Seitenstück. Belles Lettres waren ja rar in der letzten Zeit.
Zitat Harvey Wins 2024 Booker Prize
November 12, 2024
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape; Grove Atlantic US) is the winner of the 2024 Man Booker Prize. It depicts the lives of astronauts, and is “the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space.”
Zitat She is of sf interest for her fifth novel, Orbital (2023), a contemplative rendering of its six protagonists' sensory responses to their visions of the planet beneath them during sixteen orbits of their Space Station, which amount to a single day of the world. The trip to the Moon undertaken at this point, the political situation beneath them, and the visible signs of Anthropocene devastation, hint at a moment in the very Near Future. The flattened affect of the six hints at the supernumerary future of flesh creatures in the exploration/exploitation of the universe. The novel ends with a vision of our Posthuman destiny, if any of us survive the Suicide below, an insight quoted in at least one review of the tale, where future iterations of Homo sapiens are seen as "exo-skeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who've harnessed the energy of some hapless star and guzzled it dry". [JC]
Zitat Samantha Harvey gewinnt mit ihrem Roman „Umlaufbahnen“ den Booker Prize, die wichtigste Auszeichnung für Literatur Großbritanniens – und muss sich in ihrer Dankesrede Mühe geben, die Contenance zu wahren.
Die deutsche Übersetzung (eben als "Umlaufbahnen" erscheint morgen, am 14.11. bei dtv als gebundene Ausgabe. Klappentext:
Zitat Von oben betrachtet sieht die Welt gleich ganz anders aus
Sechs Astronauten schweben in einer Raumstation durchs All. Den Planeten Erde umkreisen sie in 90 Minuten, sechzehnmal in 24 Stunden. Die zwei Frauen und vier Männer aus ganz unterschiedlichen Nationen arbeiten, essen und schlafen auf engstem Raum – und doch ist alles losgelöst vom Alltag, Schwerkraft und Zeitempfinden sind außer Kraft gesetzt. Was passiert, wenn man seine Heimat nur aus weiter Ferne durch ein kleines Fenster sieht? Wie verändern sich Denken und Fühlen? In dem Zeitraum von nur einem Tag, während die Sonne sechzehnmal auf- und untergeht, betrachtet dieser ungewöhnliche, kraftvoll poetische Roman die großen und kleinen Fragen der Menschheit und bringt uns der Schönheit des Universums ganz nahe.
In der englischen Ausgabe umfaßt der Text 144 Seiten.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Zitat Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel “Orbital” (Grove), which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. “Orbital” is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare. It’s barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories, and the stories it does tell barely interact with one another. Yes, Harvey gives her six astronauts fictional first names and various nationalities. In this sense, they are preliminary fictional characters. Roman and Anton are from Russia, Chie is from Japan, Nell from the U.K., Pietro from Italy, and Shaun from the United States: two women and four men. Roman, Nell, and Shaun, who arrived three months ago to join the others, are the ship’s newbies. Each is given a strip or two of backstory, enough to mobilize a rudimentary plot. In Japan, Chie’s mother has just died. Nell’s brother, in Wales, has the flu. On board, Pietro listens to Duke Ellington while he works out. Anton’s marriage is unhappy; his wife has been unwell for a long time. And so on. In addition, the astronauts have their particular tasks while in orbit. Pietro monitors microbes, Chie and Nell are doing experiments with mice. All of them are experimenting on their own bodies, testing and checking the limits and stresses of prolonged weightless existence.
But this minimal fictionality is not really the point; it’s merely the ransom paid to the genre in order to resemble the novelistic. The point is everything else: the almost unimaginable unworldliness of the situation. Six imprisoned professionals are speeding around the world at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They circle the Earth sixteen times a day, and thus daily witness sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets (“the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes”). A gigantic typhoon can be seen gathering over the western Pacific and moving toward the Philippines and Indonesia; this event, from the godlike vantage of the I.S.S., is important but also irrelevant, no more than a vicious corkscrew of distant cloud cover on that faraway blue marble. The real point of “Orbital” is the demonstration of how a writer might capture this spectacular strangeness in language adequate to the spectacle. And how she might do so with fitting surplus, in ways that surpass the more orderly permissions of journalism and nonfictional prose.
