"a nationless borderless outpost" 'Orbital exposes the arbitrariness of nationhood.' To what extent do you agree?

Published in 2023 and awarded the 2024 Booker Prize, Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital observes a planet imperilled by the Anthropocene, surveying how the perspective of space exposes the fragility and arbitrariness of terrestrial boundaries.¹ While the narrative largely affirms that distance dismantles the illusion of political division by rendering borders imperceptible, it reveals that this dissolution of nationhood forges a deep communion among the crew, transforming arbitrary divisions into shared vulnerability.² Harvey therefore challenges her contemporary audience to abandon the artifice of separation, urging readers to recognise that authentic belonging transcends constructed borders to unite a fragile human collective.³

Harvey initially presents the orbital vantage point as an exposure of humanity's arbitrary divisions, yet reveals that traversing such liminal space dismantles illusions of separation to forge an intense interdependence.⁴ Suspended in liminal space between connection and separation, Harvey's portrayal of the crew's shared consciousness as "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone" recasts isolation as a heightened awareness of human interdependence, coalescing the six into a unified psychological entity where the sublimity of the void dwarfs any concept of nationhood. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder" that projects a "milky cover" obscuring their "siphoning eye", the roving narration drains the crew of their terrestrial perspectives, their gaze dissipating into a boundary-less expanse consumed by space's boundless immensity. To resist such cosmic erasure, readers bear witness to Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas", its bystanders mirroring the crew's "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth", translating observation into a shared communion. In doing so, the image articulates the duality between beauty and burden as Harvey's readership alongside the crew experience Earth's Anthropocene transformation, perceiving a continuous globe that exposes the artifice of political borders. This dissolution of terrestrial barriers narrows into intimate communion when Chie's grief exposes the shared vulnerability beneath arbitrary nationhood.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁷, Harvey captures the introspective weight of individual mourning that invites readers to childishly echo the mantra in their own minds, establishing a universal kinship that ignores worldly borders. This enforces the "collision of worlds" whereby the novel dismantles the physical distance between fisherman and astronaut who both "lie low hopelessly", serving as a microcosm for our collective reckoning due to our limited agency before nature's indifferent power. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" residing from the typhoon magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as the chapel's sanctified nature illuminates how the collective preservation of kinship transcends the "piddling speck" of our existence into a celebration of undivided shelter. Harvey's interweaving of collective witness and shared mourning establishes that orbital existence strips away the arbitrariness of nationhood to reveal an essential and enduring human solidarity. Harvey initially presents the orbital vantage point as an exposure of humanity's arbitrary divisions, yet reveals that traversing such liminal space dismantles illusions of separation to forge an intense interdependence.⁸