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Welcome to the third season of the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Quick housekeeping. In the show notes, you will find a link to send us a voice note, should you feel the urge.

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Our guest today is Samantha Harvey, who is a British novelist and a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spar University. Her PhD centered on writing philosophical fiction. She has published five novels and a work of non-fiction. And her work has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize, the James Tate Black Award, and the Walter Scott Prize.

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Her debut, The Wilderness, was narrated from inside the mind of a man with Alzheimer's and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her nonfiction book, The Shapeless Unease, is an account of a year of severe insomnia exploring how prolonged sleeplessness changes the way you think, write, and experience time.

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Her most recent novel, Orbital, was published in 2023 and won the 2024 Booker Prize, one of the shortest novels ever to do so. Harvey wrote much of it during COVID lockdowns, watching live footage from the ISS.

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Her work consistently returns to questions of consciousness, perception, and attention. How we experience time, place, and the limits of what the human mind can hold. We talk about what is reading.

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Can we still pay attention?

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A love letter to planet Earth.

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The value of new media.

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How she got 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets into one day.

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It's the reader who finishes the novel.

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The humbling impact of the overview effect.

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How to be an intrepid explorer but from your desk. Let's go into over it.

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Hi, this is Omida Stari.

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And Natasha McElhone. And with us today we have Samantha Harvey.

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Hey Sam, how are you?

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Hi, I'm good.

SPEAKER_04 2:11

How are you?

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Good, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Thanks for taking the time. Thank you so much so much for joining us. Yes. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 2:16

It's a pleasure. It's my pleasure.

What Reading Really Means

SPEAKER_02 2:18

We know that you won the Booker last year for Orbital and that you have been on a world tour talking about that experience. We wanted to just scroll back a little bit to a fundamental question before we get into books and your books and reading and literacy rates falling and all the other sorts of scaremongering that we've been reading in the press recently. And ask you, what is reading?

SPEAKER_05 2:46

Well, I think that we try to think about it in too kind of narrow a way often. Even when we're thinking in particular about reading novels, you know, I think that we'd read different novels in different ways, depending on what they what they give us. You know, we read them primarily for for plot and for the question of what next, or we read them for language and the question of how and why and so on. So I mean reading is it's life, it's everything. It's hard to imagine life without it. But for me, reading novels is the kind of the spine of my life. It's always been, you know, since I was a child, it's I I'm never not reading something. Um I'm never not reading a novel more specifically. Even if I'm reading nonfiction, I always have to have a novel on the go. It feels impossible to me to close that door, that that extra virtual space that a novel opens up. Um for me, it's absolutely central and and it is not replaced by reading nonfiction or reading news or reading Substack or all of those things I think have their place too, absolutely, but um it's a different thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:59

You just mentioned opening up a virtual space. Dig into that for us.

SPEAKER_05 4:06

Well you know, thinking about the difference between reading news, say, on or non-fiction, something that is there's all sorts of very stylized and and beautiful non-fiction, but but let's just say non-fiction that is more freighted with uh information, its purpose is to to provide information. That all feels to me like there's an a narrow function to that, which is fine, and that it's it's needed. But if you had if you take a sentence like um on Wall Street, the dollar fell by five cents or something. I mean, I don't know why I don't know I've chosen that. I don't know anything about Wall Street, but um let's say probably has let's say it probably has. Let's say you read that sentence in in the newspaper, and it's you know, it's just a del you know, it's delivering information. If you then were to amend that sentence and say um on Wall Street, the dollar fell by five cents, she thought, suddenly it's a very different sentence. It's it's no longer just a sort of a corridor along which information is carried. It's rooms have started to open up on the sides of it. Who is she? Where is she? Why is she thinking it? If you then change the sentence a little bit more and you say on Wall Street the dollar has has gone down by five cents, she thought and looked across at her husband who was at the far end of the table in tears.

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Suddenly multiple doors have opened up.

SPEAKER_05 5:54

You know, all of this space has just been created out of almost nothing, just a few words. But you are now in this very spacious place with lots of different rooms branching off it. And I think that's what fiction is, that's what it does. It it opens up the possibility of other consciousnesses, other spaces, other ideas, and and not just the ones that the author provides by telling you information, but the ones that are opened up in your own psyche through your own memories and the memory of someone that you know who's sat at the table once crying, you know, and and it's and so that there's now all those other rooms or that other virtual space that has opened up. For me, that's that's how I visualize fiction. It's just these of multiple, countless rooms that you walk through from you know, one to the other, and you never really know what's in the next room or how many rooms there are, but it's space in the life that can sometimes feel rather breathless and and full and stressful and and distracted, suddenly you're in this um in something quite palatial, you know, that that is that is only limited by your own imagination. And I I find that a very beguiling and wonderful thing.

