Orbital is a gorgeous modern-lit trick: One International Space Station, six astronauts, sixteen orbits, twenty four hours, about being suspended between the mundane and the sublime. This book shines in the flow of its language, and the precise attention to detail paid to the texture of life on the ISS. Sentences link to each other like the trajectory of a satellite, punctation a marker as arbitrary as crossing some boundary one hundred miles below.

What is sublime is the universe, the colors and swirls of Earth with its seas and storms and forests and deserts, the jeweled tracery of cities in the night, and the true infinity of the void. What is sublime is spaceflight, drifting like a fish or an angel through the modules of the ISS. What is sublime is the astronaut's place in history; a narrow bridge between the grounded past and an astral future. What is mundane is the mechanics of keeping bodies and the ISS functional; exercising two hours a day, cleaning filters and toilets, eating meals out of satchels, sending brief emails to family back home, feeding your body waste away in a zero-G environment it was never designed for.

The central metaphor of the book is Velázquez's painting Las Meninas, a 17th century painting famous for ambiguity in the subject, and the multiple points of view. The painting is nominally about the central ladies in waiting, yet Velázquez the artist appears in it, looking at his patrons the King and Queen of Spain, who are reflected in a small mirror indicated that they are standing roughly where you are. In the same way, Orbital is about you-the-reader looking at fictional astronauts looking at a real Earth, mediating Harvey's opinions about the unity of the universe etc.

It's all very clever, it's all very pretty. Not every book needs intense plots or characters, and they are minimal in this one. Chie's mother has died on Earth the day before. Nell is obsessed with the Challenger astronauts. Pietro befriended a Pilipino fisherman who is threatened by a typhoon the ISS crew can see. Shaun carries a postcard of  Las Meninas, Anton and Roman are Russian, and one is a ham radio operator and the other one is considering getting a divorce.  This is just an ordinary day, aside from the typhoon below and four other astronauts on their way to the moon in a billionaires capsule. It's realistic, astronauts are chosen for their ability to work with each other and not get emotionally entangled, and an explosive decompression or similar accident would be needless drama, but it leaves this book a little thin.

And as one final aside, male authors are notorious for not being able to write women, and I have to say that while Harvey is a gifted writer, at several moments when she examined the innermost thoughts of one the male characters, an astronaut or the husband of an astronaut, I was struck by the utter feminine artifice of the voice, a fantasy of how women want men to think nearly as blind as she "she breasted boobily down the stairs." 

It probably doesn't matter. Men don't read books.