Harvey portrays technology as both sustaining humanity and exposing its fragility.' Discuss.

Written amidst the accelerating climate crisis of the Anthropocene, Samantha Harvey's 2023 novel Orbital surveys the International Space Station as it nears decommission, interrogating how mechanical reliance exposes human fragility against the vastness of the cosmos.¹ While the novel initially concedes that the void severs earthly bonds through an isolating exposure of mortal limitations, it instead reveals that the very technologies sustaining orbital life intensify humanity's enduring interdependence.² Harvey therefore challenges her twenty-first-century readership to abandon the illusion of absolute mastery over nature, urging contemporary readers to embrace humanity's precarious technological existence as a source of shared resilience.³

Harvey initially presents the indifference of the cosmos as an isolating confrontation with human vulnerability, yet reveals that the mechanical vantage point of orbit fashions such exposure into a collective resilience.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, forging an interdependence that fortifies the six against their precarious reality. 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 perspective, exposing the limitations of human machinery before space's boundless immensity. Defying this cosmic erasure, readers bear witness to Shaun's "postcard of Las Meninas", its bystanders mirroring the crew's "privileged anxious view" of "mother Earth", turning the mechanical act of watching into an acknowledgement of shared defencelessness. This confrontation with precarious limits narrows into a starkly intimate form when Chie's terrestrial bereavement exposes the fragile boundaries of orbital shelter.⁶ Through Chie's anguished chant of "mother mother mother mother"⁷, the author captures the introspective weight of private mourning that invites readers to childishly echo the mantra in their own minds, revealing how physical distance intensifies emotional exposure. Yet, Harvey'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 unprotected life, a microcosm of terrestrial fragility stripped of engineered shielding. Hence, the oxymoronic enchantment of an "unearthly watery light" residing from the typhoon magnifies the "tethers of biological life" as the imagery illuminates "the chapel['s]" sanctified nature, revealing that kinship outlasts the vulnerable "piddling speck" of human existence. Through these intertwined moments, Harvey reveals that technological elevation plainly accentuates human fragility within the cosmos. Harvey initially presents the indifference of the cosmos as an isolating confrontation with human vulnerability, yet reveals that the mechanical vantage point of orbit reshapes such exposure into a collective resilience.⁸