Fiction Creates A Mental World

SPEAKER_02 7:13

I think I experience it quite similarly, um in the sense that sometimes if I wake up in the morning, if I have slept similar to you, I have big bouts of insomnia. But um the excitement when I have experienced a dream, so I must have been asleep. It's it's a little bit like having been in a book. Not necessarily a great novel, it's not necessarily elevated or anything. But the the the space, uh the psychic sort of so I guess it's the subconscious, isn't it? And that's where I certainly go with great writers and and yourself included. I think I don't know whether it was you that said it, you probably didn't, because you seem to be very modest in all your interviews, but someone said it about you in that case, which was that you demand of the reader, you know, you're confronting in the sense that you demand their attention. Um and I think that's partly why we wanted to drill into what reading is now, because really it's requiring um attention and being still, I suppose, and being in one place for long enough to traverse into someone else's psyche, to be interested enough to get out of your own head and into someone else's, right? So much of the reading that people claim we are doing, and we can go into that and maybe it's boring to quote figures and things, but we are reading more than we've ever read before, is the argument. However, not in the way that you've just described.

SPEAKER_05 8:41

Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot to that, and I think the I the the the analogy of of dreaming and and reading and writing, I think is is very apt for me. That feels more and more apt as I as I go through my writing and reading life. You know, I I feel that when I write and also when I read and probably in in slightly different ways, dream-like spaces open up. And I think that that is where novels and fiction, maybe more broadly, you know, maybe short stories to invite, ask for attention in a way that nothing else does quite. I was um interrogating my partner last night, um, as I as I do just when he wants to go to sleep. I I decide that it's time to start up a quite involved conversation about something which he loves. Um and I was asking him ahead of this you know this chat today why he stopped reading, because he used to read novels a lot and he doesn't anymore. And he said it's just that he doesn't have he has to concentrate to read a novel. And he said if he didn't, if he were working or when he's retired, he's looking forward to it uh, you know, reigniting his his novel reading career, but for him it takes work. Um, the the act of attention and of imagination takes work in a way it doesn't quite for me, but that's because my brain works differently. I think that they do ask of us something that isn't asked for in other reading arenas, but but they also offer us something, that that spellbinding, I think. The 10 hours of being spellbound in the best case scenario. I mean, not all novels are spellbinding, but if it's a great novel, then it will have you enraptured, it will it will hold you in this dream space. And I think that's what you want as a as a writer to arrest your reader, to to take them up in the spell and not let them down and not make them want to leave.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

All that resonates a lot with me, and I I've always been thinking about it in a less lyrical way, because that's how my brain works. I mean, it's all text, but obviously not all text trains the mind the same way, right? And I think that's what you were already saying earlier with the news and nonfiction example. What happens when you interrogate it, at least when I think about it, is um there are four steps basically that you can go through when you're reading. The first one is decoding, and that is like I just see what the word is on the page, and I decoded that the word means something. Then it's extracting, and that is like extracting the context of this specific sentence that I just read, then it's connecting, and that means I have to connect now this sentence with this other sentence, right? And the final step, and I think that's the hardest, and that's actually the thing that doesn't happen with most uh nonfiction or like shorter form work, is you have to integrate it. So you're creating a model of this world in which you know there are these sentences and these connections between people, and like you have to have an active imagination, you're creating a space as you as you refer to it, and I think that's uh a lot of cognitive load, right? And so if you compare that to the light touch of a tweet that is two sentences long, where you just extract and connect maybe the two sentences together, like you don't need to integrate that into a world model that you have about the world or how everything and you can have can contradicting ideas at the same time as well, because you're not integrating it. And like you can like one tweet and the other one is a polar opposite, but it sounds good, and because the sentences connect well, you buy into it. So it's uh I I totally agree with you, it's a lot more work, actually. And I therefore will kind of relate to your husband very much so that that you know, reading if you're doing a lot of the shallow reading throughout the day and it's a lot of work, it's very hard to also do the deep reading. Uh um, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 12:43

Yeah, and and I I I think it's sort of, you know, there's a lot going on at the moment because of the year of reading of people, often writers, talking about the benefits of writing and and so on. And I I think there's a danger to that because for a start, we would say that, wouldn't we? I mean, we're writers, so of course. Um not not just that we have a kind of vested interest in the subject, but that we are wired to enjoy reading and and that and therefore writing and um uh and we're and we're sort of wired to find it a little bit less laborious, you know, to for that integration that you that you talked about to to feel quite natural and to come quite easily. It doesn't come easily for everybody. And I I think that if we talk too much about how reading is some in some sense um good for us, we're gonna be really uh short-selling it because I don't read because it's good for me. I just read because I love to read. And I and I think that that's the key is to get get kids to love to read. And some kids won't, and that's that's also fine.

