When art goes to space, it normally goes looking for either adventure or truth. In other words, for every George Lucas or Ridley Scott, there for the thrusters and lasers, you have your Stanley Kubrick or Christopher Nolan, using the cosmic vacuum as a place to test some of our deepest terrestrial quandaries. This year’s Booker Prize winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which dramatises a day onboard the International Space Station (ISS), 250 miles above Earth, falls decidedly in the latter tradition.
“The more and more I thought about it,” Harvey told me on 13 November, “we just don’t write about space as a lived environment. We write about it in terms of sci-fi, and it’s all very dramatic and conflict-driven and epic. And actually everything that happens daily on the ISS is the opposite of that. It’s all about trying to minimise conflict and minimise drama.”
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