ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The winner of this year's Booker Prize is a novel called "Orbital." Samantha Harvey joins a long tradition of authors whose books take place in a single day, only in this day there are 16 sunrises and sunsets because her characters are astronauts aboard the International Space Station. When the book was first published back in December, I asked Samantha Harvey if she's always been interested in space.
SAMANTHA HARVEY: I am not what you would probably call a space nerd by any stretch. I've always been interested in the experience of astronauts, I think. And when I was much younger, I collected quotes from astronauts. I would sit in the library and go through books in pre-internet days and collect things that astronauts had said about being in space. And I was always really fascinated by that without really knowing why.
SHAPIRO: Can I just ask if you had one favorite quote from those days?
HARVEY: They were all so kind of moving. But there's one about - it was a Russian cosmonaut whose name I can't remember because they all sort of - all the quotes have run in together a bit. But he said that he had never known the meaning of the word round until he had been in space and looked back at the Earth.
SHAPIRO: Wow.
HARVEY: And that seems to be a really common theme - that there's a sense of one's senses and one's perception being redefined by being in space. It's not just that things have a certain clarity, but our terms of reference are redefined.
And then much later in life, you know, now that we can access images of the Earth from space - there are so many of them on the NASA website and, you know, on YouTube and so on. You can just watch entire Earth orbits from the ISS, and that's what I started doing. And I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet that that's what prompted this idea to write about it - you know, to think this is sort of an element of nature writing, really, that I don't see happening. So that was the impetus for the book.
SHAPIRO: Early on in the book, you talk about the challenge that one of the astronauts faces trying to describe her experience to people back on Earth. And you write...
(Reading) She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding, and there seems to be nothing in between.
And when I read that, I wondered if it also described the struggle that you faced as an author writing this book.
HARVEY: It is a sort of weird set of contradictions, from what I can gather, about being in space - that you, on one hand, are traveling, you know, at 17 1/2 thousand miles an hour around the Earth, so that you're in this kind of extraordinary physical situation where you're seeing 16 days and 16 nights in 24-hour period. And you're floating. Your view is of the Earth and of the cosmos, and there's nothing and nobody else around you.
At the same time, you have to keep to a very, very set schedule, and you have to do the dusting and the vacuuming and, you know, make your meals and fix the toilet and, you know, all of these things. And there isn't much between that very routine mundaneness and the kind of gobsmacking, awe-inspiring, description-evading reality of what's going on around you. I really enjoyed that from a writerly point of view - you know, that everything is rich and charged when you write about it because, you know, even dusting in space has its own (laughter) - you know...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
HARVEY: ...Its own strangeness. So it's - everything has that kind of sheen of strangeness and otherliness (ph). And I found that very rich to write about.
SHAPIRO: As readers and viewers and consumers of media, I think we're so accustomed to stories in space that have high drama, disasters, aliens, murder, explosions - whatever the case may be. In this novel, the only cataclysms take place on Earth - someone's mother dies, a super typhoon approaches Southeast Asia. Tell me about that decision you made as a writer.
HARVEY: Yeah. It was always really clear to me that I wanted to write space realism, I suppose, rather than sci-fi and that that hadn't really been done. I mean, I hadn't seen that done before. And that's surprising because space - inhabiting space is a reality for humans. You know, we have been continually inhabiting low-Earth orbit for 23 years now. That is a daily experience for a very select group of people. But still, that's very much within the realms of reality and realism.
So that's what I wanted to kind of capture in this book - a sense of nature writing about this wilderness and to see what it would be like to write about space without the projections that we usually put on it. I think, you know, so much sci-fi comes from the unknownness (ph) of space and our wish to project our fears and our hopes onto it. And I wanted to take all of that away and start with a blank canvas almost and simply see it as a natural environment that humans are inhabiting.
SHAPIRO: Well, Samantha Harvey, it's been lovely talking with you. Thank you so much.
HARVEY: It's been my pleasure.
SHAPIRO: Her novel "Orbital" just won the 2024 Booker Prize. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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