Deep Attention Versus Shallow Scrolling

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Just for our listeners who aren't in England, uh in England this year has been declared as the National Year of Reading to 2026 is a government initiative to to try and um bring it to the forefront. But there's a couple of things I wanted to uh respond to and and also ask. The space that you talk about that's sometimes difficult to get to, the integrating part. I think you've said it and also maybe even written about it, that your books aren't necessarily finished by you, they're finished by the reader. The intimate nature of reading a book, if if if it's a good and absorbing book, and you're going on this journey, the story that someone else has told to tell, so you're sort of suspended for a moment, your own life. Yet it also helps you process your own life at the same time. I guess there is a therapeutic element to it, uh to all storytelling, but that that intimacy, that companionship or co-collaboration, whatever you want to call it, I can't help thinking that this uh recently spoken about isolation that people feel since the advent of social media, and yes, it's immediate, yes, we get responded to instantly, yes, we can write all day long and read things all day long, but there's something very different about there's an author you're never even gonna meet, and yet you feel so close to that person. But um the thing about non-readers and readers, and I've really struggled to get all my kids to read at various times, is that I think you're right. You don't want to come across as in any way superior or sort of, oh, this is good for you, or you know, this is like having vegetables. It it's it's actually a way of connecting and linking, unlike any other. And I don't think it even matters the kind of books that you read, does it? I don't know if it does. Uh it's whatever appeals to you. But that to me is is what I I feel this national reading year should should be about, is whether it's comics, whether it's just just that that hinterland that you get to dance in and play in in your own imagination, and then maybe write something afterwards yourself. It sort of promotes creativity, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_05 16:00

No, I I I couldn't agree more. And I and I think we shouldn't be prescriptive about what people should read or or that people should read for for that matter. You know, read if you read if you want to, and then the aim is to make more people want to, or invite more kids to want to. I think that's the that's the key. But we are living in a time at one level of being very blessed by the the sheer volume of reading material out there. And and a lot of it is very good quality. I mean, okay, social media is generally not, and it's a very degraded form of of reading and of writing, but but you know, Substack, there's some wonderful stuff on Substack, and a lot of the new platforms I think are offer opportunity. I think we we should embrace them all that people like to read differently, they like to read in different ways. My my niece, to my horror, reads um novels on her phone, but she reads not not published novels, but novels that are just written by whoever, and she reads them chapter by chapter, and this is the way she loves to read. And I you know, I I sort of think that what pad I don't actually know what she uses, I must say, but she but this is exciting and interesting to her and great. Um, much as I cannot imagine doing that myself, great. She's reading, it's it's wonderful. And um I don't think we can be prescriptive about this, and certainly not about novels. I mean, some of the I don't read that much nonfiction, but when you read brilliant nonfiction, my God, it it does have that effect that you were speaking about just now, Natasha, of the the almost therapeutic or the sense of it it living, the book living in inside you. Um I remember reading many 15 years ago or so reading Waterlog by Roger Deacon about his um his year or so of swimming around the UK in uh you know, in in lakes and rivers and mountain pools. And I I was so moved by it, and I think it changed my life, but I'm not really sure how. And um I went online and I thought I'm gonna write to him. I have to write to him. He's he's reached into me in some way, you know. That book has reached into me. And when I went online to try to find out how to contact him, I I realized he had died that that week while while I'd been reading the book. I felt devastated, you know, really devastated. I think books are they can just be so powerful. Whatever whatever it is you're reading and the moment at at which they catch you in your life, you know, they they are the most powerful thing. And I I think if we can get kids reading at a younger age again. You know, because we all started reading when we were kids, presumably, you know, that that's where it begins. Those spaces open up in you then. And I think if they don't open up in you then it's hard, it's harder to locate them later in life.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

And do you think that can be promoted through group reading? I mean, do you think that old-fashioned thing of sort of sitting around in a circle at school and being read to is the way to get traction early on? Or do you think there's a new way that we just haven't been imaginative enough around?

SPEAKER_05 19:28

I can't, I don't know that I am the right person to answer that in that I don't um know very much about what happens in primary schools with kids. I don't have kids. Um, so I probably don't have very good, fresh ideas about this, but all I can say is that I do vividly remember our circular reading mat at school and the excitement of that you know, half an hour that we had, however, often I can't remember. When we would all go and sit on the mat and just be read to. And and sometimes we would have a go at reading ourselves. You know, that was the most exciting thing. We could read out to everybody else. It was an event, it was consoling, it was um exciting. And I I I do I think that's timeless, isn't it? I mean, I just think kids respond to that.

Getting Kids To Want Books

SPEAKER_01 20:23

I want to mount a little bit of a defense of different types of media. Uh, it was uh I think this guy McLuhan in the 80s wrote this book, and I I think the name of the book was The Medium is the message. I think it was misspelled by the printer as massage, but like he kept it on the book. Uh so the medium is the message. And the point is really that every medium has its own affordances, its frictions, and and it has its own incentives. And I think they they can all be positive to an extent, and it depends on how everything is constructed, right? Um, so I think there is something to be said about like a paragraph tweet, if it's like a tweet that is, you know, constructed in the right way, and it may make you think about something that you didn't think about. And if you create the space that you're referring to that you create in a novel by yourself about this one paragraph, and like you actually have a mind that is uh attentive and creates focus and like goes into a mind palace then all of a sudden and starts imagining a world, then you can actually achieve something very similar, right? So I think these little morsels of uh imaginative things that can be thrown out now very easily are there. It has something to do with the fact that um, and I and I think it's okay to criticize social media here is that all this stuff, whether it's creating these mind palaces, and I think especially as it's true for novels, it requires sustained voluntary attention. And what these things do, by and large, is industrialize involuntary attention. Like they're basically trying to hijack it. Like the way you are you're consuming this stuff. Is very modular and it's meant to be modular, and it's I mean compulsively modular, and therefore there's no integration, and you're jumping from one module to the next module, and there's no space that you create to step back and actually say, Hey, you know what? Like this is a this is a kernel of something really interesting here, and I want to take this a little bit further. And I think it's about training that muscle, and it's about like actually giving people the tools and like making people aware of the fact that that's the exercise here. It is that's the the biceps curl of becoming a good reader and thinker uh to create that space. Um yeah, so so I think the incentives are stacked against a lot of the young people who are essentially growing up on social media because these platforms are not meant to allow them to train that muscle ultimately.

