Audiobook
English language
Published Nov. 2, 2023 by Penguin Random House.
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They …
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day. Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
Poetic, with a fascinating rhythm that made this book feel like it was made for reading aloud. A short amount of time passes for the astronauts on the international space station but it feels like the book takes place over years and years as you learn about each of them. Loved it.
Look, this is not-a-novel and is not-sci-fi, unless we freeze and shatter those definitions - but I would read more fictive-philosophical-observational whatever this was on most any subject. There's no plot, there's hardly movement as we do just what it says at the top, circle the earth 16 times in a single day aboard the space station. Instead, we dive deeply into the human experience of Earth, family and civilization and war and politics and futures, and separation and disorientation from it all.
