In Orbital, curiosity is humanity's defining trait.' To what extent do you agree?

Published in 2023 as the climate crisis accelerates the Anthropocene epoch's environmental decline, Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital contemplates the complex motivations underpinning space travel across a single day of sixteen orbits aboard the International Space Station.¹ While Harvey largely affirms that a relentless drive for discovery propels human existence into the hostile and awe-inspiring void, she demonstrates to a considerable extent that this inquisitiveness is ultimately secondary to the capacity for protective witness and shared kinship that such exploration awakens.² Harvey therefore challenges her contemporary audience to reconsider the motivations behind expansion, urging readers to channel their exploratory impulses away from endless conquest and into an active, reverent preservation of the fragile planet that sustains them.³

Harvey initially presents the investigative impulse as a perilous exposure to the cosmos, yet reveals that the resultant distance transforms an inquisitive gaze into a unified resilience against cosmic erasure.⁴ Suspended with the collective consciousness "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone", the narrative coalesces the crew into a unified psychological entity, revealing how the isolating sublimity of the void forges interdependence as individuals yearn for a belonging that sheer curiosity cannot supply. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder", its "milky cover" obscuring the "siphoning eye", the astronauts and cosmonauts' perspectives scatter into vapor consumed by the overwhelming magnitude of space's boundless immensity which dwarfs all investigative endeavours. Thus, to resist cosmic erasure readers bear witness to Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas", its bystanders mirroring the crew's "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth" as observation shifts from scientific scrutiny to a protective vigil. In doing so, the roving third-person narration articulates the duality between beauty and burden as her readership alongside the crew experience Earth's Anthropocene transformation, recasting the exploratory drive as a helpless witness to the human existence flourishing below. This collective exposure to the limits of discovery narrows into an intimate confrontation with mortality when Chie receives the news of her mother's death.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁷, Harvey captures the introspective weight of private loss, inviting readers to childishly echo the mantra while exposing the limits of human ambition before sudden bereavement. Yet, this overwhelming impotence is countered as the storm's "building magnificence" held alongside Pietro's fixation on the "particular fisherman and his family" transforms the typhoon's immensity into a meditation on shared vulnerability, a microcosm of survival that outstrips any urge to explore. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as the chapel's sanctified nature transcends the "piddling speck" of our existence, proving that kinship defines survival far more than sheer curiosity. Through this interweaving, Harvey establishes that shared communion sustains the crew far more than sheer discovery. Harvey initially presents the investigative impulse as a perilous exposure to the cosmos, yet reveals that the resultant distance transforms an inquisitive gaze into a unified resilience against cosmic erasure.⁸