SPEAKER_02 22:44

Well, I I I guess now they are increasingly you do get Substack on Twitter and all of these other things. And actually you can scroll down and stay on point, can't you? And keep linking to the rabbit hole that you're in or the thing that fascinates you about. Um the economic incentives on those platforms are just disalysting, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:04

Like that's the problem. I think Substack is different a little bit in its economic incentives as well.

SPEAKER_02 23:10

It's something I wanted to just jump back to before we lose it about the reading mat, that I think we all have some kind of visual, whether it's the colour of the orange mat in our instance that was sustained and also. Um, and and to, you know, so that any listener who doesn't like reading, it's not a forever thing. I would use that half an hour, whatever period it was, to mess around and to distract people and to be disruptive. Okay, I didn't listen to any story, I had no idea. I cannot tell you anything that was ever read. It was just free time to be annoying. Um, and the point is now I love reading.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

You can start as a non-reader, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:53

You see, you see, the problem is plasticity, but uh the hope is also plasticity.

SPEAKER_04 23:59

The mat has many purposes, let's not narrow it down too much.

SPEAKER_03 24:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 24:05

Yeah, I'm but I I I I I agree with you, Oma, do uh very much about you know the the validity of of so many different platforms. Uh, you know, again, I I I think we're wrong to to be sniffy about these things. And I I think this it's just that it's trying to maintain that balance, isn't it, between passivity and and activity.

SPEAKER_03 24:26

And exactly.

SPEAKER_05 24:28

You know, there are times when it's incredibly active and pleasurable and um and generative to to go down these clickbaity rabbit holes online and just be amazed at what you can find. And it and it can spark all sorts of thoughts and and challenge things that you felt and and give you new information. And let's not dismiss that. I mean it's a magical thing to have, absolutely, and I do that myself, and I think I just get to call it research, and that's that's my that's my great advantage. But you know, it's it's um we have at our disposal uh this amazing world of not just information but of other people's thoughts and feelings and interpretations, and that's a great invitation, I think. You know, it's just how do we stay active in that process when when the the kind of built into the structure of them is as you say, this uh imperative to become passive.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

Should we move to orbit or do we want to um no?

SPEAKER_02 25:43

I'm I mean I'm loving this. I I can stay on the topic, I don't know. I I was just thinking about how nomic people can be. I don't have this ability, as you could probably tell, but when it's people criticize headlines and and compression, but I do think there's something and and I think even someone like Chekhov appreciated this this slough off of anything that's unnecessary. I do think that's one of the beautiful things about social media, um, or some platforms and and some people who contribute who really take massive pride in what they're putting out there and a lot of responsibility and accountability, and it's just it's great. They're not necessarily novelists. I was wondering about the editing process or about your your writing is it's so fine and it's so there's just no fat on the bone. It just feels so well honed. Do you mind me asking, how many edits do you have to do before you share it with someone, or do you share it very early on and it's rough drought? What what's your process?

