"How are we writing the future of humanity?" 'Orbital presents the future as a shared authorship.' Discuss.

Written amidst an intensifying recognition of humanity's irreversible ecological imprint upon the planet, Samantha Harvey's 2023 novel Orbital examines the enduring significance of collective agency at the limits of earthly habitation, suspended above a world transformed by the climate crisis.¹ While the vast expanse of space initially appears to isolate mortal observers and diminish human capacity to shape destiny, the novel instead reveals that shared witness and interdependence transform apparent passivity into a unified authorship of human legacy.² Harvey therefore invites her contemporary audience to abandon the illusion of individual centrality, urging readers to recognise that human futurity is written not in isolation, but through the enduring solidarity that binds existence.³

Harvey initially presents severance from the living world as an isolating exposure that strips individuals of agency, yet reveals that shared witness forges a collaborative resilience capable of writing a collective future.⁴ Suspended in liminal space between individual detachment and shared destiny, Harvey's portrayal of the crew's consciousness as "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone" coalesces the six into a unified psychological entity, revealing how the isolating sublimity of the void forges a collaborative resilience. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder" reflecting their temporal distortion that projects a "milky cover" obscuring their "siphoning eye", the narrative drains the astronauts and cosmonauts of their perspectives that dissipate into smoke consumed by an immensity heedless of human futurity. Thus, to resist cosmic erasure readers bear witness to Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas," reflective of mere bystanders, mirroring their "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth," recasting watching as an active participation in shared authorship. In doing so, the postcard articulates the duality between beauty and burden as her readership alongside the crew experience Earth's Anthropocene transformation, embracing the collective responsibility of safeguarding the human existence flourishing below. This collaborative resilience narrows into an intimate solidarity when Chie's bereavement exposes the fragile transience of existence.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant "mother mother mother mother"⁷, Harvey captures the introspective weight of private sorrow, inviting readers to childishly echo the mantra while revealing how mourning is endured through shared kinship rather than solitary endurance. Yet, 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, a microcosm of survival authored in common. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" residing from the typhoon magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as the narrative illuminates "the chapel['s]" sanctified nature whereby the collective preservation of kinship outlasts the "piddling speck" of our existence to secure a shared destiny. Harvey's interweaving of panoramic witness with intimate mourning reveals that humanity's future is actively authored through the enduring solidarity forged against the void. Harvey initially presents severance from the living world as an isolating exposure that strips individuals of agency, yet reveals that shared witness forges a collaborative resilience capable of writing a collective future.⁸