Trajectory of Nowhere

In the context of space and time, who are we humans and do we even matter?

- Rupinder Pannu Brar

IF you didn't read Samantha Harvey's Booker-winning novel Orbital in 2024, do so in 2025. Harvey's book revolves around six astronauts who are brought together on a spacecraft that does a ninety-minute transit around the earth and thereby, 16 such orbits daily. A narration of their scientific experiments could have simply been science-fiction or a study of the interaction between the six characters in a closed space—and it does do that. However, the book is far more than that. It unfolds the full splendour of Mother Earth as seen from far beyond the Karman line. The concept of day and night is witnessed all at once vividly across the full girth of the planet with Papua New Guinea divided: “The island’s day-lit half lies lush and dragon-like, its mountains mythical in the long last night, its coasts outlined by bioluminescent shores. Its dark half is a shadow on royal blue water.” The wonder that is the earth unfolds, which Harvey describes as “...theatrics, the opera, the earth’s atmosphere, airglow, and sometimes it’s the smallest things, the lights of fishing boats off the coast of Malaysia dotted starlike in the black ocean.” The beauty of the earth without a trace of human footprints, except for the nighttime lights, when seen from the spacecraft is that of a planet unsullied, with no signs of environmental degradation and destruction. It is as haloed as all the other planets, as alluring and mysterious.