Eco-Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Planetary Vulnerability in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023)

This article examines Samantha Harvey’s Orbital as a literary response to the ethical and temporal pressures of the Anthropocene, because the novel moves beyond the Cold War tradition that framed space as a site of conquest and mastery. Instead, it presents orbit as a condition defined by exposure, dependence, and shared vulnerability. The article argues that Orbital dismantles three central structures of modern political thought, which are territorial space, bodily autonomy, and linear historical time. Through the visual erasure of borders, Earth is presented as a continuous planetary system that exceeds the logic of the nation state. Inside the International Space Station, closed loop life support systems blur the distinction between waste and sustenance, and this condition reveals biological individuality as increasingly untenable. At the same time, the accelerated rhythm of orbital motion disrupts the twenty four hour day and weakens the progressive narrative on which national history depends. The novel ultimately proposes an ethic of planetary responsibility, because survival is shown to depend on recognizing shared atmospheres, shared waters, and shared temporalities, and within this framework citizenship is no longer grounded in territory but in ecological interdependence.