Harvey uses the perspective of orbit to challenge human arrogance.' To what extent do you agree?

Published in 2023, Samantha Harvey's novel Orbital surveys a planet scarred by the Anthropocene from the vantage point of the International Space Station, using this distance to interrogate human assumptions of cosmic supremacy.¹ While Harvey largely exposes humanity's grandiosity as a frail illusion against the overwhelming vastness of space, the author reveals that dismantling this arrogance cultivates a deep sense of earthly guardianship rather than nihilistic despair.² Harvey therefore challenges her modern audience to abandon their illusions of dominance, urging contemporary readers to locate wonder and worth in their fragile interdependence instead of seeking mastery over the universe.³

Harvey initially deploys the isolating vantage point of orbit to dismantle human hubris, exposing the fallacy of earthly dominance against the indifferent magnitude of the void.⁴ Suspended in liminal space between connection and separation, the portrayal of the crew's shared consciousness as "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone" recasts isolation as a confrontation with human frailty, dismantling grandiosity to forge interdependence. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder" reflecting temporal distortion that projects a "milky cover" obscuring their "siphoning eye", the roving third-person narration drains the astronauts and cosmonauts of perspective that dissipates into smoke consumed by an immensity heedless of earthly ego. 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", translating helpless observation into a quiet refusal of supremacy. In doing so, the novel articulates the duality between beauty and burden as Harvey's readership alongside the crew experiences Earth's Anthropocene transformation while remaining helpless to protect the fragile existence flourishing below. This exposure of earthly helplessness narrows into private vulnerability when Chie's bereavement exposes the limits of mortal endurance.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant "mother mother mother mother"⁷, the author captures the introspective weight of individual grief that invites readers to childishly echo the mantra in their own minds, rendering human assumptions of centrality hollow before the stark reality of loss. Yet, the discernment of 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, an earthly microcosm where arrogance dissolves into communion. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" residing from the typhoon magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as the visual imagery illuminates "the chapel['s]" sanctified nature whereby the collective preservation of kinship outlasts the "piddling speck" of our assumed dominion. Through this dismantling of cosmic centrality and the weight of personal loss, Harvey establishes that human dominance is an illusion. Harvey initially deploys the isolating vantage point of orbit to dismantle human hubris, exposing the fallacy of earthly dominance against the indifferent magnitude of the void.⁸