Orbital is an ode to Earth as our home: A Wknd interview with author Samantha Harvey

Her Booker Prize-winning novel follows six astronauts on board a space station, observing them as they observe their home planet.

At 49, Samantha Harvey has won the Booker Prize for her fifth novel, Orbital, which flips humanity’s traditional view of the skies — feet planted firmly on the ground, eyes trained upwards — and directs our gaze at Earth as seen from a distance: luminous, rare…, and endangered.

‘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,’ Harvey says. (AFP)

The book follows six astronauts aboard a fictionalised International Space Station, through a single day (16 orbits, of 90 minutes each). Adding a layer of nostalgia to the intricate view she builds, is the fact that, in the real world, the ISS will soon be decommissioned, and the skies are set to get much busier as private corporations take increasingly to space, looking for new worlds to draw from, and possibly call home.

“This is a book we need now, but it may also be a book we’ll need forever,” is how Booker Prize jury member Sara Collins put it.

Harvey, who grew up between Sheffield, York and Japan after her parents’ divorce and currently lives in Bath, has a degree in philosophy and a PhD in creative writing.

What made her shape Orbital as she did, slender on narrative but bursting with joy and loss? Excerpts from an interview.

* When you won the Booker, you dedicated it to people who speak “for and not against the Earth; for and not against the dignity of other humans… and for peace.” Is Orbital, in this sense, a political novel?

I don’t see Orbital as a political novel. I don’t see it as climate fiction, although, if it contributes to the conversation around climate change, and instils a sense of urgency in us, then I would be delighted.

It is an emotional project for me, and part of that emotion is in sort of being on a space station in Low Earth Orbit, and looking back at our planet as something extraordinary and precious, beyond words and comprehension, since it is our home. It’s the only home we have.

I wrote the book with a sense of sorrow, of wanting to almost memorialise both the space station as a peace project and Earth as our home and as something fundamentally unboundaried and beautiful — and to sort of set that against what I see as a new era of geopolitics, where we’re moving out of an era of relative peace and into an era of conflict, and of autocratic leaders in the West.

Space exploration is looking towards the Moon again, and towards Mars, and at getting away from Earth. I am trying to take this moment to appreciate it before we start looking at this idea that Elon Musk has of being a multi-planetary species, which seems absurd to me… except as a land grab or an exploitative thing. But then I understand that I’m not a great explorer and I am not intrepid.

* When did your fascination with space begin?

My interest in space has been a strange one. I’ve never been a space nerd but I was interested in the perspective of Earth from space. Since my teens, I’ve been riveted by the things astronauts say when they return. This evolved into an interest in images of Earth from space. We’re just gifted with this huge reservoir of images and video footage.

But I started writing Orbital in 2018 or early 2019, so the idea for this book doesn’t go back that far.

* The book is so convincing an account that people wonder if you’ve actually been in space. What kind of research did you do?

Well, the footage from ISS was my primary resource. At first, I couldn’t identify places on Earth from that perspective, but you quickly learn, and the earth begins to feel quite small when you’ve been following these orbits repeatedly. You think, “Oh, it’s like a series of gardens or a park that you’re walking through.” It all starts to feel quite familiar after a while, and that was a beautiful thing, and I can only imagine what that must be like for the astronauts and cosmonauts to experience.

In terms of other sources, I read books by astronauts. The most helpful was the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti’s Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut (2018). It had lovely insider intel on what it’s like to be there, and the little details that you couldn’t know if you hadn’t been there, as well as her sort of emotional response to things.

I also read, on the NASA website, about the different experiments they do on the ISS. I spent hundreds of hours there.

I read old, kind-of archived journals from the very early days of the International Space Station, and prior to that, the Mir space station. I watched documentaries and listened to interviews… actually there’s so much material out there.

* In the 2000s, you worked as an administrator at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath. Did that help at all?

It was a long time ago, probably 2008, when I worked at the beautiful, little museum here in Bath. It’s just a modest Georgian house where the brother and sister astronomers, William Herschel and Caroline Herschel, lived. From the back garden, William discovered the planet Uranus (in 1781), and that sort of doubled the size of the known solar system.

I worked there for a few years. That job was not born out of my interest in space but out of my need for a job.

While there I became interested a little bit in space history, and the history of space science. And I think all these things come together. So many different life experiences and things that we’re not usually even aware of, go into making a novel.

Really, Orbital came more from a desire to write, and more than anything, to write about Earth as a natural environment, to write about the loss of the natural world, to write about my feelings towards Earth and its beauty, and also the sort of degraded nature of our experience with it through climate change and so on.

So I wanted to write a kind of pastoral novel. That was where the idea first came from.

* You talk a lot about “writing from a feeling”…

The more I write, the more I come to understand that I’m writing to express feeling. If it lands, if it goes from my own heart into the heart of the reader, then that’s everything I could ask for.

For Orbital, that feeling was expansive, almost like being in love. When I look at those images of Earth, I feel a sort of breathless, oxygenated, expansive feeling of joy. But not straightforward joy, a sort of incomprehension as well, and a certain sadness that I wanted to try to put onto the page.

I did have doubts about how credible it would be for me to do it, because, after all, I haven’t been to space, and I probably never will go to space.

After temporarily giving up on it, the decision to come back was about reconnecting with the feeling that motivated the book in the first place. And I thought, I do feel passionately about this project. I just have to do it in such a way that it is on its own terms, and is convincing in its own right. This is a writer’s journey into what that might be like.

* Orbital is organised as 16 chapters, one for each orbit, but you chose not to structure it around a firm plot or narrative. What shaped that choice?

I deliberately wanted it to be a day in the life of some astronauts and cosmonauts on a space station in which nothing goes wrong.

I’m really interested in how you can have a propulsive narrative that feels like it’s moving somewhere, but that doesn’t depend upon conflict. And if you don’t have conflict, what do you have? It is a kind of spellbinding or suspension of trying to draw the reader up into a state of otherliness or something unfamiliar that hoards their interest because it is extraordinary in some way.

When you look at Earth from space, of course, there are different issues of politics, climate change, war and conflict implied in those views. And I didn’t want to avoid those. But I wanted the tone of 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.