51 pages • 1 hour read
Samantha HarveyOrbital
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary: “Orbit 9”
Roman attempts to speak to a person named Tony on the packet radio. The signal makes it difficult for them to hear each other.
The Voyager probes continue their endless journey into outer space, each one containing an identical golden record of audio produced on Earth. Sometime in the next thousand or even billion years, the probes could be found by some form of intelligent life, who will be able to interpret the records as signs of human civilization. The odds of this are presented as being unlikely. The novel questions whether that intelligent species will be able to make sense of the audio and offers the audio of a woman’s brainwaves as an example. The audio will not help the listener know, for instance, that the woman was in love.
The station crew watches the lunar mission break through the Earth’s atmosphere. They imagine the mission crew’s last day on Earth, from the moment they woke up to the moment they entered their space shuttle. Privately, the lunar crew had been anxious about their impending mission. Once they got out in public, they were glamorized by the press.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Orbit 10”
While cleaning up the station, the crew members feel aimless. Chie feels further from her mother than ever. Anton touches a lump that recently appeared on his neck and hides it, suspecting that it will cause him to be sent home with two accompanying crew members. The lump has catalyzed his dawning realization that he wants to divorce his wife. He will ask her when he returns to Earth. Nell remembers a childhood vacation that she took to Cape Town but cannot remember if that is the trip when a monkey stood on her shoulder. Pietro reads the news about the super-typhoon and worries for the fisherman and his family. Shaun suspects that the space station will soon be decommissioned due to the new lunar mission and its implications for missions to Mars. The thought makes them feel as though they are a means to an end, data points to prepare future missions for the next era of space travel. They resign themselves to playing their parts in humanity’s quest to fulfill the abstract dream of interplanetary life. Chie compiles a list of things that madden her.
Roman and Anton have tried to make the interior of the Russian quarters, which dates back to the Soviet era, feel homely. The six crew members have dinner there. They talk about their favorite childhood sweets to distract themselves from thoughts of the typhoon. Chie reveals that she has asked her family to conduct her mother’s funeral without her. As her crewmates console her, she shares her happiest memory of her mother, climbing to the top of a mountain and urging Chie to follow. It is the most she has ever shared about her feelings with them, yet she feels more isolated than ever. When Anton is moved to tears, they catch them to observe the regulations against loose liquids.
On the packet radio, Roman talks to a Canadian woman named Therese. Therese asks Roman if he ever feels crestfallen in space. She relates it to her own aimlessness, which strikes her during mundane activities like brushing her teeth. Roman struggles to understand what she means. When she explains that she thought he would have felt that way because of how unwelcoming his sleeping bag looked in photos, Roman reassures her that it is more comfortable than it looks. No matter how tired, lonely, or trapped he feels, he never feels crestfallen. The signal starts to break, and Therese reveals before losing Roman that her husband died recently and that she is using his radio.
Shaun writes a letter to his wife while contemplating her Las Meninas postcard. He has also been tasked with answering a question for an editorial on the moon mission: “[W]ith this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?” (156). Shaun has no idea how to address the question, especially in light of the claustrophobic habitat he’s lived in for several months. He privately thinks that the future has already been pre-determined but writes that the moon mission promises an exciting new era in the field of space exploration. He consults Pietro to expand on his answer. Pietro quips that the future is being written “[w]ith the gilded pens of billionaires” (158).
Pietro reads the back of Shaun’s postcard. He answers the question about the subject of the painting by suggesting that it is the dog. When Shaun looks at the painting again, it suddenly feels so obvious to him. The dog is the only figure in the painting that isn’t looking directly at anything else or actively eliciting anyone’s attention. Its liberation from vanity allows it to seem free.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Orbit 11”
Shaun continues to ponder the editorial question and privately expounds on his thought about the future being pre-determined. The irony is that no matter how hard humanity tries to assert itself through scientific endeavor, it only seems to underline that there isn’t much else of a difference between humans and animals after all. Space exploration is the next step in human assertion because it extends their territory. He thinks of how free animals are from the need to assert themselves. He prays for everyone suffering and for the moon mission.