Media Incentives And Active Reading

SPEAKER_05 26:49

Yeah, so my process has changed a little bit over time. I think partly because I've become more anxious about pursuing an idea that isn't going anywhere or that is ill-advised. I think when at the beginning of my career, you know, I think there were writers, I mean, generally, we were we were less worried about you know transgression in our prose and and writing about things we didn't have a right to to speak about. And I think I've become more nervous and more anxious over time about what it is I'm I can write about and what I can't, and what will what will go down and what won't. So to that end, I tend to now give my agent the first five thousand or so words of a new project in its very raw, rough state. And I just say to her, I don't need your I don't need any feedback as such. Um I just need a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And I I think because my agent and I have been together for a long time, we knew from from my whole career, um I completely trust her. So I think you need you need that element of trust. But because I do have that, and I know she would be honest, and uh I think she has a better sense of of I wouldn't say the market, but I it's not that I'm trying to write for a market, but it's just a better sense of what's uh of the sensitivities of of the market, I suppose. Um so I I totally trust her. So I I just wait for her to give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down. She's never yet given me a thumbs down, but it may happen. Um and then once I have that kind of go-ahead from her, um, then I don't show it to anybody, to her or anybody else until it's as done as I can possibly make it. I'm I'm really not after feedback in the process of writing. Partly because I'm kind of embarrassed of most of what I've written. Um, and I and I really don't want to show it to anybody until it's the best thing I can make it. And partly because of sort of looping back to something I was saying earlier about this this dream state, the spellbinding. You know, when when I'm writing, I try to get into that spellbound state. And I'm pursuing a scent, that's how it feels. I I don't have, I don't usually have a plan for a novel, but I have a scent and it's strong, and I'm trying to follow it wherever it will take me. And I don't want anyone to throw me off the scent, even if they're right. So I would then show it once once I have a draft that I'm happy with, or at least I'm unhappy with, but no longer know how to make myself happier. Um at that point, I will give it to my agent. I'll give it to a couple of trusted readers, and then I'll go from there. So and then it's it really varies from novel to novel how many drafts it needs. But for me, it usually isn't sentences that I work and and rework. I find sentences quite natural to write. I love kind of the stupidest thing I ever said, but I love writing sentences. I find I find writing novels mu much more complicated and difficult, but sentences, uh I'm I'm all good with them. Um and and I find that I tend not to meddle with the sentences themselves once they're out. I might a little bit, you know. I might think, oh, I need a two-syllable word there instead of three, or you know, the music isn't quite right. But but generally I don't do very much, you know, in redrafts with the sentences. It's much more the the kind of architectural stuff that I have to go back to and think about do I need all of these characters or do I need another character? Or structurally, is it working? That that's usually the big thing for me. Um is it propulsive enough? Is there a slack point somewhere? Those are the things that tend to come out more in the editing, both in in sort of the editing process that I go through myself before I show it to somebody, and then and then the editing with my agent and my editor.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

So how different I'm sorry. How how different um you don't have to tell us this, of course, is uh the let's say, for the sake of argument, the second draft of Orbital long before you submitted it or let anyone read it compared to the the the version that we all read?

SPEAKER_05 31:50

It's so different. Um Orbital was particularly transformed, actually, because I wrote um the first draft was in first person from one just one of the astronauts' points of view. And it took place over one month. That wasn't working. So I the second draft, I put it into third person, still from that same astronaut's point of view, but third person. I think I might have changed the tense as well. I I was lot I didn't know what to do with it. So I was I thought I'll push this button, I'll push that one, I'll see what happens. It still wasn't working. And then I sort of had to in the third draft go back to the drawing board with it and think, why isn't it working? I'm I'm identifying the wrong problem, I think, trying to solve the wrong problem. And I realized that I was trying to write a book that was something like books I've written in the past, albeit on a space station, you know, which is not really my shtick, but I I was just kind of writing a Samantha Harvey novel, but in space. And that's to say I was writing something that was from the point of view of one character, that's what I've always done. That that was very much led by that character. And I realized that it wasn't that kind of book, and that it needed to, I needed to disrupt my own process, and I needed to think totally differently and to s to get out of this one astronaut's point of view, it wasn't about her, it wasn't about any of the astronauts, in fact. It had to have a much more panoramic view, it needed a narrative that was looser and freer and was able to escape the confines of any human consciousness, let alone the six consciousnesses on board the space station. Um, and that I also needed to rethink the time scale. I mean, a month made no sense when I started to think about it. So I then realized that if I set it over one day, I could start to do a lot more things, I could start to embed in the structure a lot more of what I wanted to say about time and the um dismantling of time as experienced when you're traveling at 17 and a half thousand miles an hour. So that I could use the structure to say a lot of the things I was laboring over in the in the text. Um, and I could be narratively free of of any of the of any human consciousness. I mean, I could go, I could utilize that consciousness if I wanted to, but I I could be free of it. So that took me three or four drafts. But once I once I understood the kind of book it was, and that it should have this narrative stance, with this kind of a quite acrobatic, you know, panoramic narrative stance, um and that it should be over one day. The whole thing just shrank. I mean, it wasn't always a short book, it was you know, a normal, let you just probably 80, 90,000 words. It just halved in size and I wrote it quite quickly.

SPEAKER_03 35:00

Nice.

Harvey’s Editing And Drafting Method

SPEAKER_05 35:01

Um and it and it all just sort of went aligned in a in a very pleasing way that you kind you kind of always hope for. I mean, I still didn't know if it was right. I still had this feeling that something was was missing from it. And I I don't know what that was because I never really resolved it. Um I I always remember um listening to an interview with Kasio Ishiguro talking about the remains of the day, and he which which I think is a perfect novel. I mean, I I just think it's perfection. Um and he said when he delivered it to his his publisher, or who's about to deliver it to his publisher, and then he realized that it was missing something, and the thing it was missing was that the the butler, whose name I've I've temporarily forgotten, is in love with Miss Kenton and is going to go and see her. So this whole strand of the book, which is the the journey that he makes in you know over that one week, the exactly the structure of the book that the movie exactly there's this both the both structurally that the forward momentum in the book, which is literally a road trip, um, but also yeah, the the as you say, the emotional payoff, the yearning, the wanting something that you don't have, which kind of underpins the the book with this kind of seismic quiet sadness, you know, that wasn't there until the very last minute. And you think, wow, what a different book it would have been. And I think that it fascinated me that that for him was a uh a last minute uh revelation. And so I think that's kind of haunted me because I now feel like there ought to be this revelation that comes. Um, and I felt it with orbital. There should there must be a missing strand or a missing ingredient, um, something that will utterly transform it from a slightly odd, quiet book uh about the spacecraft orbiting the earth into something somehow uh bigger with a bigger proposition, you know. Um so I I had that anxiety.

