51 pages • 1 hour read
Samantha HarveyOrbital
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Orbit Minus 1”
On an orbital space station, four astronauts and two cosmonauts are slowly waking up in their sleeping bags, which hang suspended in microgravity. Each member of the mission is scheduled to stay on the station for at least nine months. The station galley contains remnants of a birthday celebration they threw the night before, even though it was no one’s birthday.
On Earth, a typhoon begins to form over the Pacific Ocean, moving west toward Asia. The station hurtles in the opposite direction at over 17,000 miles per hour.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Orbit 1, Ascending”
One of the Russian cosmonauts, Roman, gets up first and orients his position over Earth. He tallies his 88th day on the station, which is meant to orient himself in time. Each day on the station, he and the other astronauts orbit the Earth 16 times. He marks the end of the night by watching the full moon.
Shaun, the American astronaut, has a postcard of the 1656 painting Las Meninas by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in his quarters. The postcard was given to him by his wife to recall one of their first interactions in school. As a teen, Shaun failed to understand the teacher’s lesson, which revolved around identifying the subject of the painting amid its multiple perspectives. His wife has replicated the content of that lecture on the back of the postcard. After getting up from his sleeping bag, he stares at the postcard for a while and gets ready to exercise.
Chie, the Japanese astronaut, is grieving her mother, who died the previous weekend. She reflects on her relationship to the Earth, which feels like the only parent she has left. Her colleagues do not know what they can say to console her. Everyone knows that Chie wants to get back home, even if it isn’t possible to leave mid-mission.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Orbit 1, Into Orbit 2”
Ground control reminds the station astronauts that a new mission crew has just been launched to go to the moon. They joke that the new mission’s efforts surpass anything the station has achieved. Anton, the other Russian cosmonaut, aspires to go to the moon in the future.
The astronauts and cosmonauts begin their day with exercise, meant to sustain their muscles against the atrophying effect of microgravity.
Although the astronauts miss their respective families, it dawns on them that they are the only ones who will know what their lives are like on the space station. Experiences like the rapid change of night and day are difficult to communicate with anyone on Earth. This sometimes makes them wish that they never had to leave. Chie convinces herself that if she can remain on the station forever, then it will feel as though her mother has never died.
From the astronauts’ perspective, human civilization is only visible at night by way of urban lighting. Sometimes, the station passes over the ocean at night, making the Earth feel uninhabited.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Orbit 3, Ascending”
Over breakfast, the astronauts muse over the blank interior of the space station, each one wishing that it could resemble the interior designs characteristic of their respective home countries. Pietro, the Italian astronaut, jokes about missing useless things, like rugs. He quips that he would spend all day lying on one and dreaming about space again.
The astronauts attend to their respective scientific projects. Pietro monitors microbes to see how they are affected by orbital space. Chie grows protein crystals and conducts MRI scans to study microgravity’s effects on brain activity. Shaun studies plant root growth. Nell, the English astronaut, studies muscle activity in test mice alongside Chie. Roman and Anton study heart cell generation and oxygen generation.
The crew have an “Of Extra-Special Interest” item on their agenda, which is to observe the typhoon as it forms and moves toward Southeast Asia. They will continue to track the typhoon’s life cycle during later orbits in the day.
Nell receives an email from her brother, who has the flu and wishes that he had someone to take care of him, just like Nell does with her five colleagues. Nell is unsure of how to answer him without making an argument for how she actually feels trapped. She doesn’t want it to seem like she is complaining about the life she’s worked to have.
All six astronauts must rely on each other to combat the loneliness of space, as well as to have somebody else to whom they can express their feelings. As a result, all six of them feel as though they’ve “[merged]” with each other, looking past differences of nationality to function as organs of a singular body. This makes them conscious of the precarity of living in a space station, but it is relatively less dangerous than the many possible threats that endanger human life on Earth.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Orbit 3, Descending”
On an island in Japan, there is a wooden house inhabited by a man and woman near the end of their youth. They tend to a vegetable patch outside the house. Over the seasons and years, the man grows visibly older than his wife. The man eventually dies, leaving his widow behind. After a few more years, the woman sits outside her house on the verge of death. She has tried to wait for her daughter Chie’s return from space, but she cannot wait any longer now. The space station passes overhead as usual.
