The beauty of Earth in Orbital is inseparable from the damage humanity has caused it.' Discuss.

Published in 2023 amidst an accelerating climate crisis, Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital surveys the Anthropocene from the International Space Station, interrogating how the splendour of the planet remains entwined with human-inflicted ecological decline.¹ While this orbital vantage point initially reveals an imperilled sphere ravaged by terrestrial choices, the roving narration simultaneously illuminates how such devastating damage magnifies the obligation to cherish the natural world.² Harvey consequently challenges her contemporary audience to confront this entangled beauty and burden, urging twenty-first-century readers to embrace their urgent custodianship over the vulnerable planet that sustains mortal existence.³

Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as a confrontation with ecological fragility, establishing that observing the planet's magnificence simultaneously exposes the undeniable ruin left by human intervention.⁴ Suspended in liminal space with the collective consciousness "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone", the roving third-person narration coalesces the crew into a unified psychological entity, exposing how shared observation from the void magnifies their awareness of an imperilled planet. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder" with its "milky cover" obscuring the "siphoning eye", such sensory dislocation drains the astronauts and cosmonauts of perspective, their gaze dissipating before an immensity irrevocably altered by human hands. Thus, to resist such cosmic erasure readers bear witness to Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas," reflective of mere bystanders, mirroring their "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth", turning aesthetic contemplation into a recognition of ecological crisis. In doing so, this framing articulates the duality between beauty and burden as the crew experience Earth's Anthropocene transformation while remaining helpless to protect the human existence flourishing below. This helpless witness narrows into an intimate confrontation with loss when Chie's observation of the typhoon exposes the devastating consequences of ecological collapse.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant "mother mother mother mother"⁷, the introspective weight of individual grief invites readers to childishly echo the mantra in their own minds, binding private mourning to the broader degradation of the natural world. Yet, the discernment of the storm's "building magnificence" alongside Pietro's fixation on the "particular fisherman and his family" transforms the typhoon's immensity into a meditation on shared vulnerability, functioning as a microcosm of the climate crisis. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" residing from the typhoon magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as "the chapel['s]" sanctified shelter reveals how the preservation of kinship transcends the "piddling speck" of our existence into a solemn obligation to protect what remains. Through this intertwined observation, Harvey establishes that planetary splendour demands vigilant custodianship over the damaged sphere. Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as a confrontation with ecological fragility, establishing that observing the planet's magnificence simultaneously exposes the undeniable ruin left by human intervention.⁸