A lone voyager in a sea of velveteen darkness, a familiar landscape rendered strange and miraculous from up above, its peaks and troughs, holding secrets and auguries — in British writer Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Vintage, Rs 365), a long-range vision of terra firma from space becomes an occasion for meditative inwardness. Told from the perspective of six astronauts of different nationalities as they circle the Earth 16 times over the course of a single day, Orbital’s refusal to be typecast as an intergalactic adventure and its empathetic reflection on the nature of humanity has won it this year’s Booker Prize, and put it on the shortlist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. In this interview, Harvey, 49, speaks of choosing distance over triumphalism, wonders over anger and why it’s more important to show rather than tell. Excerpts: One of the loveliest things about Orbital is that at a time of hyper-connectivity, it cuts out the white noise and focuses inwards. How much of that was by design? I think it was on my mind because it’s partly personal. I have, as I’ve gotten older, a huge aversion to noise, and I find the modern world incredibly noisy and sometimes quite abrasive. There’s, of course, actual noise, but also noise, as you’ve described it, as mental babble and clutter. A large part ofme was resorting to escapism in writing this novel. I know that the International Space Station (ISS), for example, is not a quiet place. I would probably go mad there as well. Although the astronauts (in the novel) are travelling at 17,500 miles an hour, they are floating — there’s a sense ofnot going anywhere, ofjust being suspended. I find that very interesting, the slowing down ofthe body, the way it can’t move fast in microgravity. I did want the book to be a sort of slowing down oftime. A quiet moment inside this hurtling spacecraft 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, to have a peaceful day on board a space station in which everybody gets along with one another and is more or less happy and nothing goes wrong, to me, that’s a fascinating prospect for a novel. Does your fascination with space go back a long way? I haven’t always been interested in space in the sense of closely following all the shuttle missions and having space posters on my wall when I was a child, although I do vividly remember the Challenger disaster (January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded seconds into flight, killing all crew members). We had had a big display in our classroom about the mission and the disaster impacted almost everybody in my generation somehow. So there were moments like that that made me aware of what was happening in space travel, but it wasn’t a deep interest. My interest has been more in the experience of astronauts when they return to Earth, and what they have to say about their perspective from space. And then later, as images became more readily available and the Internet became a thing, the level of aesthetic, visual beauty arrested me. That’s been the case for many years and that’s where the genesis of Orbital lies. It’s much more about the imagery, 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 issues around space exploration, the more interested I became. Space exploration has always been a contested geopolitical race. Now, thanks to tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, it is also entering the realm of privatisation. How does the vision of quiet that you paint in the novel react to this commercialisation? I worry about it. It’s not that I am against space exploration. We are intrinsically curious. We want to discover new things, and it’s part of what’s beautiful about us as a species. But we have an opportunity with the future of space travel to do things differently, to have a new paradigm, to do things in a more sensitive, less exploitative, more democratic and responsible way. And we aren’t doing that. We are going to repeat every mistake we have made on Earth. We haven’t stopped to think about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and the problems of it. Low Earth orbit is now no longer pristine. The further reaches are still the one remaining wilderness we have and I worry that the ambitions of men like Elon Musk, helped by politicians such as (Donald) Trump, is just going to end up being White men making a land grab yet again. It’s dressed up as something beautiful and inclusive, but it isn’t. It will favour a very small number of very wealthy people and it won’t benefit the rest of humanity. I feel despair about it. This brings to mind the picture you paint of the pristine beauty of Earth when viewed from above and then the closeup of the ravages of the climate crisis below. We seem to be hurtling towards a climate apocalypse —mitigation efforts at global summits such as COP29 are falling short. How do you engage with its politics? I think climate change is the single biggest issue that confronts us as a species, and we don’t seem to be able to grasp it, maybe because it’s too enormous and it’s too existential. I feel frustrated by our lack of confrontation. But I didn’t want to use the novel as a platform to air those frustrations. I didn’t want it to be an angry novel, not because I don’t think those responses are valid but because I wanted it to be a visual novel as much as possible. I wanted it to do what a painting might do, or even maybe a piece of music — to show you something without judgement, and to allow you, as the reader, to come to a judgement yourself. Of course, if you are going to show people in