"Rapture and beauty": a writer's portrait of the International Space Station
26:23 Share

This is an ad by BetterHelp. What's your perfect night? Is it curling up on the couch for a cozy, peaceful night in? Therapy can feel a bit like that. Your comfort place where you replenish your energy. With BetterHelp, get matched with a therapist based on your needs, entirely online. It's convenient and suited to your schedule. Find comfort this season with BetterHelp.

Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Hey, guys.

Have you heard of Goldbelly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic, famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere, nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. They ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code GIFT.

Hi, Benjamin here. Welcome to Episode 9 of Nature Hits the Books. Something a bit different for this episode of the show, we're stepping into the world of fiction. And joining me this time is Samantha Harvey, whose book Orbital takes a look at a day in the life of a very familiar space station. Orbital is Samantha's fifth novel and has been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.

It examines the contrasts that the crew experience over 24 hours as they balance the majesty and mundanity of life on the station. On the podcast, we discuss the challenges of putting yourself in the shoes of an astronaut and how distance can give new perspectives on global issues like climate change. ♪

Samantha Harvey, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me here. It's a real pleasure. I wonder, off the bat, if you could just give me a quick sense of what your book is about. It is a day in the life of the ISS, the International Space Station. Yeah, that's right. So it's set over a 24-hour period of Earth orbits, so 16 orbits of the Earth, and the chapters are named after each orbit.

And the spacecraft in my book, I never really referred to it as the ISS. I mean, it's obviously based upon that. But I wanted to give myself just that little bit of fictional latitude by not calling it the ISS. It just happens to be a spacecraft that's almost identical. Okay. All right. In orbit name then. Exactly. So it takes place over one day of orbits for astronauts to cosmonauts.

And it follows just a day in their lives. And it is a fiction book, but it's not science fiction, right? Like there's no aliens or futuristic galaxies or anything like that. This is very much grounded in reality. Why did you go for this approach? And why is this setting a good one for telling a story that you wanted to tell? So I do like sci-fi. I do read sci-fi. But I wasn't interested really in writing it. What I wanted to write was, I suppose...

what you could call space realism or to try to think about a sort of nature writing about space and also to see space as a domestic environment which it is the iss is a domestic space daily lives go on there and i was interested in writing about that aspect and i wondered why

in sort of popular culture and sci-fi, we tend to catastrophize space. I mean, I understand that because it's always been the great unknown. And so we project our fears onto it. But in fact, it isn't so unknown. I mean, low Earth orbit really isn't unknown to us anymore. We know it quite intimately. And I thought that that doesn't need to have our fears projected into it. It's just a fascinating perspective on the Earth and

and on ourselves as earthbound creatures. And so it seemed to me like a really interesting perspective that is very other extraordinary, but also only 250 miles away from the earth. It's not far at all. So it's a really interesting in-between space. It does seem like it is a book of contrasts in many ways. And I would like to explore that. But I wonder...

I mean, if we could back up a little bit and talk about the genesis of this project. As I understand, this began during lockdown. Is that right? It began a little bit before lockdown. I started writing it and then I abandoned it because I felt that it wasn't a book I could write, that I somehow felt I didn't have permission to write it because not only am I not a national, nor could I ever be a national, but I'm so constitutionally uneducated

unlike an astronaut. It felt like a form of trespass to write it. Since astronauts do write about being in space, they write about it a lot, understandably. And I thought, well, who's going to want to listen to me? So I lost my nerve, which I don't normally do with my novels, actually, but I did with this one. And then I decided to come back to it.

And then the writing of it did largely coincide with lockdown. I mean, are you a space enthusiast, a space nerd, I guess? Or is this something that has developed afterwards or something in between, do you think? Not a space nerd, no.

I've always been interested in space, in the human experience of looking back at the Earth from space. So I used to collect quotes from astronauts of things astronauts had said about being in space, either the lunar astronauts looking back from a great distance, or sometimes, because this was going back into my teenage years, sort of before the ISS, sort of things that the astronauts on the Mir space station, for example, had said.

