Orbital

In a recent interview with the Booker Prizes, Samantha Harvey said she ‘wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism’. In doing so, Harvey wondered if she could ‘evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer’. Do you think she succeeded in this approach? How does her depiction of space travel compare to both traditional sci-fi and nature writing?

Orbital takes place over a single day, a Tuesday in October. During the course of that day, the craft orbits Earth 16 times. How does the author use the concept of time to structure the narrative? What effect does this one-day snapshot have on the reader’s understanding of the characters’ experiences and the sense of time in space?

Harvey frequently uses metaphor throughout the novel. ‘Gran Canaria’s steep radial gorges pile the island up like sandcastles hastily built, and when the Atlas mountains announce the end of the desert, clouds appear in the shape of a shark whose tail flips at the southern coast of Spain, whose fin-tip nudges the southern Alps, whose nose will dive any moment into the Mediterranean.’ How does her use of these devices enhance the reader’s ability to visualise the astronauts’ experience? Does it make these extraordinary, otherworldly events more relatable?

Throughout the novel, Harvey makes several implicit references to climate change. ‘Every swirling neon or red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices.’ Discuss how such references function as part of the subtext of the novel.

The novel contrasts the astronauts’ cyclical, repetitive day-to-day activities in space, such as exercise, sustenance, maintenance and chores; with the vast, dynamic life on Earth below. How does Harvey use this juxtaposition of perspective to balance the novel and explore the relationship between the micro (the astronauts’ world) and the macro (the billions of lives on Earth)?

In a review for The New Yorker, James Wood writes that ‘Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare. It’s barely a novel because it barely tells a plotted set of human stories, and the stories it does tell barely interact with one another.’ Do you agree Orbital is ‘barely a novel’? Discuss the absence of conventional plot and how this affects the reading experience. And if it’s not really a novel, what is it?

Orbital contains numerous references to past events in the lives of the astronauts. How do these references shape our impression of the characters, and enhance the novel’s depth? Would it have been a different novel without these backstories?

Harvey’s prose is often repetitive and looping, and deployed with a rhythmic style. How does this impact the reader’s experience and the novel’s overall tone?

Harvey’s work has drawn comparisons to Virginia Woolf from both readers and critics. In a recent interview with the Guardian, she said, ‘I admire Woolf probably more than any other writer I can think of. I didn’t think about parallels with The Waves while writing Orbital, but I can see there’s something [similar] about the way voices surface and dissipate. If the influence was there, it wasn’t conscious.’ In your reading of the novel, do you see similarities between Harvey’s work and that of Woolf?

Orbital touches on themes of religion, meaning and existentialism, as the astronauts grapple with their place in the universe while observing Earth from above. How does Harvey explore these big themes, within the context of their confinement? In what ways does the characters’ isolation amplify such existential questions?