SPEAKER_01 37:16

Personally, to be honest with you, I I feel you have that in there. Maybe I I think you're not giving yourself too much credit there. Maybe uh for for a reader. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe it's the reader. I don't know, maybe I'm adding to it. But uh first of all, I'd say maybe for the listeners that haven't read it, uh one sentence summary of the book would be great. And then secondly, I would say because we're on craft, what I would love to hear from you, and I'm sure you've answered this uh many of times, but I think the book is a great example of attention actually to detail. You're describing these land masses and structures in such beautiful details, so lyrically. And I wonder you must have become a geographer uh to a certain extent to be able to do that. What was part of the process of like actually getting to a stage that you can write about the planet Earth from above and in that level of detail? Like it requires a lot of attention to describe it so uh so beautifully.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

Did you have a globe next to you?

SPEAKER_05 38:14

I had a huge world map on my on my wall with um orbits, uh sort of I've got little post-it notes, and I tracked all the orbits that the spacecraft would be taking onto that. So um yeah, I became an in an intrepid global adventurer from my desk. Um, I mean, I did write most of it in lockdown, so I couldn't actually go anywhere, but but I uh I mean I love being intrepid from my desk. It's my favorite form of um adventure. Um to to sum up the book in a sentence, what would I say? It's uh uh a novel that takes place over one 24-hour period in a space station orbiting the earth 16 times, 16 days, 16 nights. Um, and then an attention, as you said, Omit, an attention to the earth. I think it's a book that's more about the earth than it is about space. Um for me it is. Um and it is very much an exercise in attention and if it doesn't sound too ridiculous and pretentious to say it, but kind of in devotion, as as a a really devoted attention to the earth. Um really looking at it. So that's what I did. You know, I I did all sorts of research and it was important to me to get to get things right, but the the main at the core of what I did was just looking at images and looking at maps. Uh, because of my insomnia, I one way I I helped myself get to sleep is I list I list countries, I list states, I list capital cities. You know, I so it was very helpful in that regard because I I was being exposed to this all the time. So I you know I could sort of list all the countries in the world and all the American states and and their capitals and all you know, blah blah blah.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

The analogy of counting sheep, basically, here exactly, yeah, counting countries.

SPEAKER_05 40:30

Um and and I would do that sort of very sort of was carrying the sense of the of the world map in my head all the time. Um feeling that you know, from my desk, that the the world was suddenly a very small place. Because when you're when you're looking at those images um and videos of the earth from space, you know, your the spacecraft is moving quickly. So you are traveling over India, and then all of a sudden you're in the sort of mid-Pacific, and and then before you know it, it's North America, and it starts to feel very much like these are these are just and I I say this in the book, but it felt such a apt analogy that you're just kind of these are gardens that are passing by beneath you. And yeah, it's it and it felt that the earth had just become a very intimate thing. Um, which I guess is the gift of of you know zooming out in that way. Um so yeah, that that was it it was imagery, it really imagery that that drove the novel.

SPEAKER_02 41:46

It it's funny you say about the the zooming out because even though it is one day in orbit, it felt like it contained a lifetime of thinking because people are all thinking about their own lives and going back and forward and in and out. And but but also I w when you talked about the gardens of land masses, there's um and I can't remember where I read it, but it was a writer who said the the motion of the galaxies is is like a whirl of of water flowing down our wash basins, just looking at the the sort of macro and the micro and yeah it's it's so interesting, isn't it, when you when you look at those images of the earth and and you you realize yeah, when you look at something macro, it it often does look like something micro.

SPEAKER_05 42:32

Just the way the the snow sort of uh falls on the Himalayas, you know, and it really looks like frost on a on a branch, you know. It's and and all these kind of repetitions and sort of fractals and it is uh it's so it's so fascinating, and again, it makes it feel like the universe itself is rather small, or at least it's sort of boxes within boxes within boxes, you know, just everything in repetition, everything inside everything else. So it's um, you know, it's a very obvious thing to say, but it but the idea of the the difference between the arts and the sciences is is very blurry. You know, there's there's really uh it feels it feels to me like there's sort of just the the in-breath and and the outbreath of of the same experience, really. And I think that's what I wanted to try to capture in in the book, that there really isn't this divide. No, um, they are just this different facets of the of the same way of experiencing the earth and and of life, you know.

SPEAKER_01 43:36

I I love that.

