Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Title: Orbital

Author: Samantha Harvey

Genre: Literary Fiction

My Rating: 1/5

Outer Space is a fascinating magician, with lots of tricks up its sleeves. Few of them we have uncovered, some we are still on the cusp of understanding but many more we are yet to find realise that it is a trick.

Space is fascinating.

And perhaps that is why, most science fiction novels are exploratory in design, trying to pick up some of the tricks that Outer Space has to offer, thereby hoping to make the readers fascinated by their stories. However, such books are more about concepts, technologies, domination and the stories generally take place somewhere far away, where Earth is either a distant memory or on the verge of being one.

Orbital on the other hand is more close to home in more ways than one- it happens on the International Space Station and it is about the astronauts, who are just like any of us, but facing much bigger battles than any of us.

It is what I thought it was when I read the blurb.

It ended up being a fanciful blabbering, akin to these Saints and Godmen, who go on and on, uttering a lot of words but saying absolutely nothing. Samantha Harvey seems to have a repertoire of words and she has emptied it all in the book. The writing is magnificent, no doubt and Harvey's eloquence is on full display in this oeuvre, forcing the story and the character behind an imaginary screen which somehow is visible to us. (space trick maybe?)

What could have been a philosophical discourse on family bondings, of a daughter looking up at the sky, searching for her mother/father who is above her 400 kms away, travelling at 7.66 km/s, trying to slow down the spaceship, so that the parent would receive her love and yearnings, ends up being a debauchery of words that would give an erection to a Sesquipedalian.