"new dinosaurs" 'Orbital confronts the spectre of extinction without surrendering to despair.' To what extent do you agree?

Written amidst an intensifying recognition of the climate crisis remaking Earth, Samantha Harvey's 2023 novel Orbital examines the endurance of life at the limits of habitation, suspending its six astronauts and cosmonauts above a planet increasingly defined by loss.¹ While the novel initially confronts the spectre of ecological and personal extinction as an isolating exposure, to a considerable extent it refuses to surrender to despair, demonstrating instead that shared mortality cultivates a resilient hope.² Harvey therefore challenges her contemporary audience to abandon illusions of permanence, urging readers to cherish the fragile human bonds that survive the wreckage of a vulnerable world.³

Harvey initially presents the threat of extinction as a stark confrontation with mortal frailty, yet reveals that mourning and shared witness transmute such vulnerability into a steadfast endurance.⁴ Through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁵, the narration captures the introspective weight of private bereavement, revealing how mortality must be endured rather than escaped. Yet, 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 human frailty, a microcosm of survival sustained in common. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" magnifying the "tethers of biological life" within "the chapel['s]" sanctified shelter illuminates how kinship collectively preserved outlasts the "piddling speck" of mortal transience to offer lasting consolation. This shared consolation survives only through the crew's collective gaze, as Shaun's observation of the void exposes the magnitude against which human persistence must rally.⁶ Suspended in orbit with the collective consciousness "they are so together"⁷ yet "so alone", the roving third-person narration coalesces the crew into a unified psychological entity, revealing how the sublime void forges a solidarity that resists despair. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder", its "milky cover" obscuring the "siphoning eye", the imagery drains the six of perspective as their vision fades before the vastness of cosmic space. Facing this cosmic erasure, readers bear witness to Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas", its bystanders mirroring the crew's "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth", turning passive observation into an act of steadfast persistence. In doing so, the novel articulates the duality between beauty and burden as her readership alongside the crew experience Earth's ecological transformation, refusing the hopelessness that planetary ruin might otherwise invite. Interweaving this vision of mourning and witness, Harvey affirms that shared vulnerability fortifies humanity against absolute despair. Harvey initially presents the threat of extinction as a stark confrontation with mortal frailty, yet reveals that mourning and shared witness translate such vulnerability into a steadfast endurance.⁸