Harvey, writing like a kind of Melville of the skies, finds that fitting surplus again and again. First, she attends with imaginative curiosity to the question of embodiment. It’s one thing to learn as fact that, say, astronauts aboard the I.S.S. are given to headaches and nausea, or that their dried food—already compromised, of course—is tasteless because their sinuses are so often blocked. (Without gravity, our sinuses don’t drain as they should.) Or to learn that mornings aboard the spaceship begin with two hours of running on a treadmill, weight-lifting with resistance devices, and stationary-bike riding, so that the astronauts’ muscles don’t atrophy. But what might it feel like to be experiencing such things, to be sailing in this frictionless Pequod, these cramped quarters where, as Harvey puts it, the floors are walls and the walls are ceilings and the ceilings are floors? Harvey writes of Pietro that “everything in his body seems to lack commitment to the cause of its animal life,” a description that may or may not be physiologically accurate but which is imaginatively acute. In a similar vein, she writes about the suspension of time in orbit, of how the astronauts “feel space trying to rid them of the notion of days. It says: what’s a day? They insist it’s twenty-four hours and ground crews keep telling them so, but it takes their twenty-four hours and throws sixteen days and nights at them in return.” Again, it’s one thing to learn how astronauts sleep aboard the I.S.S. (strapped to a bed and slotted into a compartment that’s not unlike an old British telephone kiosk). But how might it feel to sleep while floating in space, to sleep while dimly aware that a mad earthly floor show of light and darkness is constantly spooling beneath you? Harvey’s prose has an instinct for a kind of exact magic. “Even when you sleep you feel the earth turning,” she writes. “You feel all the days that break through your seven-hour night. You feel all the fizzing stars and the moods of the oceans and the lurch of the light through your skin, and if the earth were to pause for a second on its orbit, you’d wake with a start knowing something was wrong.” Is this how it really feels? I’m persuaded by its imaginative accuracy, in the way that I’m persuaded by the imaginative accuracy of Tolstoy’s descriptions of warfare.
Photographs and video bring us the sickly terror of watching astronauts spacewalking, hanging off the limbs of their station while fixing something or other, the irradiated Earth looming below them. But Harvey’s six-page imagining of it plunges the reader, as even video cannot quite do, into the game of becoming that spacewalker, in both terror and ecstasy. Nell and Pietro are installing a spectrometer. Nell has been told not to look down, but how can she not? Alarmingly, the Earth below her “doesn’t have the appearance of a solid thing, its surface is fluid and lustrous.” Her feet are dangling above a continent, “her left foot obscuring France, her right foot Germany. Her gloved hand blotting out western China.” She reflects that her underwater training hasn’t quite prepared her for something that is closer to surfing than to swimming. Then she looks down again, and now the Earth is not terrifying but magnificent, “blue and cloud-scudded and improbably soft against the truss of the craft.” She relaxes somewhat into her tasks. The closest analogy Nell can summon is how one flies in dreams, “because it ought to be impossible for a heavy wingless body to be gliding this freely and smoothly and yet here it is and it seems that you are finally doing the thing for which your being was born. It is hard to believe.” She looks down yet again, and the Earth seems to hang like a “hallucination, something made by and of light, something you could pass through the centre of, and the only word that seems to apply to it is unearthly.”
I’ve quoted this episode at length so as to convey the remarkable quality of immersion that “Orbital” offers, how narrative becomes not plot but the pacing of sensation. (It’s a viscerality that characterized Harvey’s last book, “The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping,” a nonfiction account of her insomnia; this particular light sleeper had to stop reading it, fearful of catching its anxiety.) And notice, too, the musical modulations of Harvey’s prose, how easily the ordinary (vertigo) consorts with the marvellous (space vertigo), and how quickly this prose music moves into the key of the metaphysical: there’s something inevitable, yet beautifully unexpected, about arriving at the vision of our Earth as “unearthly.”
Of course, any cosmic poetics is bound to be a cosmic metaphysics as well. As Melville describes and redescribes his whale, so Harvey ceaselessly drapes our globe in words, and, as with Melville, each redescription is also a reckoning, a theological sizing up. Always, there’s astonishment—Harvey begins and ends with astonishment—especially at the way the world is lit, how it is “chiming with light”:
Zitat 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 coast 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.