SPEAKER_02 43:37

And you managed, yeah, yeah, you managed to capture that perfectly.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

You know, a a few things that come to mind. One, um, you're describing the overview effect, right? And there's this notion of the overview effect that when you are looking at something from a vantage point, even if it's from the top of a mountain, you just have a different perception of reality and things click in a different way. And obviously, this is you know something that we will all never really experience. Experience in person, but we can imagine it. And what's so interesting about it is that you're not only describing the geography, but you're also transposing the human condition and uh our place in the space and this completely insane reality that these astronauts find themselves in, to be suspended there and like seeing the world. There's a lot of Sagan in it, I feel, that you know, came up for me personally. But like um, maybe a few thoughts of the whole notion of overview effect, Sagan, is that part of it? These are some thoughts that came to mind when I was reading it.

Building Orbital From Earth Imagery

SPEAKER_05 44:33

Yeah, I mean, I so the the overview effect in itself, you know, this idea that when afforded this this vantage point as astronauts are, you know, you you can see the entirety of the globe. I mean, not at once from the space station, it's too close, but you you get this this perspective that we we can't have uh here on Earth. Um, and that it somehow changes the way you see the planet, perhaps you know, the the the cosmos at large and and other creatures and each other. And I think this this must be true, and astronauts all uh talk about it, but I I sometimes wonder about the you know the longevity of that effect, because I think a lot of astronauts seem to come back to Earth and it you know, you'd imagine that they would all be kind of really passionate climate warriors and they're not, you know. So I think I think they it's not that they don't care, but most of them have not applied their the the rest of their working lives to that cause. I I wonder whether we are capable of sustaining that breathtaken perspective. There was a interview, I think it was in The Guardian the other day with George Saunders, and he he said something really interesting in that. I mean, he always you know he only says interesting things, but one of the many interesting things he said was that I think he was being asked about the political views and what's happening in in the world at the moment. And and he said, I'm not really that that interested in the the version of myself at the dinner table who is has lots of sure-footed views about things and is quite opinionated and and and knows what he thinks. I'm much more interested in the view that I have when I'm a novelist, when everything seems less certain and I'm a bit more confused. And I I don't know, I don't have clear and sure opinions. That is exactly how I feel when I'm writing, and I felt it very much when I was writing orbital, that in writing from that zoomed-out point of view, just you know, 250 miles above the earth, suddenly it's all of the my sureties about things were scrambled and obscured. You know, it's a very creatively useful, confused state than than I am in when I'm shouting at the radio or the TV because I have a view on something which I'm absolutely certain is right. Um, and even if it is right, where do you go from there? You know, there's something about, you know, may and maybe this is maybe the the point that I'm rambling towards is that maybe this overview effect that that is described by astronauts is a sort of novelistic effect in itself. You know, this stepping back from something and and being confused about it, seeing it from so many different points of view, in in a in a different way or a disrupted way, um, elaborating on a thought that you haven't elaborated on before that that then takes you somewhere that you're maybe uncomfortable with. I I think that's that was the condition I was in the whole time I was writing orbital, in this in this state of uh uncertainty, lack of surety about things, how terrible humans are, and how we're destroying the planet, and sort of finding in that the of course there's truth in that, but then finding this huge wells of compassion for humanity in our you know, our our bid to to survive and to to to play this crazy game of life and how it it nothing it nothing seemed as clear or as sure as as it does when I'm sitting here in my kitchen.

SPEAKER_02 48:35

You you're um I I really love what you say about the Avoufi effect because it does seem to expire quite shortly after the lived experience, however amazing that is. And that could be attributed maybe to things like I don't know, psychedelic trips or or a dream that someone has, or um these these sort of seemingly life-changing moments, or or you know, a loss, a death, a birth. And I think you're talking about that discomfort that you were in when you were writing it, and I feel that was really palpable. Um I I read your book actually, I was in the desert, strangely, in a sort of tin can in one of those airstream trailers. So it was a bit like more my closest experience to being an astronaut. Um, and it was just so I couldn't put it down, but it was so uncomfortable. And I found that with your two of your other books, which I I just really struggled with, not not because the writing wasn't spectacular, but because you're so confronting. And I have thought so much about what's it like to be the person writing that. It's it's one, you know, I'm sure it's a di more of a diluted experience being on the receiving end because I can put it down. But and just you know, the insomnia, I found it so triggering. It was so brilliantly described. And the five in the morning, you know, which things can I cancel that today, or all of those things, and the also my father died of Alzheimer's, and and it's just so accurate that oh my god, it's just so painful. It's so so painful, and it makes me realize that so much writing and entertainment generally, and I'm hugely guilty of this, you know, that where we start, life starts to imitate art rather than the other way around. I feel that you are in no way ever you've never succumbed to that. Like there's just something so pure and true. You write from this burning furnace inside you that is just must be very hard to be at that coal face for an extended period of time.

SPEAKER_01 50:31

I like to second that, and I feel that uh the book made me feel a lot. For sure. Yeah. I guess that was your whole mission. And I'd love to know what you if you had any specific feeling you wanted to elicit or generally just wanted to elicit feelings, because I I I felt a lot. I mean, I felt small, I felt connected, I felt lost, I felt in awe, I I felt so many things. And I think that's what's really beautiful about it. It it does require a lot from you, as you say.

