"It can't possibly be real. Forget all you know." 'In Orbital, space renders the familiar strange.' Discuss.

Published in 2023 and set against the accelerating climate crisis of the Anthropocene, Samantha Harvey's Orbital examines how the unprecedented vantage point of low Earth orbit estranges the crew from terrestrial reality, rendering the familiar planet strange.¹ While the novel initially frames this defamiliarisation as a disorienting severance from earthly norms, it reveals that such distance dismantles habitual perception, transforming foreignness into a renewed recognition of the planet's intricate vulnerability.² Harvey therefore challenges her twenty-first-century readership to abandon complacent assumptions, urging contemporary readers to embrace this strange perspective as a means of bearing witness to a fragile world anew.³

Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as an alienating confrontation with cosmic scale, yet reveals that this strange vantage point dismantles human assumptions to expose the fragile reality of the familiar planet.⁴ Suspended in liminal space with the collective consciousness "they are so together"⁵ yet "so alone", the novel's illustration of collectivity coalesces the crew into a unified psychological entity, revealing how the isolating sublimity of the void renders human interdependence strange and newly perceptible. Centring on the fragmented "trail of gunpowder", its "milky cover" obscuring the "siphoning eye", the roving third-person narration drains the astronauts and cosmonauts of their habitual perspectives, their terrestrial assumptions dissipating into smoke before an estranging immensity. To resist such disorientation, the image of Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas", its bystanders mirroring the crew's "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth", recasts familiar observation into an estranged vigilance. This shared witness embodies the duality of beauty and burden, the crew alongside Harvey's readership confronting Earth's strange Anthropocene transformation while recognising the fragility of the familiar existence flourishing below. This defamiliarised witness narrows into acute estrangement when Chie's mourning exposes the disorienting gap between orbital distance and terrestrial suffering.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁷, the novel captures the introspective weight of private mourning, rendering the familiar experience of loss strange through absolute physical detachment. Against this, the storm's "building magnificence", held alongside Pietro's fixation on the "particular fisherman and his family", transforms the typhoon's immensity into a strange microcosm of shared vulnerability. Hence the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" magnifies the "tethers of biological life", the author illuminating "the chapel['s]" sanctified nature to reveal that rendering the familiar world strange actually clarifies the preciousness of human shelter. Through this disorienting detachment from the terrestrial world, Harvey establishes that estrangement powerfully dismantles human complacency. Harvey initially presents the orbital perspective as an alienating confrontation with cosmic scale, yet reveals that this strange vantage point dismantles human assumptions to expose the fragile reality of the familiar planet.⁸