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 19-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “Orbit 14, Ascending”
The typhoon makes landfall, obscuring Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines from the station’s view. Nobody is awake to monitor it anymore since it is past two in the morning from their relative time in orbit. On the ground, the typhoon wreaks havoc on trees, buildings, and inland waterways. Floods sweep through the towns and cities.
Chie dreams of her mother still alive. The station passes over East Asia, which is untouched by the storm.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Orbit 14, Descending”
The novel presents Chie’s list of things she is looking forward to when she returns home. She began this habit during her childhood to combat uneasiness and control her anger. Her list-making habit revealed to her that there were no female pilots in Japan. This seeded her lifelong ambition.
Anton’s ambitions began when he played with spaceship toys and observed the illumination of dust motes in dark rooms, which resembled stars.
Nell dreams that Shaun and a child version of herself are diving to search for the lost Challenger astronauts underwater. They find a bonfire on the seabed and take it back to the surface, where Nell’s mother is waiting on a floating rock with the monkey from Cape Town. This triggers a shock of grief within her, and she jolts awake, unsure of what moved her.
Shaun is also dreaming of a fire that shakes his belief in God. The fire turns into a typhoon.
In his dream, Roman tells a crowd that he always wanted to be an astronaut, even before he was born. The crowd applauds and laughs, validating him.
In her dream, Chie holds her mother as a child, both of them bracing as the typhoon hits Chie’s mother’s house. The moon is knocked off course, which leaves the lunar mission unable to land. Chie regrets leaving her mother and promises to never leave again.
Anton dreams again of the moon, drifting close to it as a musical note plays somewhere far away. He knows that he is in love, so he climbs out of his spacesuit to better understand what he is feeling.
Pietro has no dreams. He sleeps without tension, as if resigned to the strange contradiction of humanity’s greatness and insignificance.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Orbit 15”
The station crosses into dawn once again, climbing past Asia and the Pacific. Life in space has helped the station crew to feel as though there is no longer an “other side” of the world. Rather, every part of the world feels connected. Sleep is the only time the station crew feels like they aren’t rushing over the passage of the Earth. The station crosses into night once again, allowing cities to emerge with man-made light. Once they cross the Middle East, they meet daytime again. By the time they pass Russia, it is already mid-morning. They will reach this point over the Earth again in 90 minutes’ time.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Orbit 16”
The lunar mission approaches the orbit of the moon, navigating a path of functioning and defunct satellites. They joke with ground control over the story of a Chinese man who broke the world record for being struck by lightning. They then talk about the story of a cow who was rescued from being stuck in a peat bog.
The crew members receive messages from their loved ones while they sleep. At nearly five o’clock in the morning on the station, Roman is half awake, conscious of their position over the Earth since he has memorized the trajectories of each orbit. A crack appears on the alloy of the station, slowly growing, but it is still too minimal to affect the living conditions of the station.
Among the decorations of the Russian module is a photo of Sergei Krikalev, the first cosmonaut to inhabit the station years earlier. His smile suggests his foreknowledge of the end of the space station program. This in turn speaks to the inevitability of the end of human life, which could end on Earth or perhaps on a colonized planet. In the latter case, what is left of humanity will look back, forgetting life on Earth.
On Samar, the typhoon tears through the fisherman’s neighborhood. He, his family, and several others are taking shelter in a chapel. They pray to a localized icon of the Child Jesus, the Santo Niño, to spare them from the storm. They believe that as long as the chapel still stands, they are witnessing a miracle. Nevertheless, the Philippine islands shrink at the wrath of the typhoon.
Years later, the debris of the space station will fall out of orbit and crash into the Pacific Ocean.
The novel ends with the start of moon-landing day. Vibrations course through the reflections of each planet, causing them to have their own unique sounds. The sound of the Earth is described as a dissonant “complex orchestra,” finding itself as the masses of people come together into a chorus that never breaks into song.
Chapters 19-22 Analysis
The end of the novel contemplates the end of the space station to drive The Inevitability of Endings as a theme, bringing to the fore related subthemes, such as the end of human life and the end of the world. The novel has been hinting that the station is ultimately destined for decommissioning, which is foreshadowed in Chapter 22 by the appearance of a crack in Roman’s sleeping quarters. The novel rapidly jumps forward to pinpoint when and where the station will meet its end. Implied in this glimpse of the future are the future lives of the six crew members that the novel has followed over the last 16 orbits. Though they are never shown, the novel uses the end of the station to hint at their return to Earth and their return to obscurity among the masses of humanity. They have either moved on with their lives or continued pursuing endeavors of space travel. What matters is that they no longer feel trapped or crestfallen, as they have throughout the novel.
By referring to Sergei Krikalev, the first cosmonaut to live on the station, the novel also hints at the way the six crew members will have already secured their place in history. No matter how insignificant they feel at present, they have achieved something that will inspire future generations of humanity, similar to the way the Apollo and Challenger missions directly inspired some of the crew members themselves.
The end of the novel is also marked by the landfall of the typhoon, fulfilling the narrative promise with which the book started. This is the novel’s final effort at underlining The Human Cost of Climate Change, especially as it relates to endeavors of scientific progress through the simultaneous arrival of the lunar mission at its destination. As the new astronauts joke about a man who has been struck by lightning several times, Pietro’s friend, the fisherman, prays to survive the waters overcoming his hometown. A lunar crew member jokes, “Live dumb, die young” (197), which appears callous in comparison to the people described in detail as fighting for their lives. Key to this juxtaposition is the path of debris left behind by previous satellite launches on the way to the moon. If this is any sign of how humanity might treat its future homes, it isn’t promising. The novel encourages thinking about the ways humanity is transposing its destructive and degrading behavior on new habitats. Through this lens, the novel portrays the negative aspects of human survivalism.
Should humanity try to expand its territory elsewhere, it may be at the cost of whatever new planet humanity chooses to settle on. Harvey draws the connection between the seemingly positive desire to explore the universe and the quest for wealth and domination, remarking that each crew leaving Earth is moving “[a]way from the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals, teetering slightly on its canting orbit, away into virgin up-for-sale wilderness, this new black gold, this new domain ripe for the taking” (199). This repeated overlap of scientific and financial interests encourages a more nuanced view of space travel, one where discoveries are sometimes commodified for their commercial value. The colonization of other planets could lead to a string of broken homes, each one abandoned once it has been degraded to the point of unsustainability. This strengthens the novel’s position that care for one’s home should begin on Earth, minimizing the impact that human life has all over the planet rather than in select parts where safety, sustainability, and the quality of life effectively become privileges.
Despite this, Harvey ends the novel on a more appreciative note, admiring life as it is on Earth rather than its potential expansion into the galaxy. As many of the station crew members have acknowledged, she doesn’t point to people as purely good or purely evil; rather, in her metaphor of the human race as an orchestra, she calls them a “fumbled harmony taking shape” (207). This indicates a perspective wherein people are not entirely in sync, but they are a unified collective. The fact that they never fully “burst into song” means that their potential is perpetually unfulfilled (207). Instead, it is the purpose of humanity to be unfinished, as is indicated by the progression from the station crew to the lunar mission and, eventually, a Mars mission. The value of people and their efforts is not in final results; instead, that value is permanent, enhancing Harvey’s point that all people should be cared for and appreciated while on Earth rather than ignored in favor of a quest for advancement.
