I started listening to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital on a recent solo hike. The book follows a group of astronauts on board the space station observing 16 sunrises and sunsets as they watch the Earth’s expressions of weather roll across the invisible borders.
Roman’s face is like that of a child. Ofiget, he murmurs. A wow snatched from the back of the throat. Sugoii, Chie replies, and Nell echoes it.
Remember this, each of them thinks. Remember this.
The shared awe of Roman, Chie, and Nell resonated deeply, raising questions about the profound memories that have punctuated my life. I found myself compelled to pause my audiobook; clearly, my mind was intent on exploring this further. What defines a ‘remember this’ moment for me? How do they cluster—are they solitary experiences or ones shared with others? I spent the next hour hiking in quiet contemplation, pondering the vivid memories that have shaped my journey thus far.
A multitude of ‘remember this’ moments flooded my mind—milestones that many of us encounter as we navigate life’s winding path. The overwhelming silence after the death of a parent. The transformative vow of marriage. The first cry of my newborn child, filling the room with a new kind of love. The heartache of losing friends taken too soon. The collective shock of the 9/11 attacks. The eerie stillness following the London tube bombings. The global pause brought on by COVID-19. These ‘remember this’ moments, each with distinct emotions and stories, are shared threads woven into the fabric of countless lives across the planet.
That reflection led me to consider experiences uniquely my own—seemingly private moments that only I had witnessed. A few vivid examples surfaced in my mind. One in particular held my focus: a sun-soaked autumn afternoon in Iceland.
Sitting alone at the water’s edge, I remembered watching the glacial lagoon stretch before me—a mirror of icy stillness disrupted only by the distant, looming presence of one of Europe’s largest glaciers. The frigid air was filled with the metallic groans and thunderous cracks of the slow-moving ice, which echoed like whispers from another time. Millennia-old layers were fracturing, vast slabs breaking away to begin their final journey through the lagoon and onward to the sea. Each calving piece was a relic of ancient winters, now set adrift, embodying both an end and a beginning. I sat in contemplative silence, a solitary witness to the glacier’s majestic farewell.
Once back from my hike, I quickly finished Orbital. It’s only around 136 or so pages. Another passage caught my attention:
Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once, it seems he’s about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close.
Science fiction, at its finest, serves as more than mere entertainment—it acts as a prismatic lens through which we examine the fundamental questions of human existence. Orbital, my 49th book of 2024 and 31st venture into science fiction this year, exemplifies this perfectly. It stands among my most compelling reads of the year—and I highly recommend it.