Orbital

A delicate and lyrical counterpoint to the weighty Challenger, Orbital is called a novel, but it bears about as much relation to your average novel as its characters' sixteen daily zero-gravity orbits of the Earth do to your morning I-5 commute. Six astronauts—two women and four men—from five countries are sharing a nine-month space-station mission; we spend a day with them, a day of sunrises every ninety minutes, of memories of individual earthbound lives, of everyday astronaut tasks, and of continual, skybound wonder. Little plot-wise happens, and the six characters blur into a humanist whole, but that wonder, gorgeously captured, is a breathless, idealistic reminder of what we build such wasteful, dangerous machines to get a glimpse of.