Orbital contends that gratitude is the only adequate response to existence.' Do you agree?

Written during the confinement of pandemic lockdowns and published in 2023, Samantha Harvey's space pastoral Orbital traces sixteen circuits of an Earth scarred by the Anthropocene epoch, interrogating mortal existence against the overwhelming vastness of the cosmos.¹ While the novel initially concedes that the void's isolation threatens to dwarf human significance, it reveals that witnessing the planet's stark fragility cultivates a deeply sustaining reverence, framing gratitude as the most vital response to existence.² Harvey therefore invites her modern audience to abandon illusions of cosmic centrality, urging contemporary readers to embrace humanity's transient place within the universe as a source of awe rather than despair.³

Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as an isolating confrontation with the void, yet reveals that such distance transmutes vulnerability into a collective gratitude that space cannot erode.⁴ Suspended in liminal space with the collective consciousness that "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone", the narration's illustration of collectivity coalesces the crew into a unified psychological entity, revealing how the isolating sublimity of the void forges an interdependence where reverence emerges from shared witness. That shared observation frays as the fragmented "trail of gunpowder" reflecting their temporal distortion projects a "milky cover" obscuring their "siphoning eye", draining the astronauts and cosmonauts of perspectives that dissipate before the overwhelming magnitude of space's boundless immensity. 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", recasting the aesthetic gaze as an act of gratitude. Thereby, the shifting perspective articulates the duality between wonder and burden as her readership alongside the crew experience Earth's Anthropocene transformation while remaining helpless to protect the human existence flourishing below. This shared witness narrows into an intimate reverence when Chie's grief exposes the stark fragility of mortal attachments.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁷, Harvey captures the introspective weight of individual grief that invites readers to childishly echo the mantra in their own minds, establishing mortality as a condition to be valued. 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 mortal existence turning exposure into gratitude. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as the imagery illuminates "the chapel['s]" sanctified nature, whereby the collective preservation of kinship transcends the "piddling speck" of our existence into a celebration of generational shelter. Within these trials of distance, Harvey affirms gratitude as the enduring response to our delicate existence. Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as an isolating confrontation with the void, yet reveals that such distance translates vulnerability into a collective gratitude that space cannot erode.⁸