Sensuous Earth-Reeling in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital
from Part III - Applications
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2026
This chapter discusses Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, which focuses on domesticity and labor aboard a space station during a twenty-four-hour period of circling the earth. It argues that Harvey builds the novel through a focus on four intertwined forms of labor: natural science experiments, space station maintenance, interpersonal talismanic-memorial labor, and the aesthetic-affective-emotional labor of metabolizing human-planet relationality. To focus on this last form of labor, the chapter examines Harvey’s use of myriad formal strategies that call attention to themselves as mediating technologies for encountering the earth’s surface. Furthermore, it highlights the novel’s primary socioecological affects: awe, anxiety, disgust, love, nostalgia, and precarity. To situate the assessment of how Harvey produces planet-scale affect, the chapter considers the overlap and divergence of the concepts planet, planetary, and planetarity. Ultimately, it argues that Harvey productively pressures the more conventional and anthropocentric concerns in the novel with her forceful centering of the earth as an object worthy of non-anthropocentric attention.
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