Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: ORBITAL by Samantha Harvey

 

"This jewel of a book is out there, like our beautiful planet in space; silent, modest, wonderful, waiting to be found."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

I can’t think of a more divisive recent novel. Friends and acquaintances either loved or loathed this 2024 title. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, written in 2007 attracted similar strong emotions. Both are novellas, both were shortlisted for the Booker Prize but McEwan, having won in 1998, dipped out in 2007, while Harvey went on to win in 2024.

Major prize winners are always open to a superfluity of opinions. It goes with the territory. Critics are asked for their reviews, book groups, along with huge numbers of the general, book reading public rush to buy or borrow, so they can see what the fuss is about. So what was the fuss about in 2024?

The major complaint seemed to be that ‘nothing happens’ in Orbital. I beg to differ. Admittedly, in spite of it’s 136 pages I didn’t find it a quick read. Orbital demands attention. Once one does pay the story the compliment of starting off with an open mind, and being ready to concentrate; it, for me at any rate, repays every reading moment. What is there to be said about orbiting the Earth multiple times for nine months? Well, quite a lot as it happens. There are the many facts sprinkled through the narrative. Harvey thanks NASA and ESA for the wealth of information made available and my goodness, these facts don’t disappoint, nor does the way she relates them with her quiet, authority.

The novel rotates with the space station, passing developing weather patterns, ambling past the ink dark Atlantic, or brilliantly lit Europe, over and over again, measuring the hours of astronaut time as if they are living Earth sunrises and sunsets, though at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. The pace of the novel suggests Earth time, while for the astronauts the days pass quickly, with so much to do, so much essential exercise, experiments, housekeeping. Hanging in their sleeping bags, asleep, head over heels over head…

And of course there are other stories, the astronaut’s stories. Each individual is out of reach of a loved one to embrace, short of Earth knowledge, though seeing the planet more entirely than anyone living on its surface. Such a disconnect at so much distance, such possible domestic disasters, and yet not one wants to go home early. Hidden illness, the death of a Mother, and yet somehow, the six of them are sufficient unto each others’ equilibrium.

Don’t expect great drama, fallings out, or violence in the space station. A hand’s breadth away from disaster, the metal holds, in spite of its age. And, so do the six men and women within it. This jewel of a book is out there, like our beautiful planet in space; silent, modest, wonderful, waiting to be found.

Orbital is published by Vintage. 

See also Samantha Harvey's The Shapeless Unease, reviewed by Graeme Fife

More of Cindy's choices: 

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Katherine Rooney

Guest review by Ben Tufnell: IN ASCENSION by Martin MacInnes

 "For all the big ideas, the sheer scale of the story, the narrative is compelling. I was gripped, hurtling headlong towards an astonishing conclusion."

Ben Tufnell is a writer and curator based in London, where he runs Parafin, an art gallery. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art, in particular on artforms that engage with landscape and nature. His short stories have been published by Conjunctions, Litro, Lunate, Storgy and Structo, amongst others, and his debut novel, The North Shore, is published by Fleet.

Close to the opening of this extraordinary novel, the narrator, Leigh, peruses the bookshelves in her mother's office. Femi is a theoretical mathematician and Leigh notes volumes with intimidating titles like Philosophy of Cusp Forms and Ultraparallel Theorem, as well as one bearing only an infinity symbol, a lemniscate, on its spine. It is a sign. That symbol with its interlocking ovoids recurs in many different forms throughout this ingeniously constructed book: in a mysterious message that may be from an extraterrestrial intelligence, in the shape of the Nereus, the spaceship that eventually carries Leigh to the edge of the solar system. Indeed, In Ascension is itself structured like an infinity symbol, a Moebius whose ending returns us to the beginning.

Yet, while taking us on a vast and awe-inspiring journey to the stars, In Ascension is grounded in life on Earth. It is a story about connectedness, about nature and human nature; ecologies, both macro and micro. The linking motif running through the book is water: water as a carrier of life, water as connector, water as protector (the Nereus, named after a Greek sea god, contains an ocean in its hull). MacInnes beautifully evokes a formative moment, when Leigh, swimming near her home in Rotterdam as an escape from her unhappy childhood, has an insight into the interconnectedness of all lifeforms and environments - 'there was no gap separating my body from the living world' - and this notion is a sort of foundation for all that follows.

Leigh becomes a marine biologist specialising in algae.In the near future, against a backdrop of climate collapse, she joins a scientific expedition to investigate a newly-discovered marine vent, which initial readings suggest may be deeper than the Mariana Trench.She and her colleagues speculate about the role thermal vents may have played in the genesis of early lifeforms, even the origin of life itself. As their ship nears the site, anomalous phenomena begin to occur. The leader of the expedition suggests they may have found 'a location of singular importance in the history of life on the planet...a cradle, a garden...' When the expedition attempts to measure the depth of t the trench their initial readings suggest it is 36kms deep, three times that of the Mariana Trench. Subsequent readings suggest it is many, many times deeper than that. It is the series of jaw- dropping moments in a book which challenges our sense of the possible.

