Review of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

A beautiful gem of a book...very short, barely even a novella, but I couldn't read it quickly because it was so beautiful. It's set in the International Space Station, more or less as it is now, though there's another moon mission in progress - the only thing in the book that makes it speculative fiction rather than just naturalistic fiction. 

It describes the back stories and inner lives of the occupants - Russians, Americans, Japanese - but also their sensuous experiences of the space station, and the physical sensations of being in weightless, and the impact on time perception of living through so many dawns in each 24 hour period. 

So well done, it's hard to believe that she hasn't been there.

And of course it's also about Earth, and what it looks like from the space station (humans largely invisible except at night), and there's the tiniest brush with climate turmoil - bigger, more unpredictable storms, changing seasons on the ground.