So that always really piqued my interest. I think I decided I wanted to write a pastoral book. I feel a sort of ongoing sadness, I suppose, about the gradual or maybe not so gradual loss of the natural world and how that impacts me directly, how I feel about it directly and the loss of that. And I wanted to write a novel that had a sort of pastoral, slightly nostalgic feel and

And somehow that led me to space, which sounds like a very unobvious connection.

But I thought space is our remaining wilderness. But even then, low Earth orbit is not really a wilderness anymore, and we've managed to fill it with junk. So I thought it'd be quite interesting to write in the sort of territory of nature writing, but about that area of wilderness, which in some senses is also being lost, but affords us a view that is a sort of comfortable distance away from the Earth to enable me to look back

just to see it not with any judgment and just to see what I can do with my complex feelings.

And reading your book, I mean, it feels like you must have approached it, at least in the first instance, really with a reporter's mindset. I say sitting here as a science journalist, right? Because the science is all there. The toll of what it's like being on a space station, on human muscles, the beautiful fact that fluid swells to the face and your face looks different, but also some of the experiments you've done.

You wrote about two, which seem very much grounded in reality. How much did you have to hit the books in your preparation for writing this? Yeah, extensively, because I knew very little about the ins and outs of life on the space station when I started this book.

And maybe that was one of the other reasons why I decided after about 5,000 words to give up. I thought, God, I have no idea about this environment. I'm trying to write a piece of realism about it. But once I did commit myself to the project, it's a sort of joyous subject to research. And there's so much...

out there. That's the great gift of this subject matter. So pretty much everything that NASA and ESA, the European Space Agency, do on the ISS is in the public domain. So you can find it all out. And then, of course, astronauts write about it. So you can find out quite a lot of that personal detail.

And you can go online and you can view exactly which science experiments are happening today on the ISS. You can find out the ones that happened last week and the week before. And you can go as deeply as you want into any of this. You could spend your life on the NASA website. It's a very deep place.

I did a huge amount of research and loved it. I love it, though, in the sense that it can fuel creativity for me. I want it to be able to enable me to see around a corner or see through a creative problem or give me a new sense of direction for what I want to do. And it's a real sort of dance, I think, for me between the research and the writing and the fact and the making up.

I think those two things exist in a really interesting dance with one another and the research.

to write to the end of the book. I mean, I didn't sort of stop researching and then write the book I was researching all the way through. There are so many specific little things, though. Earlier in the book, you write about a set of tweezers being lost and heading for the air vents, quote, the resting place of all lost things. And I thought this is such a specific reference that someone must have told you this. Did you speak to any folk about this? Any astronauts or any folk who've been up in space? No, this was all plundered from astronauts

astronaut journals and diaries and books. Some of the loveliest details I found, like there's a detail in there about how they try to make a garlic paste because food just tastes of nothing in space, in that the space food is bad, but also your sinuses are blocked, so you can't really taste properly. They're always trying to find ways of kind of enhancing food and making it just taste of something. So they make this garlic paste

which sort of explodes in the oven. And then the smell of garlic just permeates the space station because there's nowhere for a smell to go. You can't open a window, right? So I thought it was such a lovely detail. And that was taken from an astronaut journal that I found from the very early days of the space station. And this was deep in the archives of the NASA website, just going through their sort of daily journals. So those small anecdotal things were found in

in things that astronauts had written. I didn't speak to any astronauts in the process of writing it. I always prefer not to go straight to the horse's mouth with these things because I feel like it would hamper my ability to make things up. If I were to ask an astronaut something, it would be then very difficult for me to make up something different. That was part of the rationale and then also...

We need to. I mean, there's so much written down. And did you find it hard to put yourself in their shoes? Because it's such an extraordinary thing that so few people get to do to escape Earth's atmosphere. And I've often read and heard that folk come back

You know, they've had some sort of epiphany, I guess, in a sense that I and maybe yourself are unlikely to experience. So how did you shift yourself into that mode? This was my continuing anxiety as I was writing the book. I wouldn't be able to get into an astronaut's mindset.