Soon after, the focus turns outwards, towards space. A mysterious object, decorated with runes a and symbols is detected passing through the outer solar system. A message is received from the Voyager probe, now billions of miles distant and long presumed inactive. A new propulsion system is developed which will allow a spaceship to travel at hitherto unfeasible speeds.

Leigh develops new algal strains as a source of food ( and psychological comfort, the algae's greenness a potential salve against the sense of loss experienced as our blue-green planet retreats into the distance) for a long extra-planetary journey. She trains as a member of the support crew for the mission, but it is no surprise when she and her colleagues are bumped up to become the primary crew. As the Nereus passes beyond the heliopause (the limit of the sun's influence) things begin to blur, as if the narrative logic of space and time is being stretched and distorted by the vastness of the journey.

There's more, of course, but I've already given so much away. What I will say is that MacInnnes handles his material - and his research, which must have been extensive- deftly. And for all the big ideas, the sheer scale of the story, the narrative is compelling. I was gripped, hurtling headlong towards an astonishing conclusion. However, a word of caution: readers who like their stories neatly tied up may well be frustrated. Readers who enjoy something more open, more speculative, will find In Ascension completely satisfying.

It's a big story, beautifully told, austere and grand, filled with ideas. It is mind-boggling, mind-expanding, enriching. Rightly longlisted for the Booker Prize, I would be amazed if it didn't make the shortlist. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more ambitious novel being published this year. It gives us the story of a life and a story of life itself.

In Ascension is published by Atlantic Books  

Ben Tufnell's The North Shore was chosen by Adèle as one of her books of the year in our birthday round-up.

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Guest review by Julie Cohen: SAGA by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

"At its best the marriage of words and pictures can accomplish some extraordinary storytelling that can’t be achieved by words alone."

Julie Cohen grew up in Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University and the University of Reading. Her award-winning novels have sold over a million copies worldwide, and she has twice been selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club in the UK. Julie runs an oversubscribed literary consultancy which has helped many writers go on to be published. She is a Vice President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, founder of the RNA Rainbow Chapter, and a Patron of literacy charity ABC To Read. Her bestselling novel Together has been translated into eleven languages and optioned for television adaptation; The Two Lives of Louis & Louise was long-listed for the Polari Prize and has been optioned by Enderby Entertainment as a feature film. Her first historical novel, Spirited, will be published in July 2020. She lives in Berkshire with her family and a terrier of dubious origin.

www.julie-cohen.com

Twitter: @julie_cohen

I don’t remember how I got hooked on Saga. I’ve always loved graphic novels and comics. People who don’t read them think they’re all about superheroes and violence, but at its best the marriage of words and pictures can accomplish some extraordinary storytelling that can’t be achieved by words alone. Comics look simple, but their narrative can be incredibly complex. I was already a fan of Art Speigelman’s harrowing and beautiful Holocaust memoir Maus, and Neil Gaiman’s collaboration with various artists on the sprawling, mythic Sandman. I’m also in love with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis or Un Ocean d#Amour by Grégory Panaccione and Wilfrid Lupano. And then there’s my current favourite, Alise Oseman’s gay teenage love story Heartstopper. 

Saga is special, though. It’s an epic space opera. It’s episodic, with a new volume in a continuing story coming out every year or so. Every volume starts with a dilemma, and ends on a cliffhanger, and in between is a convoluted, surprising story told across a diverse and inclusive cast of aliens, creatures, ghosts and machines.

At its heart, Saga is a Romeo and Juliet story. Alana, who has wings, is a soldier from the planet Landfall. Marko, who has horns, is a soldier from the moon Wreath. Their worlds have been at war since time immemorial, pulling in most of the galaxy to take sides and fight. Alana and Marko meet when Marko’s a prisoner of war, and Alana is his guard. Against all odds, the two of them fall in love. In fact, they bond over a trashy romance novel, which both of them can see is actually a revolutionary text about reconciliation and galactic peace.

The series begins when the couple are on the run and Alana is giving birth to their child, Hazel. Hazel is an impossible child - no one believes that Wings and Horns can ever get along, let alone procreate - and her existence is cause for Wings and Horns and all of their associated allies and enemies, assassins and journalists and bureaucrats and mercenaries and opportunists, to hunt the family across the galaxy. Alana, Marko and Hazel are joined by various characters including a ghost babysitter, disapproving in-laws, a robot prince with PTSD, an ecological spaceship, a transgender ex-con, and a race of religious meerkat-like sentients who are facing extinction. Other storylines involve a lovelorn assassin with a lie-detecting cat, a young girl rescued from sexual trafficking, a gay journalist couple from a homophobic amphibious planet, and the story of the war itself, which has become self-perpetuating, with its own economy, ideologies and so, so many casualties.

As a space opera, it has lots of action, tons of sex, and some pretty devastating character deaths. It’s fast-paced, both funny and sad, and the art is frankly gorgeous. We’re used to serials on television but it’s fun to read a serialised story—although be warned, the cliffhanger ending of Volume 9, the latest volume, is a shocker. And Vaughan and Staples have taken some time off the series to pursue other projects, so I’m not sure when it will be resolved.

