Orbital Gaze, Earthly Wounds: Reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital as Planetary Fiction

This article examines Samantha Harvey’s Orbital as a representative work of planetary fiction. From the orbital vantage point of International Space Station (ISS), the novel presents Earth as a border-less planet and promotes an eco-cosmopolitan ethic beyond nations and species. By portraying the consequences of nuclear catastrophes and human-induced climate change, the novel also zooms in on the personal experiences of ecological refugees. Drawing on the concept of “planetarity” first proposed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and later developed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Clark, Amy Elias, Christian Moraru, among others, we observe that Orbital, through a defamiliarized narrative that views the Earth as a distant, living, and integrated planet, challenges anthropocentric thinking and reimagines human-nonhuman relations. Orbital urges us to reconsider the sense of planet in the contexts of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, and retrace the metabolic rift on Earth. We argue that this orbital vantage point functions as a unique narrative device that renders visible the planetary scale of ecological degradation, and thus demonstrates planetary fiction’s capacity to represent planetarity, envisioning our collective future and new forms of responsibility on the increasingly uninhabitable planet Earth.