself noticing more and more those the narrative sacrifices in the telling of the story.

I know I'm not supposed to be. I don't know even know whether it's wrong or right to focus on or not to focus on those who are lost. Who are, after all, and once again, fictional beings.

But I do.

I think what I'm getting at is that I'm having a hard time with death implied in fiction but not depicted—not even named—nor mourned. With destruction that is only there to shape the main character. With main characters who don't—or barely—seem to mourn, as if victory, as if the core narrative, is only ever the overcoming of the foe.

I think that's it.

It has to do with mourning.

All the mourning we have yet to do.

All the remembering and rebuilding we have yet to do.

Thanks for reading so many words.

Sorry this went so long and was so depressing.

I'll be back in your inbox in late March with something different.