‘From space you have the feeling that the Earth is all we have’: Booker winner | India News – Times of India

Our lives here are unspeakably trivial and momentous at the same time, he seems about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter a lot, and not at all.”
This is how one of the lines goes in Samantha Harvey‘S Booker Prize winning novel “Orbital,” a fictional story about six astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) that is imbued with hope and wonder for our home planet, along with solemn views on conflict and human-led struggles for power. Speaking to Jaya Bhattacharji Rose for the TOI Bookmark podcast, the British author spoke about the process of stringing together the prose, which almost seems like an ode to life on earth.
“If you look at the Earth from low Earth orbit, you can’t see the whole Earth. You can only see one side of it. You can see the atmosphere and the stars… There seems to be a kind of tenderness somehow in the view of it from low Earth orbit. There is a sense that this is our home, this is all we have, that it is real and it is something that needs to be protected,” Harvey said.
The writer, who has previously been shortlisted for the James State Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize, also highlighted the research done to add the visual details about the Earth as seen by the astronauts. From following immersive live transits of Earth through the ISS to pouring over images captured by lunar astronauts, all were essential to building a fictional world that almost resembles a painting. Bringing together different aspects of science and engineering, including astronomy and physics, wasn’t easy, Harvey admitted, adding that she started to feel confident when the process of “alchemizing” them all into prose began.
Was it disorienting to juggle these images and then return to the physical reality of her surroundings? In response to the question, Harvey emphasized the symbiotic link between the two. “You look at these images for hours and then you look out your window at the garden and it’s a strange jolt of reality… it seems like the continents themselves are gardens,” she said. Interestingly enough, Harvey doesn’t have any social media accounts and has admitted in the past that she doesn’t have a cell phone either.
Harvey, a student of philosophy, has often drawn from her field to consider questions about human existence – both large and small – in her fiction. Her debut novel, ‘The Wilderness’, is written from the perspective of a man struggling to hold on to his personal memories as Alzheimer’s disease takes over, while her second novel, ‘All Is Song’, explores themes of moral and childish nature treats. duty, and about the choice between questioning and conforming. ‘Orbital’, on the other hand, tackles themes of how tiny human-induced conflicts can figure into the bigger picture, albeit from a perspective miles away. One of the discoveries that fascinated her most, the author said, was the existence of a well-lit border between India and Pakistan, one of the few visible from space at night.
“During the day you see no boundaries at all, except the natural boundaries of land and sea. But at night the border between these two countries is visible. Even then, the filigree of those lights is delicate and seems so innocuous… That is the kindness of the planet. It is quite difficult to reconcile the knowledge of the conflict with the fact of what you see.”