This illumination makes the world seem palace-like, heavenly: “If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.” At other moments, from such a distance the Earth seems completely uninhabited; or mankind a creature that comes out only at night, with flares. Perhaps this uninhabited place is nothing more than the ruins of a civilization. At only two hundred and fifty miles’ distance, our glowing world still seems to occupy a privileged place.
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dream - of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
They hang in their sleeping bags. A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities. Their sleep begins to thin and some distant earthly morning dawns and their laptops flash the first silent messages of a new day; the wide-awake, always-awake station vibrates with fans and filters. In the galley are the remnants of last night's dinner - dirty forks secured to the table by magnets and chopsticks wedged in a pouch on the wall. Four blue balloons are buoyed on the circulating air, some foil bunting says 'Happy Birthday,' it was nobody's birthday but it was a celebration and it was all they had. There's a smear of chocolate on a pair of scissors and a small felt moon on a piece of string, tied to the handles of the foldable table.
Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt. Now there's Santiago on South America's approaching coast in a cloud-hazed burn of gold. Unseen through the closed shutters the trade winds blowing across the warm waters of the Western Pacific have worked up a storm, an engine of heat. The winds take the warmth out of the ocean where it gathers as clouds which thicken and curdle and begin to spin in vertical stacks that have formed y typhoon. As the typhoon moves west towards southern Asia, their craft tracks east, eastward and down towards Patagonia where the lurch of a far-off aurora domes the horizon in neon. The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.
Onboard the craft it's Tuesday morning, four fifteen, the beginning of October. Out there it's Argentina it the South Atlantic it's Cape Town it's Zimbabwe. Over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning - a slender molten breach of light. They slip through time zones in silence.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Zitat Spaceflight Now@SpaceflightNow Overnight, SpaceX stacked its Starship rocket at its Starbase facilities in Boca Chica Beach, Texas. A wet dress rehearsal is anticipated prior to the Flight 6 launch. Launch is NET Nov. 18 at 4 pm CST. 2:05 PM · Nov 15, 2024
Zitat Tianzhou-8 docked at China Space Station's aft port at 18:32UTC November 15 8:21 PM · Nov 15, 2024
Letzter Versorgungsflug, Tianzhou-7, ist am 17. Januar gestartet. Die Zahl der Raumstarts für China in den letzten 10 Wochen: September: 8, Oktober: 6, November: bislang 4.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Zitat The sixth flight test of Starship is targeted to launch Tuesday, November 19. The 30-minute launch window will open at 4:00 p.m. CT.
A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. You can also watch the webcast on the new X TV app. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to check in here and stay tuned to our X account for updates.
Zitat Analogous to the fifth flight test, distinct vehicle and pad criteria must be met prior to a return and catch of the Super Heavy booster, which will require healthy systems on the booster and tower and a final manual command from the mission’s Flight Director. If this command is not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks show unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that takes it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and the return will only take place if conditions are right.
The returning booster will slow down from supersonic speeds, resulting in audible sonic booms in the area around the landing zone. Generally, the only impact to those in the surrounding area of a sonic boom is the brief thunder-like noise with variables like weather and distance from the return site determining the magnitude experienced by observers.
Starship’s upper stage will fly the same suborbital trajectory as the previous flight test, with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean. An additional objective for this flight will be attempting an in-space burn using a single Raptor engine, further demonstrating the capabilities required to conduct a ship deorbit burn prior to orbital missions.
Several thermal protection experiments and operational changes will test the limits of Starship’s capabilities and generate flight data to inform plans for ship catch and reuse. The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles. The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles. Finally, adjusting the flight’s launch window to the late afternoon at Starbase will enable the ship to reenter over the Indian Ocean in daylight, providing better conditions for visual observations.
Future ships, starting with the vehicle planned for seventh flight test, will fly with significant upgrades including redesigned forward flaps, larger propellant tanks, and the latest generation tiles and secondary thermal protection layers as we continue to iterate towards a fully reusable heat shield. Learnings from this and subsequent flight tests will continue to make the entire Starship system more reliable as we close in on full and rapid reusability.
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
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