In Orbital, progress and preservation are irreconcilable.' Discuss.

Written during the confinement of pandemic lockdowns, Samantha Harvey's 2023 novel Orbital traces sixteen circuits of an Earth scarred by the Anthropocene, interrogating the friction between technological progress and the urgent necessity of preservation.¹ While the novel initially concedes that the relentless march of human expansion irrevocably alters and imperils the planet, it instead reveals that the orbital vantage point transforms ambition into a mandate for guardianship, suggesting that true progress relies upon safeguarding the natural world.² Harvey therefore challenges her modern audience to abandon the hubris of unchecked mastery, urging contemporary readers to recognise that technological advancement must be reconciled with an enduring responsibility towards the fragile planet that sustains existence.³

Harvey initially presents the consequences of human progress as an isolating confrontation with the planet's peril, yet reveals that witnessing such environmental destruction fosters a collective desire to safeguard the planet that transcends detachment.⁴ Suspended in liminal space with the collective consciousness "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone", Harvey's illustration of collectivity coalesces the crew into a unified psychological entity as the isolating sublimity of the void forges interdependence as individuals yearn for a planetary stability that expansion jeopardises. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder" reflecting their temporal distortion that projects a "milky cover" obscuring their "siphoning eye", the roving third-person narration drains the astronauts and cosmonauts of their perspectives that dissipate into smoke consumed by the overwhelming magnitude of space's boundless immensity. 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" as an act of defiance. In doing so, the image articulates the duality between beauty and burden as Harvey's readership alongside the crew experience Earth's Anthropocene transformation while remaining helpless to protect the human existence flourishing below. This helpless witness of a damaged world narrows into an intimate confrontation with mortality when Chie's mourning exposes the fragile nature of preservation.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant "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. Yet, the author's 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, a microcosm of guardianship necessitated by nature's power. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" residing from the typhoon magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as the prose illuminates "the chapel['s]" sanctified nature whereby the collective safeguarding of kinship transcends the "piddling speck" of our existence into a celebration of generational shelter. Through this shared witness, Harvey establishes that the destruction wrought by progress mandates rigorous planetary preservation. Harvey initially presents the consequences of human progress as an isolating confrontation with the planet's peril, yet reveals that witnessing such environmental destruction fosters a collective desire to safeguard the planet that transcends detachment.⁸