- This novel won this year's Booker Prize. It's certainly a worthy winner. It's a breathtaking, visionary, deep view of planet earth and the humans who live on it.
- Six astronauts from different countries - Roman, Shaun, Chie, Pietro, Nell and Anton - are circling planet earth in a spacecraft. Their job is to tend to all sorts of scientific stuff, which they assiduously do. They also reflect on their families, personal relationships, achievements and ambitions. They are not so special. They are normal human beings. They circle the earth sixteen times a day. They are in awe of its stunning beauty.
- Samantha Harvey's prose is beautifully poetic, and its written with passion and anger. The astronauts are in awe of their planet and continually reflect on its beauty, geography, colours, and weather systems - 'just a giddy mass of waltzing things'. And its headlong journey to destruction.
- It's a 137 page short novel, but the small print and dense prose mean it can’t be read quickly. I had to read sentences and paragraphs a few times to let them sink in. It's certainly worth the effort.
- They see a huge typhoon developing near the Philippines ‘..a charging force closing in on land’. They can see how destructive it will be.
- Harvey confronts us with all sorts of challenges. ..only white American men have gone to the moon - this is what the world is, a playground for men, a laboratory for men; OK, we’re alone, so be it; trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does; the atom bomb - be afraid my child of what a human can do - you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory; This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? Can we not stop tyrannising and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Every swirling neon or red algae bloom…every retreating glacier…every mound laid newly bare…every scorched and blazing forest…every shrinking ice sheet.
- They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that's what they begin to see when they look down. They don't even need to look down since they, too, are part of those extrapolations, they more than anyone - on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a millions cars.
- They see a huge typhoon developing near the Philippines ‘..a charging force closing in on land’. They can see how destructive it will be.
- Harvey confronts us with all sorts of challenges. ..only white American men have gone to the moon - this is what the world is, a playground for men, a laboratory for men; OK, we’re alone, so be it; trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does; the atom bomb - be afraid my child of what a human can do - you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory; This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? Can we not stop tyrannising and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Every swirling neon or red algae bloom…every retreating glacier…every mound laid newly bare…every scorched and blazing forest…every shrinking ice sheet.
- They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that's what they begin to see when they look down. They don't even need to look down since they, too, are part of those extrapolations, they more than anyone - on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a millions cars.
The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.
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