Reviews

Matthew Porges

On the new space race

A. C. Grayling. Who Owns the Moon? In Defence of Humanity’s Common Interests in Space. Oneworld, 2024.

Samantha Harvey. Orbital. Grove, 2023.

Tim Marshall. The Future of Geography: How the Competition in Space Will Change Our World. Scribner, 2023.

Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? Penguin Press, 2023.

Some years ago, I saw a poll that suggested that a large majority of British citizens would decline a free trip to the moon, on the grounds that there is nothing to do on the moon. I am an extreme sucker for space stuff, and would jump at the chance to spend a week or so on the moon. Nevertheless, I had to admit they had a point. The moon is a neat rock. I could picture myself walking around up there, maybe driving the lunar rover in a big circle, but then what? On the other hand: It’s another celestial body. Wouldn’t you, as a hominid, kind of have togo, if you got the chance? Apparently not. I conducted an informal survey of my friends, and they basically all wanted to stay on Earth. Losers, cowards; this is why society is in such a dire state. We used to aspire!

So maybe most people would decline to actually go to space (even if I would like to go, I can’t; I have a job), but there is clearly a large appetite for media that is in some way about space. There is a vast corpus of TV shows, movies, plays, museums, books, and video games recounting the history of human spaceflight, gesturing at the dream of a multiplanetary future; and that is before we even consider science fiction. In his second inaugural address, the current US president promised a voyage to Mars, so his speechwriters must imagine there is a demand for it. Yet it is sort of difficult to imagine oneself into a space suit. The specialist knowledge required, the famously rigorous selection process for astronauts, the distance and danger and the lifelong dedication, mean that space travel does not immediately lend itself to mass participation or easy empathy. Astronauts are captivating to watch in any number of documentaries about life aboard the International Space Station, or preparing for various journeys, but in interviews, they are, like elite athletes, mostly at a loss to explain why the experience is meaningful, or what makes them so obviously special. So perhaps this is ripe territory for realist fiction: Are we crying out for the quotidian space novel, the space comedy of manners, the space bildungsroman, zero-gravity autofiction?

In this potential vacuum, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize–winning novella, Orbital, the shortest such winner in decades, offers a radically appealing premise: plotless and concise, allusive and oblique, set in orbit. Six astronauts aboard the ISS carry out their experiments, gaze out the window, and reflect poetically on their shared situation. Harvey the novelist is here to explain to us what an astronaut never could: What does space feel like? Never having been to space, Harvey has access to the same tools as any other terrestrial writer approaching this task. In interviews, she has described experiencing some trepidation about writing so far outside her own experience. But Harvey is a human, like all the astronauts on the ISS, so there is a possibility of empathy and a frisson of difference in her attempts to tangibilize those experiences. So much the better. She has called Orbital a “space pastoral”; more precisely, in its almost complete uneventfulness, it is a book about nothing, Seinfeld in space. This need not be a bad thing. And as with Seinfeld, Orbital’s lack of plot and depth is in itself a form of signification. As Stalin allegedly said, quantity has a quality all its own; so too does brevity. The implication that fills Orbital’s void is that space is ipso factoprofound, that the fact of being in space — even just a tiny bit, in low Earth orbit — is a particularity that expresses a kind of universalism.