Complications in Sagen's Pale Blue Dot
Samantha Harvey:
(I’m not sure how much of the power in this text will survive my ripping it out of context, but I can’t resist the urge to put it here. Perhaps a bit of table-setting will help. On its surface, Harvey’s novel describes a day in the life of 6 astronauts (actually, 4 astronauts and two cosmonauts) from five different countries in orbit around the earth. In this excerpt, she begins with an account of training in perspective that the six people experienced before their time in space.)
You will see, they were told, its [the earth’s] fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for. While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that’s where it ends. There’s no wall or barrier — no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear.
…
It seems easier on balance not to read the news. Some do and some don’t, but it’s easier not to. When they look at the planet it’s hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it’s as though that pantomime is an insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness, or else too insignificant to be bothered with.
…
But then one day something shifts. One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only politics really were a pantomime. If politics were just a farcical, inane, at times insane entertainment provided by characters who for the most part have got where they are, not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them, if that were the beginning and end of the story it wouldn’t be so bad. Instead, they come to see that it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that. It’s a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought, from here, so human-proof.
Orbital, pp. 107ff