Orbital
Orbital
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Samantha Harvey on Orbital
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A cosmonaut’s word for roundThe book’s origin runs back to Harvey’s teenage years in libraries, not to any adult ambition to write about space. One sentence copied from an astronaut’s account lodged in her memory for decades, and when ISS footage became freely available online she finally had a way to follow where it led.
I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet that that’s what prompted this idea to write about it.
From the start, Harvey had a specific literary genre in mind. During a visit to Toronto she had been moved to tears by J.L. Carr’s quiet novel about a man recuperating in the English countryside, and she wanted her next book to carry something of that elegiac attentiveness. The ISS simply offered a vantage point no pastoral writer had used before.
I wanted, really, to write about the Earth more than about space. I wanted to write something like a pastoral novel, something that was about the natural world.
Worsening anxiety through her forties made the ordinary world feel loud, and ISS footage offered relief the ground could not. That relief became the book’s emotional engine, though she knew relief alone was not enough to sustain a novel.
I wanted to write a celebration of the Earth’s beauty, but with a sense of sorrow or a pang of loss because of what we’re doing to it.
She had spent months in NASA’s archives and read through astronaut journals on the agency’s website, but what she found there only sharpened her sense of what was missing. The journals were factually dense but left the interior experience untouched.
I was thinking, there’s a gap here – a sort of metaphysical gap, a magical experience that isn’t being documented the way I’d like to document it.
The ISS itself was also aging toward decommissioning when she began writing, which gave the project an additional charge. She saw the station not just as a location but as the last physical emblem of a political arrangement that was already dissolving.
I do see the ISS already with a kind of nostalgia of something that belongs to an era of peaceful cooperation between humans.
How she wrote it
Sixteen orbits and a feeling like being in loveThe first draft placed British astronaut Nell at the center in first person and unfolded over a month. Both choices had to go. The problem was not characterization but time itself: at 17,500 miles per hour, circling Earth every ninety minutes, the standard novel’s relationship to duration simply broke.
I was unable to say the things I wanted to say in the novel. I was unable to kind of contain the sense of time passing and the strangeness and upendedness of time passing when you’re moving around the Earth every 90 minutes. [paraphrased from audio]
The structural solution she arrived at was to compress the book to a single day divided into sixteen orbits, one for each time the ISS circles Earth in roughly twenty-four hours. That constraint did more than organize chapters: it let the form carry what the sentences alone could not.
In ordering the narrative in this way I could use the structure to simulate something of the experience of time when moving at 17,500 mph in low earth orbit – I could structurally encode this experience of time. I could giddy the reader, rather than just telling the reader that time was strange and fractured and giddying.
Within that tight temporal container she gave herself complete freedom everywhere else, shifting between third person, second person, and a collective “we” largely by instinct. She also set herself the problem of generating forward momentum without any plot. The answer was to treat prose itself as a kinetic system.
There is, as many people have rightly pointed out, no plot in the book. So I was trying to find other ways of making it propulsive: different tempos, using time in different ways, compressing and stretching time, using different registers in the language, zooming in, zooming out, trying to create a kinetic energy.
ISS footage stayed open in a corner of her screen from the first sentence to the last copyedit, so the visual source of the book’s detail never went cold. But the research could only work if it stayed invisible: too much technical fact, she knew, would puncture the fictional spell she needed to sustain for the length of a novel.
For Orbital, this thing I felt was some oxygenated, flammable concoction of rapture and sadness and upending and excitement, maybe a bit like being in love. I tried to write, always, from inside that feeling, and to see if that feeling could get inside the sentences.
Her chronic insomnia, which she had documented at length in her 2020 memoir “The Shapeless Unease,” had already changed how she wrote before she began “Orbital.” Both books are short and concentrated, written in bursts. She described what that shift had cost and what it had given her when speaking at the Toronto Reference Library.
Since having insomnia, I write in a more concentrated and focused style. It’s shorter. In a way, writing is my way of dreaming.
The remark reframes the book’s brevity: the compression is not a stylistic preference but a consequence of years without reliable sleep, and the writing that came out of those years became, for her, the thing sleep had been.
What she wants us to sit with
Earth stuff pondering the earthHarvey resists being assigned a position on hope or despair, but she is precise about the emotional register she was aiming for. Joy, in the book’s economy, is not naivety: it is a deliberate stance taken in full knowledge of what is being lost.
I wanted the tone of the book to be predominantly joyful because that is a form of power, in a way. I wanted to convey that to be happy is an act of resistance.
She returns in interviews to the Velázquez painting “Las Meninas,” which appears in the novel and scrambles the normal relationship between observer and observed, making it impossible to determine who is looking at whom. From 250 miles up, she argues, something structurally similar happens to a person’s ordinary sense of standing at the center of things.
I was really interested in that kind of unanchoring of the idea of perception. Can we unanchor our own perception of the world from ourselves in some way? However temporary or however small that might be. [paraphrased from audio]
Beauty, in her account, is not a passive aesthetic experience from orbit. It arrives as a demand. She made that demand explicit in an interview at Point Reyes Books, where she described what looking down at the planet actually asks of the person looking.
To look at its beauty from space is to be asked to wake up, it’s a call to action through light and colour.
The book is also an elegy for the ISS as a peace project. Writing after the station’s decommissioning was announced, Harvey saw the corporate and nationalistic space ventures that would follow as a direct reversal of what the station had represented, and said so plainly to the New Statesman after winning the Booker.
We’re going into a future which is far more individualistic, far more corporate, and it’s going to be exploitative. It’s as if we’re no longer going to be attentive to this planet, but just try and get away from it.
At the Booker Prize ceremony, she extended a line from Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” to describe what the novel had been for her: a species turning its attention back on itself from outside. The addition she made to Sagan’s sentence is where her argument lands.
We are star stuff pondering the stars. And I would add that we are also earth stuff pondering the earth. And I think my novel is an exercise in that pondering. To look at the earth from space is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time the person in the mirror is herself. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves. [paraphrased from audio]
The mirror image collapses the distance that the whole novel has been building. Orbit, in the end, is not an escape from human life on Earth but the angle of vision from which that life becomes legible.