‘The more society becomes secular, the more we lose our nature to ask questions’: Samantha Harvey | Lifestyle News

One of the best things about Orbital is that in times of hyper-connectivity, it cuts through the white noise and focuses it inward. How much was it by design?

I think it was on my mind because it’s partly personal. I have, as I’ve gotten older, a great aversion to noise, and I find the modern world incredibly noisy and sometimes downright abrasive. There is, of course, real noise, but also noise, as you describe it, in the form of mental chatter and clutter. A large part of me resorted to escapism while writing this novel. I know the International Space Station (ISS), for example, is not a quiet place. Maybe I went crazy there too. Although the astronauts (in the novel) are traveling at 17,500 miles per hour, they are floating—there is a sense of being suspended, of going nowhere. I find it very interesting, the slowing down of the body, the way it can’t move as fast in microgravity. I wanted the book to kind of slow down time. I found this quiet moment inside the hurtling spacecraft interesting, this paradox, this way of writing without drama or conflict, or at least trying to create drama without conflict. So, spending a peaceful day on a space station where everyone gets along and is more or less happy and nothing goes wrong is, to me, an attractive prospect for a novel.

Does your fascination with space go too far?

When I was a kid I wasn’t always interested in space in the sense of closely following all the shuttle missions and having space posters on my wall, although I clearly remember the Challenger disaster (January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger). exploded seconds into flight, killing all crew members). We had a big demonstration about missions in our classroom and the disaster affected almost everyone in my generation in some way. So there were moments that made me aware of what was going on in space travel, but it wasn’t a deep interest. My interest has been more in the experience of astronauts when they return to Earth, and what they say about their perspective from space. And then later, as images became more readily available and the Internet became a thing, the beauty, the level of visual beauty, arrested me. This has been the case for many years and therein lies the origin of Orbital. It’s more about imagery, about the idea of ​​painting with words, it’s more about Earth than about space, although the more I researched about the ISS and the issues surrounding space exploration, the more interested I became.

Space exploration has always been a contentious geopolitical race. Now, thanks to tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, it too is entering the realm of personalization. How does the vision of tranquility you portray in the novel respond to this commercialization?

I worry about it. It is not that I am against space exploration. We are intrinsically curious. We want to discover new things, and that’s part of what’s beautiful about us as a species. But we have an opportunity with the future of space travel to do things differently, to achieve a new paradigm, to work in a more sensitive, less exploitative, more democratic and responsible way. And we don’t do that. We will repeat every mistake we made on earth. We have not stopped to think about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and its problems. Low Earth orbit is no longer old. Another reach is the wilderness we still have left and I worry that the ambitions of men like Elon Musk, aided by politicians like (Donald) Trump, will once again end up as white men grabbing the land. It’s dressed up as something beautiful and inclusive, but it’s not. It will support a very small number of very rich people and it will not benefit the rest of humanity. I feel disappointed in this.

It brings to mind a picture of the pristine beauty of the Earth from above and then a close-up of the devastation of the climate crisis below.

We seem to be heading towards climate apocalypse – mitigation efforts at global summits like COP29 are weakening. How are you involved in its politics?

I think climate change is the single biggest problem that faces us as a species, and we don’t seem to be able to understand it, maybe because it’s so big and it’s so existential. I feel frustrated by our lack of conflict. But I don’t want to use the novel as a platform to air those frustrations. I don’t want it to be an angry novel, not because I don’t think those reactions are valid but because I want to make it as visual a novel as possible. I wanted to do what a picture can do, or even a piece of music – to show you something without judgment, and to allow you, as the reader, to decide for yourself. Of course, if you’re going to show people our planet from space in very intricate detail, what you’re showing them is the impact of climate change. And I don’t want to shy away from it. I wanted to be a part of that scene. But this is not a book that wants to be whined about.

It just wants to look for a moment and present a particular perspective, and make the reader do what he wants. I think it’s hard to write politically or write with an agenda in a novel and do that well. If I get angry about something, nonfiction is the way I do it.

You speak of Orbitalas as a function of observation. How much of this ability to see the world from afar comes from your training in philosophy?

This is a really interesting as well as very difficult question to answer. I abandoned academic philosophy a long time ago, so my knowledge of the details is pretty rusty now. But I did a PhD in writing and my topic was how to write a philosophical story – how can you put controversial philosophical ideas into a novel and have it work, or, does it compromise the novel and does the novel compromise philosophy.

My conclusion was that it was almost impossible to put real philosophy into a novel. A novel is something in itself. So, what I have taken from my love of philosophy is a stance, about distance and focus. It is about the type of attention that you should give to ideas. That degree of alertness and openness is what I’ve always wanted to bring to my writing and ideas in my prose: to look and see and be willing to look at ideas from every point of view. The Las Meninaspanting (1656, by Diego Velázquez) that I wrote in Orbital is, in fact, a link to my study of philosophy. I remember when I was an undergraduate, in our first or second term, one of the lectures was on that painting. I was thrilled to see it and fell in love with the fact that it is an unsolved puzzle about perspective. When the painting came into this book, at first I thought it had no place and then I started to see that it was a metaphor for the book, the basis for what I was trying to do. I think my philosophical background permeates everything I do with my writing, but not in terms of presenting actual philosophical ideas. It’s more about the nature of meditation and wanting to see things from many different perspectives.

You mentioned the difference between genres and themes. How do you make that call, especially since the themes you write about often rely on the exploration of time?

By appearance, I am, in my bones and marrow, a novelist. So, although I write non-fiction and I occasionally write essays and like to write poetry, I’m actually a novelist. That said, my last book (The Shapeless Ones, 2020) was non-fiction. It was about my experience of insomnia and I think that in many ways, Orbital is more similar to that book than to my other novels. When I wrote The Shapeless Unease, I had no design or plan for it. I just started writing in sleep-deprived states and what I wrote was completely spontaneous and the paragraphs came out as they demanded. Sometimes it means written in the first person, sometimes it means the second or third person; Sometimes this means writing something like an essay, or a spoof case study; Sometimes it was more poetic, sometimes, just a murmur. So, I was very interested in the process of throwing different voices and forms into one book. There was something of that freedom and spontaneity that I wanted to transfer to my next novel. So I tried to orbit some of that and let the book go where it wanted to go.

Orbital cover.

Time is probably the most fascinating thing about writing for me, the way we can picture it in all its strangeness and how it passes in strange ways, but also time as a kind of energy that’s moving through the story—just as you can use time in a novel, how much time does your novel have? Covered, I love playing with that. So expanding time in some sections and compressing it in others and making that expansion and compression form energy in the story, these are things that really interest me. With Orbital, I struggled a lot with the time frame because the book wasn’t always set in one day. A 24-hour period was opened only after it was realized that it should be just one day and should be organized in terms of 16 classes. So, a sense of time in all its narrative applications is really fundamental to me.

What about faith? That has been a major theme in your work…

I have no religious beliefs myself. I do, and this may sound like a silly thing to say, like it. I have always envied people who have religious beliefs and are able to live by them, but I have never been able to myself.

I have tried. I’m not at all cynical about faith, whatever one’s faith is, because I think we all believe in something, whether it’s in a god or a religious system or money or writing. I think religious faith, at its best, gives a person a vision to live by, allowing us to ask questions about the world that we wouldn’t otherwise ask. It is a kind of brother or sister to philosophy. At its worst, it can shut down those questions and that’s a shame. But I know many people who have religious beliefs and are constantly questioned by other non-religious people. It’s a beautiful thing, and I think the downside of it, the more secular society becomes, the more we lose our nature to question things, to keep questioning our values ​​and ourselves and our own position in the world.