And that's not so much from the point of view of not being able to represent their feelings of awe or wonder, because for me, those are very present. When I look at images of the earth, just at my desk looking at images, let alone seeing it in the flesh, and that was what I wanted to write from, a place of

rapture attention to the beauty of our planet. I wanted the book to have a quite joyful tone, I suppose.

My anxiety was that I would overdo that. The astronauts really don't feel that most of the time. You know, most of the time they just kind of got a bit of a headache and they're sort of missing home and they've got these arduous science experiments to do and they have to do two hours of exercise every day. And yet maybe they'll look out of the window at some point and see the Earth and their heart will leap from.

And then it's just back to daily life. That was always my worry with it, that I was slightly overplaying the majesty in it. They can't sustain that feeling all the time. Maybe this was one of the gifts of writing the book over just one day because I could kind of convince myself, well, maybe on this one day they feel that sense of awe in an ongoing way, partly because there is a new mission happening sort of in the background of the book.

And also there is this typhoon happening on the Earth and there's a sense of heightened perceiving and heightened awareness of where they are. So is my own sensibility too arty, too wasty, just not science-y enough? You know, they're pretty extraordinary, unflappable beings. Yes, I've been watching some footage of the heart rate of Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon for the first time and it is rock steady. And I'm like, I can't imagine what it is to be that calm and collected all

all the time. No, I would have had a panic attack and passed out by then. I mean, you talk about the moon mission that you write about in the book. And in my head, I saw this as this novel is set in the very near future. And this moon mission is analogous to the Artemis missions that are in preparation. But it's interesting because you talk about these astronauts and they have to maintain almost a roboticism, but also they are human beings.

And it seems that at times they're aware of the incredible nature of what they do, but they're also a little bit jealous of the folk heading to the moon. And that kind of space between things, it comes up again, right? They're very cozy and collegiate with their colleagues, and yet they are completely isolated from their families. So extraordinarily lonely in places they deal with.

things like brushing their teeth, the mundanity of the regular day, but also seeing the continents from above 16 times in a day. I mean, it seems that's quite a central theme to your book. There are these toss-ups, these weights of one against the other. Very much, yeah. When I started to read about the ISS and life there, I was so struck by these very difficult contradictions that exist between the claustrophobia of being in this little titanium tube and

And then the agoraphobia of looking out the window and there's nothing, you know, you're not within protection of the Earth's atmosphere anymore. And then the, as you say, this collegiate nature of it, the fact that you're with maybe five or six other people all the time, but you're quite profoundly alone as well. That it is this extraordinary, upending, time-exploded experience, and yet...

It's really quite mundane and they spend a lot of time hoovering as far as I can see. All of these amazing, wonderful contradictions I find such rich territory for fiction where opposites are continually colliding and the astronauts are asked to assimilate all of these things at once. When you start following those orbits as I did, day after day,

it becomes a very familiar space it's just like oh yeah here's the south coast of africa again and oh yeah there's the indian ocean and okay there's new guinea and you start to feel this great familiarity and yet it's a planet it's huge and it's unknowable to us in so many ways and it's a rock

in space for all our tender feelings about it. One thing I noticed is that Earth is always lowercase e. It's always the Earth. It's never Earth with a capital E, like a big thing. That clearly was something you thought about. Yeah, that's a really interesting observation. Something I find very, very touching is that all the other planets in the solar system are named after Greek or Roman gods, and only the Earth

is named after the stuff it's made of. But it's such a lowly word, you know, just this dirt that it's made of. That's what we call our own planet and the others have these grandiose names. So maybe that's part of that decision to keep it lowercase, reminding myself and perhaps the reader that we are so familiar with and have such tenderness for the earth that

that we call it by this very lowly names of a pet name almost. Oh, interesting. I mean, one element that does run through and you touched on it there is that the crew are quite powerless in the face of this developing typhoon, enormous typhoon that begins partly through the book in the Pacific, moves towards the Philippines.

