Everyone is raving about this sort-of novel, and it’s clear why – it’s a stunning meditation on the beauty of the Earth, as seen by six astronauts on the International Space Station. Not much happens. It just follows them across 16 orbits, a single day, as they see sunrises, noons, sunsets, and tapestries of city lights or great black spaces at midnight. The language is lush, almost overwhelming. It’s the most lyrical writing set in space that I’ve ever read, beating even Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red/Green/Blue Mars”.

So SF writers – up your game! This is what you need to win the Booker Prize as she did. Harvey doesn’t use any genre tropes, but she is writing about the urge to explore, to get out of the mundane, to find the wonderful, and that’s what SF is about. That’s what drove all the characters here.

Yet she also writes about how routine their lives are on the station. The people there are kept constantly busy with experiments or repairs, but it looks like make-work. The ISS has now become a backwater as far as programs go. It has aged badly, and only has a couple of years left. During this one day, the next phase of space exploration begins as a crew is launched for the next Moon landing.

Still, between the workouts on the stationary bike and the replacing of filters and the worry about loved ones down below and the constant background noise of fans, there’s the magnificent view of the Earth out of every porthole:

In the new morning of today’s fourth earth orbit the Saharan dust sweeps to the sea in hundred-mile ribbons. Hazy pale green shimmering sea, hazy tangerine land. This is Africa chiming with light. You can almost hear it, this light, from inside the craft. Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like a sandcastle hastily built, and when the Atlas Mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern coat of Spain, whose fin-tip nudges the southern Alps, whose nose will dive any moment into the Mediterranean. Albania and Montenegro are velvet soft with mountain.

It all reminds me of a new UU hymn by Peter Mayer. The tune comes from an old Welsh hymn, but Mayer updated it to our current out-looking age. It’s called “Blue Boat Home”:

The Earth is our mother, our oasis, our ship in the endless sea. That’s what every single astronaut has noted, and it’s what this novel and song evokes.