Chie wonders at the discovery that her control mice have learned to fly in circles. It is only then that her grief finally strikes her. She weeps, thinking of her mother’s funeral, which is scheduled for the same day as the moon landing.
Shaun performs somersaults, reminding himself of the miracle of his weightlessness in space. He remembers how sick he was when he first arrived on the station. The first time he tried to somersault, it was to acclimate his body to the conditions of space. His mind understood that microgravity isn’t the absence of gravity; rather, it is caused by the constant free fall that the station experiences as it orbits the Earth.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Orbit 12”
The crew fall asleep watching a Russian science-fiction horror film after dinner.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Orbit 13”
The novel compresses the history of the universe into a single year, comparing the Big Bang to January 1. In March, the Milky Way is formed. In August, the sun is born, heralding the creation of the Earth and its moon. In September, bacterial life begins to evolve. The history of multicellular and animal life on Earth takes place all throughout December. Modern human civilization only transpires in the final seconds of the year. The year ends, but the universe does not. The next year could bring about any number of events that result in the end of life on Earth. Even then, this only represents a small portion of the history of the universe, which continues to expand and collide galaxies with one another.
The crew members awaken after the movie has ended. The six briefly remember the strangeness of the circumstances in which they find themselves. They link arms to say good night and return to their quarters.
Chapters 14-18 Analysis
Overshadowed by the moon mission, the crew members are frustrated by their sense of self-importance. When Shaun is tasked with answering the editorial question, he is at a loss for words to discuss the importance of the moon mission. It would mean admitting that his own efforts are unimportant by comparison. In these chapters, the age of the space station begins to show itself, particularly in the Russian module that is presented as a relic of the post-Soviet era. A similar relic in the context of the space station is the Voyager program; the chances of it achieving its intended mission while human civilization still exists have become increasingly slim.
The history of the universe magnifies that sense of unimportance by scaling it against the scope of natural and human history. Harvey writes, “If the cosmic calendar is in fact all of time, most of which has not yet occurred, in another two months any number of things could have happened to the cool marble of earth and none of them promising from a life point of view” (173-74). This emphasizes how humans are not the focal point of the universe’s existence; they’re a small feature of it, a fact that only increases the station crew’s feelings of insignificance next to the lunar crew. However, the same could be said for the new moon mission as well once the novel introduces the idea of a potential Mars mission. Similarly, the efforts of the crew on the space station eclipse all past efforts, all the way back to the first trips to space. Against this scope, all human endeavors become invisible, emphasizing The Cosmic Insignificance of Humanity as a theme. If the goal is constant progress, then no individual achievement has significant value.
These chapters thus try to resolve the tensions surrounding this insignificance by untethering individual impact and effort from ego. When Roman speaks to Therese, he holds back on saying that he is crestfallen but admits to feeling “trapped.” Shaun similarly feels that he has no power over his circumstances, which Pietro reinforces when he jokes that the future is being written by billionaires. The humility of their diminishment is reflected in Pietro’s interpretation of Las Meninas. Shaun has spent the novel trying to find the subject of the painting because it will help him make sense of what the painting is really about. Pietro’s suggests that the dog is the true subject of the painting because it is the only one who isn’t trying to draw the viewer’s—or anyone else’s—attention. This frees the dog of the same ego that resonates with the station crew’s reflections on the Earth. By accepting Pietro’s interpretation, Shaun realizes that vanity is the root of the human endeavor to extend its territory. This makes them no different at all from animals, which extend their territory and assert their survival in simpler, more primal ways. Shaun is thus reminded to forget questions of his own relevance and free himself from his ego to overcome the aimlessness that living in space has caused him to feel.
This resolution is symbolized by Shaun’s attempts to somersault, which harken back to his first days on the station. The constant free fall of the space station as it orbits around the Earth resonates with Shaun’s lack of control over his circumstances. He constantly feels like he is falling through his own life, unable to save himself. Hence, the only thing he can think himself capable of doing is somersaulting, allowing his mind and his body to acclimate to the terror of his circumstances and reassert control.
