By Pauline H.
Samantha Harvey questioned whether she had the knowledge and expertise to write about space—after all, she’s no astronaut. It took her years to take the plunge and write the wonderfully uplifting Orbital, which invites readers to follow six astronauts aboard a spacecraft orbiting Earth—collecting data, conducting experiments, and, above all, observing the planet below. We’re glad she did. Orbital is less a novel about space than a reflection on the beauty of life on Earth, the nature of humanity, and its fragility that makes life’s simplest things our most valuable possessions.
Can we not stop tyrannizing and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? (Harvey, (2024)
Given the controversy surrounding Katy Perry’s trip with Blue Origin, we might well ask why humans need to such gluttonous trips to appreciate our own blue origin—the perfect planet beneath our feet. Ironic to engage in destructive, carbon-intensive journeys in order to admire a planet already at our fingertips. To gain perspective, perhaps all you need is to immerse yourself in Samantha Harvey’s short novel Orbital—an alien in contemporary literature, to be consumed like a long poem—just like our fleeting time on Earth.
As Harvey asks, “Who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful?” (Harvey, 2024)
Sources:
Harvey, S. (2024). Orbital. Penguin Random House.(original work published 2023)
