ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

Here we glimpse 24 hours inside an orbiting space station on the day of the first moon landing since the Apollo project.  The six characters—four astronauts and two cosmonauts—are in need of a plot in order to keep this reader engaged and awake.  I liked the message of this book a lot more than the book itself, as the author indulges in quite a bit of philosophizing about Planet Earth as this vessel goes around and around.  Monotonous?  Maybe, but the six characters seem to be eternally in awe, seeing Earth from 250 miles away as what should be a borderless utopia.  However, they also witness the effects of pollution and climate change brought on by Earth’s human inhabitants but don’t seem to dwell on our shortcomings.  The book reminds us that everyone who has ever walked on the moon was an American—a fact that one of the Russian cosmonauts laments.  I was also surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, at how steep a toll weightlessness takes on the human body.  No amount of exercise can compensate for the absence of gravity on a body that is supposed to bear its own weight.