Book Review: Orbital

Orbital
By Samantha Harvey
Audio version, 6 hrs

Read by Sarah Naudi
Copyright 2023

This book was the winner of the Booker Prize in 2024 and winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize. It was also shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Orbital is poetic novel about 24 hours in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station (although it is never called that). The mission is one of the last space station missions before the station is to be decommissioned and eventually ditched into the ocean.

The six are from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan. There are two women and four men. They travel around the earth 16 times a day, going 17,000 miles an hour above our blue dot.

The author gives us glimpses into the lives of these space explorers but also shows what is going on beneath them - a typhon near the Philippines, clouds of dust across deserts, the dots of cities along the coastal areas.

And out another window are constellations, galaxies, and worlds yet unthought of.

Below them and then beside them, another rocket blasts off from earth, with astronauts headed toward the moon this time.

This could have been boring, and at first, I was afraid I was going to be put off by the reader, but I decided to give it a shot. I'm so glad I did. I found it fascinating. The writing was extraordinary, very lyrical and poetic, with a sentence structure that was calming. I enjoyed getting to know the astronauts a little, and then the widening expanse of the view of the world, then a dip into the microcosm of some portion thereof.

This is not a book I would have picked up normally, but it was a good choice. I was looking for something short while I wait on a hold for a longer audio book.

It's good to explore what's out there.

Thursday Thirteen

Over the years, I have read a lot of dystopian literature. Dystopian books generally refer to a society or world that is characterized by suffering, oppression, or extreme injustice. In a dystopian setting, the social, political, or environmental systems are deeply flawed, often creating bleak, undesirable conditions for its inhabitants.

Some of the first books I read that left an impression on me include Alas Babylon, by Pat Frank, which I read in the 10th grade, 1984 and Animal Farm, both by George Orwell, and A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter M. Miller. All of those were published before I was born. That was followed up by things like The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, both by Margaret Atwood.

Then there were the movies that stuck with me: Mad Max, The Postman, Waterworld, etc. Heck, even Game of Thrones was a dystopian fantasy.

Scary stuff. In none of these did women, in particular, make out very well.

Since we are moving into a bit of uncertainty, I thought I'd offer up some common elements or themes often found in dystopian literature:

1. Oppressive Government: A totalitarian or authoritarian regime controlling every aspect of life, including surveillance and constant monitoring of citizens through technology or informants. There is also a loss of privacy.

2. Propaganda: Media and messages designed to manipulate and control public opinion.

3. Restricted Freedom: Limited personal, political, or social freedoms.

4. Dehumanization: Citizens are treated as numbers or resources rather than individuals.

5. Environmental Decay: A degraded or polluted environment due to human neglect or disaster.

6. Technological Control: Technology used to oppress, control, or replace human functions.

7. Economic Inequality: Stark division between the elite and the impoverished masses; a rigid hierarchy that determines status and rights.

8. Rebellion or Resistance: A group or individual fighting against the oppressive system.

9. Censorship: Suppression or alteration of information to maintain control.

10. Artificial Scarcities: Manufactured shortages of resources to enforce dependence.

11. Loss of Individuality: Citizens are forced to conform, with personal expression discouraged or punished.

12. Fear and Intimidation: Use of violence, punishment, or the threat thereof to maintain control.

13. Cultural Decay: Loss or erosion of art, language, history, or traditions.

These elements often intertwine, painting a bleak picture of a world that serves as a warning or critique of current societal trends.

______________

Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 890th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.

Purple Skies

 

I Got Something to Say

For a while now, I've been trying to decide if I am "real" enough in this blog.

I read other people's writing, and it seems to flow and energy drips from it. My writing, to me, feels constructed, constrained, and a little constipated.

Perhaps this is because I know it's in the public domain. But then, so is the work of the folks I read. Other bloggers, other writers. 

People who can dip into their emotional well and come out of it and leave you in tears.

I'm not sure I can do that. I'm not sure I am capable of that. I don't know that anything I've written since I began blogging 20 years ago has ever done that.

