One traveler in the sea of velveteen darkness, a strangely familiar landscape made from above, its peaks and troughs, carrying secrets and auguries – in the British author Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Vintage, Rs 365), a long-distance view of terra firma from space it becomes an opportunity for introspection. Telling the story of six astronauts from different nations as they orbit the Earth 16 times in one day, Orbital’s refusal to be pigeonholed as an intergalactic drama and its empathy for the human condition won it this year’s Booker Prize. , and shortlisted it for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
In this interview, Harvey, 49, talks about choosing distance over victory, surprises over anger and why it’s more important to show than tell. Quotes:
One of the best things about the Orbital is that during intense communication, it cuts through the white noise and focuses inward. How much of that is by design?
I think it was on my mind because it’s partly personal. As I get older, I have a strong aversion to noise, and I find today’s world incredibly noisy and sometimes noisy. Of course, there is real noise, but also noise, as you described, like mental chatter and clutter. A large part of me turned to escapism to write this novel. I know that the International Space Station (ISS), for example, is not a quiet place. I would also go crazy. Although the astronauts (in the novel) are traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, they are floating – there is a feeling of not going anywhere, of just being suspended. I find that very interesting, the weight loss, how fast you can travel in microgravity. I wanted this book to be a kind of time-lapse. The quiet moment inside this destructive spaceship seemed interesting to me, this contradiction, this finding a way to write without drama or conflict or at least trying to create drama without conflict. So, having a peaceful day on a space station where everyone gets along and is very happy and nothing goes wrong, to me, that’s an interesting prospect for a novel.
Does your fascination with space go back a long way?
I wasn’t always interested in space in the sense of closely following all the astronauts and having space posters on my wall when I was a kid, although I remember well the Challenger disaster (January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger). the plane exploded seconds later, killing all the crew). We had a big demonstration in our class about work and the tragedy touched almost everyone in my generation in some way. So there were moments like that that made me see what was happening in space travel, but it wasn’t a deep interest. My interest has been more in the experiences of astronauts when they return to Earth, and what they have to say about their vision of space. And later, as the images are easily available and the internet becomes a thing, the level of beauty, visual beauty captivates me. That has been the case for many years and therein lies the genesis of Orbital. It’s more about the image, about the idea of trying to paint with words, more about the Earth than it is about space, although the more I researched the ISS and space exploration issues, the more interested I became.
Spatial exploration has always been a contested geopolitical race. Now, thanks to tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, it’s also entering the realm of personalization. How does the idea of peace that you paint in the novel respond to this sale?
I worry about it. It’s not that I’m against space exploration. We are curious. We want to discover new things, and it’s part of what’s good about us as a species. But we have an opportunity in the future of space travel to do things differently, to have a new perspective, to do things in a sensitive, less exploitative, democratic and responsible way. And we don’t do that. We will repeat every mistake we made on Earth. We never stopped thinking about what we do, why we do it, and your problems. Low Earth orbit is no longer clean. What is going on is the wilderness we are left with and I worry that the ambitions of men like Elon Musk, aided by politicians like (Donald) Trump, will end up being White men taking over the world again. It’s dressed up as something nice and inclusive, but it’s not. It will benefit a very small number of very rich people and will not help all of humanity. I feel hopeless about it.
This brings to mind the picture you paint of the pristine beauty of the earth from above and the closure of the ravages of the weather below.
It seems we are facing a climate apocalypse – mitigation efforts at world conferences such as COP29 are failing. How do you get involved in its politics?
I think climate change is the single biggest issue we’re facing as a species, and we just don’t seem to be able to understand it, maybe because it’s so big and so present. I feel frustrated by our lack of argument. But I didn’t want to use the novel as a platform to vent that frustration. I didn’t want it to be an angry novel, not because I don’t think those answers are valid but because I wanted it to be as visual a novel as possible. I wanted it to do what a painting can do, or maybe a piece of music – to show you something without judgment, and allow you, as the reader, to come to your own judgment. Yes, if you’re going to show people in really intricate detail our planet from space, then part of what you’re showing them is the effects of climate change. And I didn’t want to run away from that. I wanted that to be part of the vision. But this is not a book that wants to get angry about this.