quite 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 shy away from that. I wanted that to be part of the view. But it isn’t a book that wants to be angry about this. It wants to simply look for a moment and present a particular perspective, and for the reader to do with that what he or she would like. I think it’s difficult to write politically or to write with an agenda in a novel and to do that well. If I feel angry about something, then non-fiction is the way that I would do that. You speak of Orbitalas as an act of observation. How much of this ability to look at the world from a distance comes from your training in Philosophy? It’s a really interesting as well as a very difficult question to answer. I gave up academic Philosophy a long time ago, so my knowledge of the details is quite rusty now. But I did my PhD in writing and my subject was how to write philosophical fiction — how you might put discursive philosophical ideas into a novel and does it works, or, does it compromises the novel and does the novel compromises the philosophy. My conclusion was that it was really almost impossible to put actual philosophy into a novel. The novel is a thing unto itself. So, what I took from my love of Philosophy is more a stance, a position about distance and attention. It’s about the kind of attention that you have to give to ideas. That degree of alertness and openness is something that I have always wanted to bring to my prose and to the ideas in my prose: to watch and to look and to be prepared to look at an idea from every perspective. The Las Meninaspainting (1656, by Diego Velázquez) that I write about in Orbital, in fact, is a link back to my study of Philosophy. I remember when I was an undergraduate, in our first or maybe the second term, one of the lectures was on that painting. I was thrilled by it and fell in love with the fact that it is this unsolvable riddle about perspectives. When the painting crept into this book, at first I thought it had no place in it and then I began to see that it is a metaphor for the book, fundamental to what I was trying to do. I think my philosophical background permeates everything that I do with my writing, but not in terms of presenting actual philosophical ideas. It’s much more about a disposition of attentiveness and of wanting to look at things from many different perspectives. You mentioned the distinction you maintain between genres and themes. How do you make that call, especially since the themes you write on often hinge on explorations of time? In terms of form, I am, in my bones and marrow, a novelist. So, although I have written non-fiction and I do occasionally write essays and quite like writing poetry, I am really a novelist. That said, my last book (The 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 it does with my other novels. When I wrote The Shapeless Unease, I had no design or plan for it. I just started writing in very sleep-deprived states and I found that what I wrote was entirely instinctive and the passages just came out as they demanded. Sometimes that would mean writing in first person, sometimes it would mean second or third person; sometimes it meant writing something that was like an essay, or a spoof case study; sometimes it was more poetic, sometimes, just a rant. So, I became quite interested in the process of throwing together different voices and forms into one book. There was something of that freedom and instinctiveness that I wanted to transfer into my next novel. So I tried to bring some of that into Orbital and to let the book go where it wanted to go. Time is probably the single most fascinating thing about writing for me, both the way we can depict it in all its strangeness and the way it passes in peculiar ways, but also time as a sort of energy that’s running through the narrative — the way you can use time in a novel, how much time is your novel covering, I really love to play around with that. So expanding time in some passages and compressing it in others and making that expansion and compression a form of energy in the narrative, these are things that really interest me. With Orbital, I struggled quite a lot with the time frame because the book wasn’t always set over one day. It was only when I realised that it should be just one day and it should be organised in terms of the 16 orbits, that that one 24-hours period was blown open. So, the sense of time in all of its narrative applications is really fundamental to me. What about faith? That’s been a prominent theme in your work. I don’t have any religious faith myself. I would, and this may sound like a stupid thing to say, like to. I have always rather envied people who have a religious faith and can live by that, but I’ve never really been capable of it myself. I’ve tried. I am not cynical about faith at all, whatever one’s faith is, because I think we all put our faith in something, whether that’s in a deity or a religious system or money or writing. I think that religious faith, at its best, gives one a philosophy to live by, that allows us to ask questions about the world that we don’t otherwise ask. It is a kind of a brother or a sister to Philosophy. At its worst, it can shut those questions down and that’s a shame. But I know plenty of people who have religious faith and are constantly questioning in a way that other non-religious people tend not to. That’s a beautiful thing, and I think the loss of that, the more society becomes secular, the more we lose our disposition to keep questioning things, keep questioning our values and ourselves and our own position in the world.
