Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Published 2024 · 133 pages · 42,937 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Science Fiction

How hard is Orbital to read?

Orbital scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Harvey writes with poetic precision, using scientific terminology and evocative language to capture the experience of space. The vocabulary is accessible but carefully chosen.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Sentences are often lyrical and sometimes long, tracking perception and thought as the astronauts orbit. The prose has a meditative quality that rewards slow reading.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
The novel moves between concrete details of life in space and meditation on Earth, humanity, and connection. The perspective from orbit naturally encourages philosophical reflection.
Information density: 52 out of 100
The slim novel covers one day in sixteen orbits, with each character's memories and present experiences woven together. The density is emotional and perceptual rather than informational.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
The narrative moves between astronauts without clear transitions, creating a collective consciousness effect. Understanding requires attunement to the shifting perspectives.
Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
Earth itself becomes a symbol—fragile, beautiful, unified. The space station is a symbol of international cooperation. The orbits structure time into something cyclical and meaningful.
Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
Harvey writes with wonder and tenderness rather than ironic distance. The tone is elegiac and hopeful, fully committed to the beauty of what the astronauts witness.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
The day ends as it began, with the astronauts still orbiting. Resolution comes through the completion of the cycle rather than through dramatic conclusion.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
Sixteen orbits provide the organizing structure, with each passage a meditation on different aspects of the experience. The structure is elegant and purposeful.

How Orbital is regarded

Orbital holds a literary regard score of 51 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Orbital sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (78 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Orbital scores 60 out of 100. A second mythos, irony, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard.
Symbol: Formal
the more you look at it the less substance it has and the more it becomes an apparition, a holy ghost.
Mythos: Romance iv (romance iv)
they are encapsulated, a submarine moving alone through the vacuum depths
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
In the cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big Bang happening on January 1st, almost fourteen billion years ago

Where the story of Orbital takes place

  • International Space Station in low Earth orbit, one October day (Tuesday to Wednesday), sixteen orbits during an Artemis (2024 to 2025), the main setting
  • Nagasaki, August 1945 (Chie's grandmother's death)
  • Challenger launch, 1986 (Nell's childhood memory)

5 things that are true of Orbital, with the passage for each

  1. The crew are four astronauts and two cosmonauts, two women and four men.

    four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men

  2. The novel's single day is made of sixteen orbits, with sixteen sunrises and sunsets.

    in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets

  3. Political disputes have split the station's toilets by nation.

    RUSSIAN COSMONAUTS ONLY, it says on the door of the Russian WC.

  4. Pietro solves the Las Meninas riddle by saying the painting's subject is the dog.

    To answer your wife’s question, the subject of the painting is the dog.

  5. The cosmic-calendar passage places Buddha six seconds before midnight on the cosmic year.

    Buddha came at six seconds to midnight, half a second later the Hindu gods

Scenes in Orbital that Frye would name

41 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anatomy, untitled
Buddha came at six seconds to midnight, half a second later the Hindu gods The cosmic calendar and its list of cultural artefacts is an encyclopedic Menippean catalogue.
Anagnorisis, untitled
And Chie had said silently to her mother’s silent request: yes, I see. Chie settles on one reading of her mother's photograph, a recognition about her own vocation and her mother's meaning.
Anatomy, untitled
In the cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big Bang happening on January 1st An encyclopedic digression compressing universal history into one year.
Sparagmos, untitled
They see the ocean roll over a town. The airport collapse, the planes capsize. The bridges give. The typhoon tears the human world apart in a catalogue of wreckage.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Ah, Nell thinks, I see. I see at last; this is why I came to space. Nell's dream-recognition of why she became an astronaut, shattered on waking.
Displacement, untitled
Krikalev seems to look out now from the photograph as a god looks on its creation, with a patient forbearance. A realist cosmonaut is displaced into creator-god, a Genesis echo.

Books that share these scenes with Orbital

About the author

Samantha Harvey