<
https://theconversation.com/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-the-2024-booker-prize-a-short-but-powerful-story-urging-us-to-save-the-planet-243580>
"Samantha Harvey’s
Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so
skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against
the urgency of the climate crisis.
While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia,
six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space
Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in
stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between
night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.
Orbital was written during lockdown when the meaning of home (for those lucky
enough to have one) changed forever. There’s a sense in which Harvey’s six
astronauts return us to that moment when our homes became prisons and we were
forced to contemplate the global effects of a virus that had no respect for
national boundaries.
On the International Space Station, borders are only visible on the side of the
Earth that is under night and only really as clusters of artificial light which
shows cities. Rivers are “nonsensical scorings … like strands of long fallen
hair” and “the other side of the world will arrive in 40 minutes” blurring it
all.
Russian cosmonaut Anton contemplates US astronaut Michael Collins’ iconic
photograph of Apollo 11 leaving the surface of the Moon in 1969 with the Earth
beyond. He thinks “no Russian mind should be steeped in these thoughts”, but he
is captivated by where the people are in the photograph. Is Collins the only
human not to appear in it? Or is he the only human presence we can be sure of?
Shaun has a postcard of Diego Velázquez’s
Las Meninas, sent to him by his
wife. The painting’s complex composition has been said to create a unique
illusion of reality where it is unclear who the subject is. Is it the viewer?
The royal child? King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain who are depicted on
the wall?
“Welcome,” Shaun’s wife writes on the postcard, “to the labyrinth of mirrors
that is human life.” The Italian astronaut Pietro solves the labyrinth with the
simple observation that the dog at the child’s side must surely be the subject
of the painting. “[It is] the only thing… that isn’t slightly laughable or
trapped within a matrix of vanities.” Humans, Shaun concludes, are no big deal.
While we gaze at ourselves and try to “ascertain what makes us different” from
a dog, which as French theorist Michel Foucault also observed is the only
object in the painting that has no function other than to be seen, it reminds
us that our differences are negligible. As Shaun concludes, we are also animals
fighting for survival."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