Although it’s fast reading - there are very few words per page, after all - I find that it stands up to rereading and it’s an annual treat of mine to reread the entire series before I read the new volume. And one of the pleasures of Saga, like any cult classic, is to unexpectedly find fellow fans of the series.

As with all good science fiction, Saga is really about the world we live in now. It’s about mindless nationalism and how war benefits people in power whilst destroying the rest of us. It’s about how romance novels are seriously underrated. It’s about intolerance and prejudice. It’s about the effects of violence, not only on the victim but on the perpetrator. More than anything, it’s about the love between a couple and for their child, and what it means to be a family.

Saga is published by Image Comics.

SECOND ANNIVERSARY post by guest Joanne Harris: RECORD OF A SPACEBORN FEW by Becky Chambers

Kyte Photography

Joanne Harris (MBE) was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for fifteen years, during which time she published three novels, including Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.

Since then, she has written 15 more novels, two collections of short stories, a Dr Who novella, guest episodes for the game Zombies, Run and three cookbooks. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of Sheffield and Huddersfield, and has been a judge for the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize, the Orange Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science.

She works from a shed in her garden, plays bass in the band she first joined when she was 16, is currently writing a screenplay and lives with her husband and daughter in a little wood in Yorkshire.

The first volume of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers trilogy, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was by far the best sci-fi novel I'd read in a long, long time. Genuinely different to the mainstream of the genre, inclusive and compassionate, it seemed to me to be doing what speculative fiction has been trying (and mostly failing) to achieve for most of the ‘90s. Two volumes later, I am convinced that Becky Chambers is near the forefront of a long-overdue revolution in a genre that has been seen for too long as very male, very white and with a general tendency to value space battles over psychology. Not that there’s anything wrong with space battles. But, with some noble exceptions, sci-fi has traditionally been seen by many as an action genre, plot-heavy and character-light, with aliens often presented as thinly-disguised racial stereotypes, and women as love interests, rather than fully-formed protagonists.

Becky Chambers’ first novel forms part of a fresh, new wave of sci-fi. Initially self-published when mainstream publishers failed to see its potential, or to understand the deep demand among readers for increased diversity, it is lighter on plot than most sci-fi, but far richer in character development. It concentrates on powerful themes of belonging and identity, and treats the concept of alien-ness - in terms of race, gender, sexuality and culture - as something genuinely different, rather than just presenting them as humans in clever makeup. The dialogue is terrific - Joss Whedon with more empathy - and the narrative style is spare and elegant and wholly, gloriously immersive.

Record of a Spaceborn Few  carries on from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Close and Common Orbit only in that it serves to further our knowledge of the universe in which the books are set. Only one character from the first book is mentioned – and that only in passing – which means that the books can be read alone or as part of a wider exploration. I would suggest reading them all – not only because they are excellent, but because they provide an expanding overview of the author’s universe; a universe at least as important as any of the characters. Unlike most futuristic scenarios, this is a universe in which Humans are neither the dominant nor the superior species. The order that has been established within interstellar society has come from an alien culture, as has much of the technology. Humans are a minority group – white humans even more so – challenging the assumptions of so much of our traditional science fiction.

Only on the Exodus Fleet are Humans still in the majority, but the Exodus Fleet is a relic, dating from many centuries ago, still bearing the descendants of the last generation of Humans to leave Earth. This fiercely isolationist group still retains its original cultural identity, though the ancient ships are in disrepair, and supplies are always a problem. Young people wanting to explore the outside world with its many colonized planets are faced with the same kind of culture shock faced by members of certain religious groups who choose to leave their traditional environment. Some leave for good; some return, unable to face life outside the bubble.

When a disaster rocks this already fragile community, those Exodans who still call the Fleet their home are faced with an existential crisis – how to face up to the knowledge that their final destination – the stars – was reached a hundred years ago, and that they are an irrelevance in a universe that has moved on?

Within this framework, the author manages to weave themes of inclusivity and diversity into her sci-fi, along with representations of mental illness, body dysmorphia, xenophobia, depression, gender fluidity and so on - all with the most delicate touch, and in a way that feeds directly into the plot, rather than appearing pasted-in for the sake of political correctness. This is the real deal emotionally: the characters are well-rounded, original and relatable, and the underlying ideas are compassionate and true. It's also a cracking story, well-paced and compelling, with more than enough plot to satisfy, but with a nice, grown-up element of personal and emotional growth, too.

The story is seen through the eyes of a number of different characters – a young mother; a hopeful visitor struggling for acceptance; a young man desperate to leave – all these stories intertwined to make up a larger – and strangely familiar – narrative. A tale of a grieving community; a tale of misplaced ambitions; a tale of optimism and rejection; a culture willing to do almost anything rather than face the outside world. The parallels with current events are inescapable, and yet are delivered with a welcome lightness of touch.

Imagine The Grapes of Wrath, set in space, with all the intensity, heartbreak and tension that implies. And grieve a little for the fact that the mainstream literary world is so slow in acknowledging the scope, skill and literary value of sci-fi - although frankly, anyone who scorns sci-fi as a lesser genre really doesn't deserve to read anything as splendid as this.

Record of a Spaceborn Few is published by Hodder & Stoughton.