Samantha Harvey, who has won the UK’s top fiction award, the Booker prize, for her novel Orbital, has created a new genre: nature writing about space.
“I see it as a kind of space pastoral,” Harvey told the żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ podcast earlier in the year. “I wanted to see what you could do with words in a painterly way to try to conjure up that rapturous, joyful, extraordinary and also now somewhat grief-stricken view of the Earth.”
Orbital takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station (ISS). There are six humans on board, who during the span of the novel observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. We learn about their lives and their thoughts while in space, but the main character is the planet.
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In an announcement from the Booker prize about Orbital’s win, chair of judges Edmund de Waal said that Harvey’s “language of lyricism and acuity… makes our world strange and new for us”. The judges had been unanimous in choosing the novel as their winner, he said, ahead of shortlisted books that included Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share,” said de Waal.
There is great beauty in the view of our planet from space and, as Harvey told the żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ podcast, it is inevitably tinged with grief for what we are doing to it. But she didn’t write her novel with a climate fiction hat on. She wanted to write a book about joy and beauty because those feelings are empowering.
“To be able to see beauty and to feel joy and to feel your heart expand – I wanted to try and capture that on the page because it feels like my only form of resistance,” she said.
Harvey was clear that, of course, she will never go to space. But what if Jeff Bezos reads the book, rings her up and says “Samantha, you’ve written this beautiful book and as your reward I want to invite you to space.” Would she go?
“I’d take it. Yeah, absolutely.”
She was ambivalent about the boom in space tourism. “There is a part of me that thinks we should deal with the problems that we have on Earth – which are numerous and profound – first,” Harvey said.
Although she said the current space race feels like more of the same competitiveness between companies and nations that has contributed to the crises engulfing Earth’s climate and nature, she highlighted the collaborative example of the ISS over the past 20-plus years. It is one reason she has two Russian cosmonauts in her book, along with four astronauts.
“[The approach to the ISS] has been science-based, it hasn’t been a land grab, it’s been about nations cooperating with one another and it’s sad that we are coming to an end of that era,” she said.
The Booker prize, which is worth ÂŁ50,000 to its winner, has been won in the past by authors including Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel and Richard Flanagan.
