Let me assure you that Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is not science fiction.  Longlisted for the Booker Prize, it is a cross-genre collection of character sketches and vignettes.  Don’t buckle up: nothing much happens.

Harvey describes a day in the life of six astronauts. On their eighty-eighth day on a space station that orbits the earth 16 times a day, they are overwhelmed by the wonders of Earth seen from outer space. They observe the gorgeous colors on the planet, note the effects of climate change on the terrain, and muse on space travel as politics.  Each researches the effect of the lack of gravity in his or her special scientific field: in one cruel experiment, a group of mice learn to fly, while others wither.  But the astronauts suffer equally from the lack of gravity:  despite their two hours of exercise daily, their muscles weaken and their responses slow.   

During a conversation about what inspired them to become astronauts, Nell says it was Challenger, which exploded in seventy seconds, with seven astronauts on board.  “I realised space is real, space flight is real, a thing real people do, die doing.  Real people, like me, could actually do it, and if I died doing it that would be OK.”

And that’s very sad, don’t you think?

 Now can you buckle up, you ask?

Well, no.

Some miss their families, others prefer space. At one time or another, all wish they could stay in space forever. Another spaceship is headed for the Moon, and they would like to take that journey, too.

But the action, such as it is, happens off-stage. A Japanese astronaut’s mother dies, and she dreams about her mother.  Another astronaut, Pietro, has a radio conversation with a woman in Vancouver who questions the value of their mission.

There is a discernible structure, but Orbital hasn’t the grace of Ishiguro’sThe Buried Giant, a quietly beautiful novel which enraged SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who said in her review at The Guardian that literary writers could not and should not write SF.  (It is one of my favorite books, though I do not consider it science fiction.)  Harvey’s slim volume is not science fiction, either, but it is surprisingly wordy, often more awkward than lyrical, and Ursula K. Le Guin would be annoyed.