Orbital suggests that human life is fleeting, but not meaningless.' Discuss.

Published in 2023 against the accelerating climate crisis of the Anthropocene, Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital surveys the earth from space, interrogating whether the fleeting span of mortal existence renders human life inherently meaningless against the overwhelming scale of cosmic time.¹ While the void initially appears to eclipse human brevity by reducing life to a momentary anomaly within a vast universe, the novel ultimately reveals that this very transience imbues existence with a concentrated purpose that deep time cannot replicate.² Harvey therefore challenges her contemporary audience to abandon the illusion of permanence, urging readers to recognise that human brevity constitutes a reason to cherish our momentary presence rather than a cause for despair.³

Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as a defamiliarising confrontation with humanity's fleeting nature, yet reveals that shared witness of earth translates cosmic transience into a collective resilience.⁴ Suspended in liminal space with the collective consciousness "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone", the crew coalesces into a unified psychological entity, the isolating sublimity of the void forging an interdependence that braces the six against the apprehension of their fleeting existence. That unity frays when the fragmented "trail of gunpowder", reflecting a temporal distortion that projects a "milky cover" obscuring the "siphoning eye", drains the astronauts and cosmonauts of perspective, their gaze dissolving before an immensity that reduces mortal life to a momentary anomaly. To resist such cosmic erasure, the contemplation of Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas", its painted bystanders mirroring the crew's "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth", recasts observation as an act that anchors meaning. This ekphrastic witness embodies the duality of observation and burden, the visual art framing the Anthropocene transformation while refusing the despair that human transience might otherwise invite. Such collective steadfastness against time's passage contracts into private brevity when Chie receives the news of her mother's death, exposing the immediate weight of mortal loss.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁷, Harvey captures the introspective weight of a life abruptly ended, inviting her readership to echo the mantra and revealing how impermanence is endured rather than escaped. Yet the storm's "building magnificence", held alongside Pietro's fixation on the "particular fisherman and his family", reshapes the weather's immensity into a meditation on shared vulnerability, an earthly microcosm of life persisting despite its fragility. Hence, kinship collectively preserved becomes a sanctuary where the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" magnifies the "tethers of biological life" within "the chapel['s]" sanctified shelter, granting enduring value to the fleeting "piddling speck" of human existence. By interweaving cosmic scale with private mourning, Harvey exposes that life's brevity necessitates connection rather than stripping existence of worth. Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as a defamiliarising confrontation with humanity's fleeting nature, yet reveals that shared witness of earth transmutes cosmic transience into a collective resilience.⁸