How astronauts on the space station inspired an insomniac writer

There is no way Samantha Harvey would ever head into space. “I am so spectacularly not an astronaut,” she said the day after her novel Orbital won the Booker Prize. “I’m so unadventurous, so unaudacious, so impractical, cowardly, anxious. I would be terrible.”

Even so, Harvey has been skirting around the idea of living in space, where time, weight and distance play by different rules, since she was a teenager with pictures of astronauts on her wall. Orbital, her fifth novel, is set on the International Space Station.

Samantha Harvey poses with the trophy and her book Orbital after winning the Booker Prize last November.Credit: AP

Harvey turns 50 this year. When she won the Booker, she says, she felt “an incredibly strong sense of unburdening, that some worries I hadn’t even really known were there, about all the things that come along with an artistic career and the precariousness of it, had been lifted”. Nobody was more surprised by her win than she was: this brief but densely written account of space business, with no plot and barely any distinction between the characters, wasn’t the kind of family saga she thought judges usually liked.

It wasn’t the kind of novel she usually wrote, either. The Wilderness, her first published novel, was written from the point of view of a man with dementia; Dear Thief, her third, was written as a long letter to an estranged friend who, decades before, had seduced the narrator’s husband.

“It’s true that all my other books – spoiler alert – are written from the point of view of one character,” she says, speaking over Zoom from the remote old farmhouse where she works. “That’s always been my love as a writer, just locating myself in one person’s point of view – that isn’t my own – and really exploring it.”

Orbital demanded something different of her. She pictured it as a painting. “I did consider writing it from one of the astronaut’s points of view, and I thought, ‘no, that’s not right for this book because I don’t want it to work at a solely human scale’. I want it to have a much more panoramic, sort of acrobatic narration. And I wanted to encode in the structure of the book something of the astronauts’ experience of time, that it exploded over one day in space.” Some readers, including her American editor, demanded to know more about the astronauts’ homes, families and why they were there. “And I thought ‘I don’t want to do that’.”

‘The magic is that there they are, going at 17,500 mph around the planet whilst vacuuming or making a meal.’

Orbital, following a day in the lives of six astronauts, was written amid a heavy period of insomnia.Credit:

What she wanted to do, she says, was closer to nature writing. Her first idea was to write about the Earth. She watched the ISS feed, which showed images of the sunrise over the blue hoop of Earth seen from the ship. Perhaps, she thought, she could convey the “sheer exhilaration” of seeing that outline of the planet.

“I wanted to write about the beauty of the Earth; I wanted to write in a kind of tender, attentive, almost pastoral way about the Earth. So I started with that.” Orbital isn’t a climate change novel, she says, but she is happy for it to be read that way.

What she did not want to do, she says, was write science-fiction. There would be no aliens or other catastrophes, no computers going rogue. “Sci-fi is all very dramatic and conflict-driven and epic – and, actually, everything that happens daily on the ISS is the opposite of that. It’s all about trying to minimise conflict and minimise drama. I just wanted to write about six people who were doing the thing that they loved to do most, in harmony with one another.” Almost inadvertently, she found herself writing a kind of eulogy for the era of international co-operation that made the space station – which is due to be decommissioned after 23 years – possible at all.

It is also full of dense detail she drew from extensive reading, especially of astronauts’ memoirs. “Truth and facts are your fodder. They are the whole nutrient base of your writing,” she says. “The magic of the subject matter seemed to me to be embedded in the facts of it, that there they are, going at 17,500 miles an hour [28,000 km/h] around the planet whilst vacuuming or making a meal.” Surprisingly, she didn’t want to meet the people who wrote them. “I don’t really, when I’m writing a novel, want to talk to anyone too real. And I didn’t really want to get one person’s experience because I wouldn’t have felt I could digress from it.” Ultimately, it had to be a leap of imagination.

The question she asked herself was whether that leap was worth making. There was a time when she put the book away, convinced that nobody would be interested in what “a woman in Wiltshire” had to say about something so well documented by people who had actually done it. Some months later, after trying and failing to pursue other ideas, she read the several thousand words she had written and decided she did, in fact, have something to contribute.

Harvey will appear at the writers’ festivals in both Sydney and Melbourne in May.Credit: Matt Lincoln

Enjoyable as many astronauts’ books were, she says, “It feels like there is this big gap, which is what I think they really think, something in their hearts, something between their experience of being in space and their rather glossy presentation of it.” There was something not being said, probably because it was difficult to put into words. “And it felt like, OK, maybe there is a case for somebody like me to come in and try to supply the words based on everything I’ve found out.”

Harvey studied philosophy at university. Philosophical questions – about identity and selfhood, faith in a god and what that means to human existence, what we owe each other and how significant or insignificant we are – run through her books as streams of thought, sometimes pooling into digressions. She has no religious faith herself – “there’s something in me that is always arguing with it” – but many of her characters do. “There’s something in that state of submitting yourself to something larger, the trust in something larger, that I find seductive,” she says. In a secular world, she believes it is the job of novels, like philosophy, to focus our attention on big ideas. They aren’t about storytelling. “You can tell a story in two minutes.”

If she does have a faith, she thinks it could be her belief in writing. “I find, when I’m writing, that I can entrust myself to something bigger than me that I don’t really understand and can’t control,” she says. “I trust the process.” That process has been refashioned, however, by persistent insomnia. It has changed her writing, she says; she now writes in short, urgent bursts. “I think the softening of the mind that sleep brings just isn’t there, so everything is rather humming and sharp and focused. And you’ve got to get things done in the time that you have before you just feel knackered.”

She sleeps better these days but finds she still attacks writing – and sculpture, which she has been studying for the past few years – in this fast, furious way. She also thinks it has changed her flow of ideas, away from troubled individuals towards the universal. “And I’m sure this idea of exploded time, the continuity of day and night as you’re kind of circling the planet at great speed, is connected to the continuity of time when you’re awake all night.”

So is a kind of heightened feeling, which she has compared to being in love. “Since having had insomnia there is a great desire in me to write about beauty and rapture and happiness for some reason,” she says. “Everything is so dire. There’s so much pain and so much suffering and I have this opportunity in my writing to go somewhere else.” That’s what her next book will do, she says. She just has to find time to write it.

Samantha Harvey will appear at Margaret River Readers & Writers Festival from May 2-4; Melbourne Writers Festival from May 8-11, and Sydney Writers’ Festival from May 19-27.

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