What were you trying to say with this? It does seem like a direct message about climate change. I wanted to mark time in the novel by some event that was not a human scale. So although this 24 hour period in space is sort of exploded into 16 transits of the earth, there is slowly but surely this typhoon closing in, you know,

So that was the motivation behind it. But then, of course, into that you read and it's implied that there is a climate change issue going on here. It wasn't that I wanted to write a novel about climate change or that I didn't want to. I wanted to write about the Earth and implied now in any view of the Earth is climate change and what we're doing to its weather systems and climate.

I found it then the typhoon could become a way of expressing quite a lot of things. Of course typhoons have always happened, they're not solely a product of climate change but

They are getting more frequent and stronger and more forceful and more destructive. And they disproportionately affect the poorer areas of the earth. So I found that it could become a sort of motif or a symbol or something without me having to really do the legwork of explaining that. And to, again, sort of point towards these contradictions that I was interested in, that, of course, the typhoon is going to be catastrophic.

on a human level and on the earth. But when you look at it from above,

It's a thing of sort of magnificent beauty and elegance. And I was interested in that dissonance again. And in the fact, as you said in your question, the astronauts can see it and they can report on it, but they can do nothing about it. And in all your research then, did you learn more about climate change that you didn't already know? I mean, obviously we're all familiar with it as a thing, but the extent of it and how it is, well, moving apace and not much is being done to get on top of it. I spent a lot of time reading up about

the effect of warming oceans and how that affects the weather systems on Earth. And I got an insight into how very, very complicated it is to predict what's going to happen with climate change and gave me enormous respect for people who do model these things. And it makes me feel so frustrated to the point of tearfulness, I think, because I

We have so much information at our fingertips. And one of the things that the ISS does and is very famous for doing is to collect data so that we can see very clearly how glaciers are shrinking or how coastlines are changing as sea levels rise. We have all this information. We have all of this data.

And we still are not doing anything about it. Or we're doing very, very little. If I'd learned anything in the process of writing this book, it was that

And one thing I took from it as well is that the ISS, it seems like an expression of political will of togetherness, right? All these countries working together. And I think that's a very important thing.

And yet, in the distance from their perspective, there is something where people aren't working together. Is this something you were trying to get across? It was very central to me. That's a good point. One of the ideas of this weird connection I made with the pastoral novel and ending up writing from low Earth orbit was the sense that the era that the ISS has embodied of international cooperation has come to an end, really.

The ISS is still clinging on to this cooperation because neither US nor Russia can really pull out. You know, the spaceship can't work without those two parts functioning together. And I really wanted to mark what I see as the sort of tail end of that era of post-Soviet.

Cold War hopes of unity. You look at the names of the modules on the ISS and their harmony, unity, tranquility. The Russian sections are called Dawn and this idea of this new dawn of peace and cooperation. And it has come to an end. When I started writing this book, the war in Ukraine had not yet started, but

Already I was perceiving that this fracture in the relationship, which is partly what the crack in the spacecraft at the end of the novel is sort of signifying. This just isn't going to last. More and more as I wrote the book, I found I wanted to write about the dying days of this very...

beautiful, hopeful thing. This wonderful sort of time capsule that's rattling around and it is kind of rattling as well. It's quite decrepit now. It's quite vintage. Retrofuturism, right? I think it's at play, but it's not. It's just, it is what it is. That's exactly it. It's kind of cutting edge, marvellous piece of machinery and also falling apart. And so are the dreams that built it. To me, what a magical kind of terrain for fiction. You talk about

this being fiction, astronauts and cosmonauts and taikonauts and so forth are some of the most studied humans on the planet, right? They're prodded and poked before and after and during and we've got all this data. Where does this fit into that? A fiction novel about their lives, do you think? It's interesting because a lot of the studies that are done on astronauts are on astronauts as, to put it in elegant terms, as sort of data and sort of pieces of meat, you know, what happens to this flesh in space.

