You’d think six people on a space station would be a novel of claustrophobia and tension but this is quite unexpectedly different. The focus goes in and out from the personal to the universal in a way that you don’t notice the difference. I found it miraculous that something so short could deliver such a mind-opening and ultimately calming experience. A rare treat.
Sometimes there are urges to see a particular thing – the Pyramids or the New Zealand fjords or a desert of sand dunes that are bright orange and entirely abstract and which the eye can’t fathom – the image could just as easily be a close-up of the one of the heart cells they have in Petri dishes. Sometimes they want to see the theatrics, the opera, the earth’s atmosphere, airglow, and sometimes it’s the smallest things, the lights of fishing boats off the coast of Malaysia dotted starlike in the black ocean.
