Orbital by Samantha Harvey was the book I picked to read after you all chose it as a must read for me in 2025. It’s a book about a small set of astronauts orbiting space and their thoughts on Earth, life and humanity as well as the thoughts of a few people living on Earth on the same matter.
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Orbital is more of a novella than it is an actual novel and even though it’s fictional, it feels more like the author’s own thoughts than it does a completely fictional novel about space. It’s short, it’s not really a novel and here’s how I feel about the rest of it…
Orbital plot – 3.75/5
As you’ll know if you’ve read any of my other reviews by now, I rate all of my books by how good their plot is and how good their characters are. Orbital is very difficult to rate in both of those factors as there is no real plot and the characters don’t do a heck of a lot.
The plot of Orbital is relatively non-existent – there are some minor conversations between the different astronauts but other than that, most of the plot is a philosophical and emotional look at Earth from the view of space.
If you’re into looking at life, humanity and earth in a more philosophical way, this may be for you. But for someone who’s more into actual story, moving plot and action, I just couldn’t get into this at all.
I can appreciate Harvey’s incredible writing though and I have to give it to her, there are some impressive thoughts in here, some of which I agree with, others I don’t.
Orbital characters – 3.5/5
As I wrote earlier, the characters in Orbital are fairly non-existent. We have our six main astronauts sitting in their spaceship, but other than this, there’s not a whole lot of character development at all.
The six characters all have different views from one another and this is just about the only personality we get from any of them, as the rest of the book is mostly just narrative written from the point of view of what often seems the author.
Orbital final rating – 3.75/5
Orbital is a book that I know will appeal to many with its almost sole focus on philosophical views on Earth and humanity, and Harvey’s fantastic writing; however, it just wasn’t for me. I need more plot, more character development and more progression throughout my books but Orbital felt much more like a long philosophical poem on humanity as a race. As I said, for some, this may be exactly what they’re looking for, but for me, it simply wasn’t what I’d consider enjoyable.
