Samantha Harvey | Orbital
Recorded: Fri 25 Apr 2025
Duration: 1 hr
Samantha Harvey | Orbital
Spring 2025
Samantha Harvey talks about her Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital? This beautiful uplifting book follows a team of astronauts in the International Space Station as they circle the Earth in all its spectacular beauty and begin to ask, ‘What is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?’
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from Earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?
In conversation with Alex Clark
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