It wants to just look for a moment and present an idea, and for the reader to do what they would like to do. I think it’s hard to write about politics or agenda writing in a novel and do that well. If I feel angry about something, then what is not true is how I act on it.
He talks about Orbitalas as an act of observation. How much of this foresight comes from your training in Philosophy?
It’s really interesting and a very difficult question to answer. I gave up on Academic Philosophy a long time ago, so my knowledge of details is rusty now. But I did my PhD in writing and my topic was writing philosophical fiction – how to put counter-philosophical ideas into a novel and does it work, or, does it compromise the novel and does the novel undermine philosophy.
My conclusion was that it was almost impossible to put real philosophy into a novel. This novel is one thing. So, what I have taken from my love of Philosophy is more of a stance, a position about distance and attention. It’s about the kind of attention you should give ideas. That level of awareness and openness is something I’ve always wanted to bring to my prose and to my prose ideas: looking and looking and being ready to look at a vision from every perspective. The Las Meninaspainting (1656, by Diego Velázquez) that I write about in Orbital is, in fact, a link back to my Philosophy course. I remember when I was an undergraduate student, in our first or maybe second period, one of the lectures was on that painting. I enjoyed and loved that this is an unsolvable riddle about ideas. When the painting came into the book, at first I thought it had no place in it and then I started to see that it is a metaphor for the book, which is fundamental to what I was trying to do. I think my philosophical background permeates everything I do with my writing, but not in presenting actual philosophical ideas. It is very much about the state of attention and wanting to look at things from many different perspectives.
He mentions the distinctions he maintains between genres and themes. How do you make that call, especially since the topics you write about are often time-tested?
By nature, in my bones and essence, I am a novelist. So, although I’ve written non-fiction and sometimes I write essays and I like to write poetry, I’m really a novelist. That said, my last book (Shapeless Unease, 2020) was non-fiction. It was about my experience of insomnia and I think that in many ways, Orbital has more in common with that book than my other novels. When I wrote Shapeless Unease, I had no design or plan for it. I just started writing in the most sleepless states and I found that what I was writing was natural and the episodes came out as they wanted. Sometimes that means writing in the first person, sometimes it means the second or third person; sometimes it meant writing something like an essay, or a spoof case study; sometimes it was very poetic, sometimes, just noisy. Therefore, I became very interested in the process of combining different words and forms into one book. There was something about that freedom and natural inclination that I wanted to convey in my next novel. So I tried to bring some of that to Orbital and let the book go where it wanted to go.
Orbital cover.
Time is probably the single most interesting thing about writing for me, both how we can describe it in all its strangeness and how it passes through in strange ways, but also time as a kind of force that runs through the story – in a way that you can. you can spend time in a novel, how much time does your novel cover, I really like to play with that. So expanding time in some episodes and compressing it in others and making that expansion and compression a kind of force in the story, these are things that really interest me. With Orbital, I really struggled with the time frame because the book wasn’t always set in one day. It was only then that I realized that it should only be one day and that it should be planned according to 16 routes, that one 24-hour period was blown away. So, the sense of time in every narrative that you work on is really fundamental to me.
What about faith? That has been a prominent theme in your work…
I have no religion myself. I would, and this may sound like a silly thing to say, like. I’ve always envied people who have religious faith and can live by it, but I’ve never really known that myself.
I tried. I’m not criticizing faith at all, no matter what a person’s faith is, because I think we all put our faith in something, whether that’s in god or a religious system or money or writing. I think that religion, at its highest level, gives a person a philosophy to live by, which allows us to ask questions about the world that we wouldn’t ask otherwise. It’s kind of like your brother or sister in Philosophy. At worst, it can shut down those questions and that’s a shame. But I know many people who have a religious faith and who always ask in a way that other non-religious people often don’t. That’s a good thing, and I think the loss of that, the more secular society becomes, the more we lose our attitude to keep asking questions, keep questioning our values and ourselves and our place in the world.
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