Orbital

No shit, it won the prize. Orbital is a real athletic piece of prose writing. It contains some of the best sentences I've read this year (Martyr! has the others) and possibly ever.

Billionaire megalomaniacs looks at space and know exactly what it's for. Scientists look at it and though they don't know, they're confident that the point of themselves is to study it until it becomes clear. I think the rest of us have a tendency to look and think: all well and good, but what's it really got to do with me?

After completing the first ever spacewalk, Alexei did a crude colouring pencil drawing of the sunrise because he felt it needed to be understood in ways other than an image recorded by a lens and photosensitive film. When Alan Bean got back from being the fourth person to walk on the moon, he likewise felt compelled to paint it. All the photographs of the moon show it to be monochrome and in fact it is, but he wanted to paint it with colours because human experience is different.

Samantha Harvey has done the writing that most effectively explodes the so what feeling about space, I think. I'm sick of the Carl Sagan clips and Neil DeGrasse fucking Tyson and even sweet, dear Chris Hadfield. Harvey's descriptions of the infinite filtered through the minutely personal still take make me feel something and look up.