When the lights of Cape Town come they’re a talon that marks the beginning, or end, of a continent

When the lights of Cape Town come they’re a talon that marks the beginning, or end, of a continent of several thousand miles. The ascending orbit moves up its coast, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia. Africa is dusty brown in the moonlit night, sparsely clouded, and electrified by lightning across its breadth. Its city lights are discreet and scant. Maputo here, Harare there, Lusaka over there, Mombasa ahead, and each is a small heap of gold coins on a tapestried cloth, joined by nothing – no night-lit roads or urban sprawl. A beautiful velvety poverty of man on an earth that tips into the void; you feel you’d fall off, except with each new moment there’s yet more earth, and you follow its trail across the Gulf of Aden to the Middle East.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 1,825

The last thing you need is to get sick in space

Absently Anton runs his fingers over a lump that’s appeared on his neck the last fortnight and that he tries to obscure by raising the collar of his polo shirt. The last thing you need is to get sick in space. They’ll worry and send you home and, because you can’t fly back on your own, two others will have to go with you, and to cut short the missions of those two others would be unforgivable. He’ll say nothing to the flight surgeon or to his fellow crew and he’ll hope nobody notices. It’s the size of a cherry in the low hollow of his neck, and perfectly painless.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 1,359

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 302

She would survive the blazing heat and tumble of her re-entry only to be pulled from her capsule and fold like a paper crane

Anyone in Mongolia or those easternmost wildernesses of Russia, or anyone at least who knows about such things, would be aware that now, in their cold afternoon sky, higher than any aeroplane, a spacecraft is passing and that some human is up there hefting a lift-bar with her legs, willing her muscles not to give in to the seduction of weightlessness, nor her bones to birdness. Else that poor spacefarer will be in all kinds of trouble when she lands back on earth where legs, once more, are very much a thing. Without that hefting and sweating and pressing she would survive the blazing heat and tumble of her re-entry only to be pulled from her capsule and fold like a paper crane.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 268

It isn't about me not being able to see them, but them not being able to see me

The dean's always been doubtful; he says a confession box won't stop them going back to a passing thuggish friar; after all I know who most of my parish are, even with a screen between us, and they know I know, and I know they know. What privacy is this? I think this is where the dean most shows his lack of subtlety. It isn't about me not being able to see them, but them not being able to see me - does he understand that?

S. Harvey, The western wind (2018), 52