This is a Booker-award winning novel about 24 hours in the life of astronauts on a near future space station. The location and characters are used to literally look at our world from a higher perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is a good basis for a novel. Samantha Harvey’s prose is evocative and she does a nice job of balancing the ethereal with the mundane. The characters are drawn with a poetic blend of abstraction and specificity. She addresses the big picture of life on earth and how weird it is to work in space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Man, that should be candy to me, but it does not quite come together. It always feels just a touch too writerly. I understand what she is aiming for in the abstraction of her characters, but instead of inhabiting that space between a living being and a symbol in a story they just seem like literary constructs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look, the book won a Booker prize. In general the folks who hand those out are better judges of writing than I am. But I am not a fan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a Booker-award winning novel about 24 hours in the life of astronauts on a near future space station. The location and characters are used to literally look at our world from a higher perspective. That is a good basis for a novel. Samantha Harvey’s prose is evocative and she does a nice job […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-general","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3382,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3381\/revisions\/3382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}