There is so much that I don't write about because this is a public space and because I am - or was - a public persona - that I am pretty sure my filters are constantly on high alert.

Even if I don't want them to be.

So if I wanted to rip my heart apart on this blog, and dump all of my grief, my angst, my heartache, I seriously doubt I could. I might want to, but I don't think I could.

I ache to feel like a real woman, a real person, a real human being with emotions and everything, but sometimes I feel more like some androgynous Vulcan, living a life of logic, with my emotions shut off and shut down.

Only then they come flying out at odd times. In strange words with my husband, for example. Perhaps a short snap at a friend. Maybe a huge sigh with another family member.

But I so badly want to write with freedom, with abandonment, to let it all fly out. Even now, I'm trying to do that, sitting here writing, trying to find an emotion to cast outward, and all I find is a lot of broken.

I find the broken in the way I feel physically, while I am still - still - trying to get over this virus or allergy or whatever it is I have. My voice is raspy, my eyes water constantly, my sinuses are all over the place.

There's broken in my soul at the thought of my country falling to pieces right before my eyes. I keep wanting to say, "Not on my watch," but it is my watch and I have failed, as have the multitudes and the many, and yet we all, except those of us who die tonight, will get up tomorrow and it will be just another cold, frigid day in Southwest Virginia, and my beautiful mountains will still pitch up towards the blue sky, and the snow will still be spotty on the grounds, and the deer will slip from the cedar trees and into the glen to munch on frozen grass and the cardinals will fluff themselves up in the tree in the front yard, their bodies enlarged to keep warm as the polar vortex bears down upon us.

There's broken in my heart when I think of all I have not done and will not do, and all that I wanted to do but could not bring myself to do, and then there is regret because I cannot remember what I have done, and I have done a lot, it has been a life well-lived, or as well as I could live it, at any rate, and so what if I don't ever see the pyramids or travel to Ireland? Those are just marks on a map, after all, and life has no roadmap, no life does.

There are those who can bulldoze their way through their life and take and take and get what they want or think they need and many of those people are happy, but most are not, or so it seems to me. And there are people like me who shrink and grow small in order to simply stay safe because safe is security and yet safe is boring and not really secure at all, because it's a nothingness sort of existence to stay safe and secure and holed up, aloof and alone.

I want to find that part of me, that part that I know is in there, that would allow me to write with the freedom of a flag flapping in the breeze - any flag, anywhere - flapping in a wind until it tears into shreds, and no one is even sure what kind of flag it was, in the end. Isn't that the way to get out of this place, to fly straight into the wind, unfettered and free?

Wake Up, Maggie

 

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I don't know a lot about this man, something I need to rectify. I am not a big biography reader though in recent years I have attempted to rectify that. However, I mostly lean towards the memoirs of women.

From Encyclopedia Brittanica: "Martin Luther King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee) was a Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics, such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964."

I was not quite five years old when King was killed in Tennessee. I do not have memories of this man, though I may have seen him on television. I have no memories of his death, but it hasn't been all that long ago that I was reading something about him and ran across a chilling reminder of how deeply racism is instilled in the hearts and minds of so many in this country. The words in that article were something to the effect that many white people rejoiced and partied when they learned the King was dead.

That this would have been anyone's reaction never occurred to me until I read it. Looking around me now, though, I see that of course this would have been true. People probably drank champaign and danced on top of their cars. Racism has never left. I just didn't see it because I live in a relatively white area. I grew up with it and didn't even know it.

This day is also the day the USA ushers in its new gilded age. An oligarchy unseen in my lifetime takes over. Or maybe it has always been this way, just not this blatant. I am not sure.

All I know is that today is a day to think, to contemplate, and to wonder. 

Try not to worry, and do not rejoice too much. There are winners and losers in everything, and what seems to be is not always what is.

The future remains as uncertain as it did in 1968.

I read the back issues of newspapers for fun.

Believe me, nothing much has changed as far as human nature over the last 150 years. The issues of today were the issues in 1875. They were only in less technological forms, but the class divide was as strong then as it is now.

Don't look for those issues to disappear overnight.