The best-written imaginative novel of the year
Read the opening pages of our pick from the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize shortlist ^ Plus our first pick from the recent releases in nonfiction
Photo by Austrian National Library
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—‘They have each at some point been shot into the sky on a kerosene bomb, and then through the atmosphere in a burning capsule with the equivalent weight of two black bears upon them. They have each steeled their ribcages against the force until they felt the bears retreat, one after the other, and the sky become space, and gravity diminish, and their hair stand on end’: the most beautifully written novel on this year’s shortlist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for imaginative literature.
Last December we chose this novel as a best-written recent release, and last year we chose Nicola Griffith’s Spear from the Ursula K. Le Guin shortlist.
—’Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion’: our first pick from the recent releases in nonfiction.
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THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE FOR IMAGINATIVE FICTION - 2024 SHORTLIST
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Sift by Alissa Hattman
The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson
The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo
The best-written of these is
Orbit minus 1
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
They hang in their sleeping bags. A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities. Their sleep begins to thin and some distant earthly morning dawns and their laptops flash the first silent messages of a new day; the wide-awake, always-awake station vibrates with fans and filters. In the galley are the remnants of last night’s dinner – dirty forks secured to the table by magnets and chopsticks wedged in a pouch on the wall. Four blue balloons are buoyed on the circulating air, some foil bunting says Happy Birthday, it was nobody’s birthday but it was a celebration and it was all they had. There’s a smear of chocolate on a pair of scissors and a small felt moon on a piece of string, tied to the handles of the foldable table.
Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt. Now there’s Santiago on South America’s approaching coast in a cloud-hazed burn of gold. Unseen through the closed shutters the trade winds blowing across the warm waters of the Western Pacific have worked up a storm, an engine of heat. The winds take the warmth out of the ocean where it gathers as clouds which thicken and curdle and begin to spin in vertical stacks that have formed a typhoon. As the typhoon moves west towards southern Asia, their craft tracks east, eastward and down towards Patagonia where the lurch of a far-off aurora domes the horizon in neon. The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.
Onboard the craft it’s Tuesday morning, four fifteen, the beginning of October. Out there it’s Argentina it’s the South Atlantic it’s Cape Town it’s Zimbabwe. Over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light. They slip through time zones in silence.
.
They have each at some point been shot into the sky on a kerosene bomb, and then through the atmosphere in a burning capsule with the equivalent weight of two black bears upon them. They have each steeled their ribcages against the force until they felt the bears retreat, one after the other, and the sky become space, and gravity diminish, and their hair stand on end.
Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard. Earth’s fabulous and improbable backyard. Turning head on heel in the slow drift of their hurtle, head on hip on hand on heel, turning and turning with the days. The days rush. They will each be here for nine months or so, nine months of this weightless drifting, nine months of this swollen head, nine months of this sardine living, nine months of this earthward gaping, then back to the patient planet below.
Some alien civilisation might look on and ask: what are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round? The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours
"Ravishingly beautiful." — Joshua Ferris, New York Times
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.
RECOMMENDED:
Twin Peaks: The Return’s awfulness game is deep and broad, ambitious and exploratory, and seeks out and infects areas of life that should be unreachable by any telly drama. I’m trying to think of synonyms for awful as it’s nowhere near strong enough in this context, but none of its synonyms do the job either. Ghastly… dreadful… The Return isn’t dreadful. Or it is dreadful but is so much more than that, so far beyond dreadful you feel embarrassed for your mind for even suggesting the word.
Rank, gruesome, mince aren’t quite strong enough either.
But disaster might be getting closer. Also catastrophe, trainwreck, fiasco, travesty, monstrosity, carnage, abomination, atrocity, crime against humanity, holocaust…
No, with holocaust we might finally have found a word too strong for a TV drama. Likewise bloodbath. But a disaster is roughly what we’re dealing with.
The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama's Worst Fiasco.
NONFICTION RECENT RELEASES - BOOKS CONSIDERED
The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter
Money by David McWilliams
A Beginner's Guide to Dying by Simon Boas
My Roman Year by André Aciman
Seven Children: Inequality and Britain's Next Generation by Danny Dorling
A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry
A Woman Like Me: A Memoir by Diane Abbott
On Freedom by Timothy Snyder
Kingmaker by Sonia Purnell
The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts
The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
Hope I Get Old Before I Die by David Hepworth
Never Understood by The Jesus and Mary Chain
Truss at 10 by Anthony Seldon
Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee
The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World by Mustafa Akyol
By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle
Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump
Health and Safety by Emily Witt
Talkin' Greenwich Village by David Browne
Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening by Elizabeth Rosner
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein
Taming Silicon Valley by Gary Marcus
Exvangelical and Beyond by Blake Chastain
Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Robert Skidelsky
AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor
Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark by Leigh Ann Henion
American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order by Jerome E. Copulsky
Abortion by Jessica Valenti
Liberating Abortion by Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone
Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Our first pick from these is
James
‘He has two loves: the natural world and bombs.’
Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealised as something cold, hard, rational, neutral and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings, even if that requires all traces of humanity to be sucked out of every equation as thoroughly as the air from a vacuum chamber.
The life and work of James Ephraim Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he enabled us to understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia. In his personal life, he realised feelings – such as desire, intuition and loyalty – shaped what he was looking for in his research.
He rediscovered relationships – between life and the atmosphere, between humans and nature – that had been lost, or at least neglected, three centuries earlier during the Enlightenment, when ties between human civilisation and the rest of the animate world started to rupture. Back then, a duality emerged of self and other that provided the philosophical basis for the Industrial Revolution by turning nature into a resource to exploit, rather than something that humanity was part of and reliant upon. Lovelock reconnected us. He put us back inside. He reminded us that we are living agents rather than mechanistic objects. As the former director of the Science Museum Chris Rapley put it: ‘Lovelock put the soul back into science.’
This has never been more important than now as humanity grapples with a polycrisis of climate breakdown, extinction of nature and social inequality. Lovelock’s theory of interconnectedness takes us to the heart of the world’s current problems: our relationship with the Earth – and, crucially, how far we can push it. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet. As Lovelock’s closest friend and Gaia theory co-developer, the US biologist Lynn Margulis, put it: Lovelock ‘let people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they’ll tend to treat it with respect.’
Based on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating, sometimes contradictory man.
James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory, the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments to maintain a habitable ecosystem.
Lovelock's life was a chronicle of twentieth-century science, and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory - a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life.
Drawing together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a unique biography of one of the most fascinating scientists of the modern age.
Thank you!!
So excited to read Orbital! Thanks for recommending it.