Six Degrees of Separation: Orbital

First Saturday of the month and time for the super monthly tag Six Degrees of Separation, which is hosted by Kate at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest, Six Degrees of Separation #6degrees picks a starting book for participants to go wherever it takes them in six more steps. Links to my reviews are in the titles of the books chosen. The starter book this month is:

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

This love letter to the Earth set on board the International Space Station takes place over one day of multiple orbits. It was my Book of the Year – nuff said.

A book which is in effect a love letter to the pioneer days of the space race, that isn’t The Right Stuff, is:

The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock

Beyond the technological marvels, the successes – and the failures of the space race in the 1960s, are human stories rfet. The pioneering heroes had wives and families, friends and colleagues, who are left behind every flight, every launch, wondering if their man will come home. The Last Pilot is a novel about one such human story, a fictional family set amongst the real life test pilots and astronauts and their story blends seamlessly into that of history.

Another novel titled ‘The Last …’ is:

The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada

Yoshiro is a centenarian, one of Japan’s ‘old-elderly’. He lives on in Tokyo looking after his great-grandson Mumei. Japan has been devastated by an environmental disaster – we never discover exactly what happened – and it has resulted in the old living on and remaining relatively spritely with age, but the young die young, the poisons in the air, the earth, the food, waste them away. Mumei will be in the last generation of children and Yoshiro takes infinite care with his young charge. It is a very subtle dystopia and while being a mere 138 pages long, it is an intense read indeed. 

Another Yoko is:

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa

Seventeen-year-old Mari is a dutiful daughter, manning the desk at her family hotel, the Hotel Iris, situated in a Japanese seaside town. The book opens with a guest and the prostitute he’d brought back to the hotel causing a kerfuffle and being ejected. Mari is fascinated by the man’s voice. Later she sees him again and follows him. After a few days of stalking they strike up a conversation. He is a translator, and lives an ascetic life on the island off the coast. The first shock is to find that he is a widower in his sixties, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Mari, she’s ready to fall in love. The second is when she goes with him to the island, and the third is when he ties her up and subjects her to degrading acts which she submits to with increasing pleasure – but always managing to catch the ferry home before her mother wonders where she is. Unsettling indeed!

Another hotel is:

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel

This novel has three main protagonists: Vincent, the beautiful bartender; Jonathan Alkaitis, a financier who owns the hotel where she works; and Leon Prevant, a shipping executive. All three meet in the Hotel Caiette, an exclusive hotel only reachable by ferry from Vancouver Island – the kind of place you retreat to – for whatever reason. When her boss’s scheme goes wrong, Vincent has to escape and make herself scarce. So she goes to work as a chef on a cargo ship…

Another novel in which someone lies low working on a ship is…

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg

When the six-year-old son of Smilla Jaspersen’s neighbour falls to his death from their apartment block roof, Smilla knows it wasn’t an accident, he fell getting away from someone. The police will close the case but she saw the footsteps in the snowy roof and how he ran on it. So Smilla investigates, and on finding that the boy’s father died in an ‘accident’ in Greenland, is drawn into something much larger, more insidious, greedy and violent. It will draw her back to her homeland, on a voyage in a specially equipped icebreaker up to the Arctic and will put her in terrible danger, but if anyone can survive there, it’s Smilla who has that feeling for snow, and they’ll discover something up there that should have stayed buried.

Which is also the case in

Phase Six by Jim Shepard

There is a real concern that underneath the ice are a host of pathogens biding their time, waiting for the opportunity provided by climate change to emerge. In Phase Six, one such bug is uncovered in the thawing permafrost in a small Greenland settlement which two boys unwittingly pick up and transmit to their community. Had no-one had to leave the village, its onward transmission might have stopped, but the mine-workers transported out taking it with them. Too late! Here, Shepard changes point of view, and we join Jeannine and Danice who work for the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) on a team going up to Greenland to investigate the outbreak… This novel remains probably the best description of an outbreak of a deadly virus I’ve read.

I’ve gone from space to the US desert over to Japan, back across the Pacific to Canada ending up in Greenland with some strong themes of being on the edge. Where will your six degrees take you?