Some of it is to benefit science on Earth, but a lot of it is to try to see how we can make the human body more equipped to deal with longer duration space missions. There isn't really very much written, I think, about astrophysics.

astronauts as people with hearts and souls, if you like. They're often the subject of science and not the subject of art, I guess. That also seems sort of interesting to me, the idea of trying to explore what happens to a person's heart when

when they're in space and not just the lump of flesh, but the locus of feeling and experience. And I think that astronauts themselves are not really very good at doing that or they maybe don't want to. You know, I wanted to

be a bit audacious and try to speak to that more and see them less as objects of science and more as subjects. I know that Tim Peake has read your book. He, of course, has been on the ISS. What did he make of it? Yeah, he has read it. He said some lovely things about it, but then he's an incredibly polished scientist.

charming and lovely man so of course he's going to say kind things about it. And what about anybody else? Have any other folk who've been in space reached out to you, sent you a message at all? I haven't heard from other astronauts. It terrifies me to think of them reading it. You know, I wonder if they see it as some sort of trespass into their private world. I'd be interested to know what

But I haven't had that feedback and I am sort of scared of it. I mean, your book's out in the world now, out on the earth, lowercase e. What are you hoping that people take from it? You've told the story you wanted to tell. Do you have anything that you hope people pick up on? More than anything, I suppose I want the book to have a feeling of rapture and beauty. A sort of happiness, I suppose. Just undeniable happiness.

gladness at the sight of our planet and if that can land with the reader then the book has worked for me I think the success of a book or whether it's

saying to the reader what you want it to say lies in the question of whether the thing that was in your heart, in my heart when I wrote it, is that something that might be in some way deposited into the reader's heart when they read it. And whatever the reader or I want to do with that feeling is another matter, whether that's to rush out and take direct action for climate change or whether it's to just spend more time

peeking out of the window, or whether it's to spend more time looking at footage of the Earth from space, or whether it's to go into some sort of downward spiral at what we're losing. I don't know, that's for the reader to decide, but I want to somehow impart

some of that feeling of expansion and rapture that I have when I look at those images. Can I ask what effect it had on you when you see the ISS go past? Do you give it a little wave maybe? I love seeing it go past. I really like outdoor swimming and I was swimming at Lyme Regis in February and it was dark and I was just like kind of lying in this very cold water looking up at the sky and

and I saw the ISS go past and I felt almost moved to tears you know it was really wonderful I feel like I experience it slightly differently now having spent so much time writing about it but for me writing the book was beautiful escapism and I was sad to leave its world and usually when I finish a novel I'm not sad at all to leave its world I'm just so relieved for

that it's done. But with this book, I thought, oh God, I can't spend seven hours a day looking at footage from space anymore. Or I can, but I can't really justify it. And that felt like a loss and it felt to me that it was a perspective on things that helped me, helps me still and is quite consoling just to be reminded of the earth's weird loveliness. But also,

I see it as something that's quite robust. It's us who are in trouble. The Earth will be fine. It's just a lump of rock in space. It's not the Earth we need to save. It's ourselves and all the other creatures on it. And I find that sort of somehow consoling. Wonderful. Let's leave it there. Samantha Harvey, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Samantha Harvey there. Her book Orbital is out now.

That's it for Episode 9 of Nature Hits the Books. If you have any feedback on this episode, why not ping us an email to podcast at nature.com with the subject line Nature Hits the Books. Otherwise, look out for the next episode soon. The music used in this episode was called To Clarity by Aire via Epidemic Sound. I'm Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening. Music

Oh my god, it's the coolest thing ever. Hey guys, have you heard of Goldbelly? Well, check this out. It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic, famous foods from restaurants across the country anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. They ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. Seriously.

So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code GIFT. But, Abu, when do we make my nuggets?

En Rouse, consigues productos para todos los gustos y tendrás acceso a más de $600 semanales en ahorros con cupones digitales. Porque lo bueno se comparte. Rouse, fresh para todos.