The typhoon intensifies, growing into a category-four typhoon. The crew continues to observe its movement, sending images to ground control. They predict its impact but are powerless to stop it.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
From its very beginning in “Orbit Minus 1,” the novel is clearly structuring itself around 24 hours in the life of the six astronauts who inhabit the International Space Station. This structural conceit is important to point out because it already establishes the fluidity of time as one of the novel’s main recurring concepts. Because they live differently from the standard 24-hour day that most people experience, the astronauts have to break the conventions of ordinary human life, altering the units of time so that a day is measured by 16 orbits rather than 24 hours. Even then, the novel takes liberties with the limitation it imposes on a single day in space. The novel frequently flits back and forth through time, either flashing back extensively to episodes in Shaun’s childhood or compressing the life of Chie’s parents into the descending half of their third orbit.
All of this serves to underscore the strangeness of space life. Humanity has defined its experience according to standard conditions like the length of a day, but these conditions are patterns of nature symptomatic to living on Earth. As soon as the astronauts started spending their days in space, they had to adapt those patterns of nature in ways that would feel unfamiliar to the bulk of humanity. Nell thus struggles to explain her life to her brother on Earth, exposing how her five colleagues are the only people who can truly understand what her present life is like because they are living it too.
The novel distinguishes each of the astronauts initially through their nationalities. However, these facets of their identity quickly collapse in the face of the experiences they share, as well as the ways they depend on each other to survive psychologically. In Chapter 4, the six crew members are compared to organs of a single body, a metaphor that speaks both to the important role each person plays in sustaining the station and the role they play in sustaining each other. Harvey writes, “They’re everything to each other for this short stretch of time because they’re all there is” (27), demonstrating how their bonds have been intensified by the group’s isolation. Consequently, the novel hints at the idiosyncratic internal conflicts that each of the astronauts faces over the course of their respective missions.
Chie has the most pronounced internal conflict, as she is dealing with the recent death of her mother. The tension that arises from her being unable to say goodbye to her mother causes her to feel conflicted about returning home. This establishes The Inevitability of Endings as a theme. Although Chie’s return is inevitable, the fluidity of time affects her waiting in strange ways. At one point, Chie decides that she never wants to leave the station because it will make her feel as though her mother is still alive. The interlude that presents her parents’ lives similarly depicts Chie as an absent figure. She is only referred to at the end of her mother’s story as her mother expresses her intention to wait for Chie before she dies. In a sense, Chie’s mother has spent her entire life waiting for Chie to remain grounded with her. This hints at the fraught ways that Chie thinks about her ambitions of traveling to space.
The other crew members similarly experience their own internal conflicts. Anton reflects on his irrelevance as a cosmonaut who has unfulfilled ambitions about traveling to the moon. This becomes significant in the context of the new lunar mission, the transit of which is simultaneous with the day the novel captures. It also begins to hint at The Cosmic Insignificance of Humanity as a theme. Likewise, Shaun finds himself connecting his constant gaze toward and reflection on the Earth to a past lesson on Las Meninas, which seemed to have gone over his head while leaving an indelible impression on Shaun’s wife. Like the viewer of a work of art, Shaun observes the planet and its inhabitants, pondering what may be the focus. The characters introduce their differing perspectives on what they see, mirroring how individual viewers of a painting may identify different focal points.
These opening chapters also establish the crucial motif of the typhoon, which will continue to develop and feature throughout the day the novel captures. During this period of 16 orbits, several days will elapse on Earth, capturing the growth of the typhoon into a super-typhoon, as well as its landfall on Southeast Asia. This sets up another of the novel’s major themes, The Human Cost of Climate Change. However, in this section, placing Chie’s parents’ story alongside descriptions of the swelling typhoon presents time and death as unstoppable forces that everyone—but particularly the astronauts—can only watch and wait for, emphasizing their feelings of powerlessness and disconnection.