SPEAKER_05 51:01

Well, thank you. I mean I yeah, well I did uh it's interesting. Did I want to elicit? Well, I of course I wanted to elicit a feeling in the reader. Do do I did I know what that was? I don't think so. I think um it goes back to to this confusion again in in myself when I wrote it.

SPEAKER_06 51:22

You know, I I felt all of those things you described. Um but the but I was I often try to write from a feeling and I I might not be able to name what that feeling is, but I can locate it in myself.

Overview Effect And Writing From Joy

SPEAKER_05 51:43

And I think with orbital it was something weirdly enough, for all its confronting nature and and the sort of complexity of it. I think it was quite a a pure feeling of joy, actually. I felt like I wanted to write a book that was about joy and just about the acknowledgement of uh of the improbable beauty of of the earth. Um this kind of spluttering inarticulate feeling that I then decided to try to articulate in the whole novel. Um that it was that, it was this kind of oh, you know, that on the on the cusp of breath, it was that feeling of a sort of vertiginous, suspended, breathtaking feeling. That's and and where wherever that sort of delivered me and wherever that delivers the reader, and I I I think it leaves you in lots of different places. And I I think you know, I realized after a while that what I was trying to do with the book was to sort of scatter my own gaze and scatter the reader's gaze. So we don't really know what the book is about or what it is we're being asked to think or feel, it's just a scattering, and I think that's why you know this this image of Las Meninas came back in to the book. But I I'd started writing about that early on, that the painting Las Minas, and I and I thought, well, this is nothing to do with the book, and I and I put it aside and I came back to it and thought, no, this is something to do with the book. There's something you know in the in the idea of that painting whereby we're being asked by the artist to to look at something and and to not know what it is we're looking at, and to not know what its subject is. That seems very pertinent to this book I'm trying to write. I'm trying to uh to scatter my own gaze and and my own perception of something and to see what happens. Um and it's been interesting to me in meeting a lot of readers this year, and people take from it very different things. Some people feel that it's a very consoling book, some people not at all, some people feel it's hopeful, some people feel it's very much not hopeful, some people think it's about for them, it's about grief, that you know, the loss of a parent or a loved one. Um some people find it very joyful. Uh, some people find it that it's a kind of activism, it's a you know, a call to action in terms of climate change. I am honored by all of those responses. Um and it's not that one of them feels more true to me than any other, but it's always so surprising. And it comes back to this, you know, the book is completed by the reader, you know, because all of those are true, but I don't know what I don't know what I wanted from the book. I just wrote it from a feeling, you know, really in the dark.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

How beautiful that uh, you know, it's kind of a choose your own adventure and thing for everyone. And to have written something like that. It's great that you can have this different types of relationships with with the reader that is uh you know on one piece of work, so many different kinds of outcomes. Uh this is uh if this is not an advertisement for people to go pick up the book, then I don't know what is. Um as we wrap up, do you want to maybe tell us a little bit about what's next for you?

What Comes Next And Closing

SPEAKER_05 55:24

Well, so I uh did start writing a novel hundreds of years ago. Um because Orbital came out. Well, I finished it in early 2022. I was unbelievable. I don't know where the time has gone. So I I had started another novel, and and I have barely looked at that for over a year now, which is unheard of for me. I never take breaks from writing really. So I don't know what I'm gonna find when I go back to it. But as far as I can remember, it was a love story.

SPEAKER_01 56:04

Oh, a love story.

SPEAKER_05 56:05

And I think that it's very much it very much follows on for me emotionally from Orbital, because I think when I wrote Orbital, I felt full of this expansive something, you know, this I don't know, it is a I have described it before as a kind of a feeling of in loveness at those images of the earth and and just exploring those images. And I was left with a surplus of that feeling, and and so I thought, right, well, I it's time to to use them, you know, to write a love story then. Um so that's what I've been writing, and it's um ill-advisedly, I think, mostly in the form of a long kind of prose poem. Um there is some prose in it, but it's it's mainly taken a sort of at least the appearance of a poem. I don't know whether I can really dignify it with the with the term poetry, but it's that's how it that's how it took shape. Um it was never the intention, but I think I've been on a trajectory the last few years of writing ever shorter books. I don't know where that ends, whether it just ends with one kind of magnificent and exquisite one-word book. Um, but that's the journey I'm on at the moment. So this this book that which was never meant to be particularly short, or it's certainly not meant to be poetry, it has become more and more compressed and condensed and about this this you know dense feeling of of being in love. And I, you know, I don't want it to be a tragic love story, I just want to go for the good bits.

SPEAKER_00 57:51

Nice. Well, I can say I very much look forward to it already.

SPEAKER_04 57:56

I might never finish it. This might be the last we ever hear of it. I might I might go back and just think, what the hell was I thinking?

SPEAKER_01 58:07

Whatever comes next, I'm I'm sure it's gonna be great. And uh really appreciate that you took the time. And I want to thank you for writing such a beautiful book. For me personally, it was um it made me feel a lot, and I like that. That's what I want. I'm very much in my head most of the time. And when I was reading the book, I would just felt so many different things, and I think that is exactly what I'm seeking out when I'm picking up a book. Uh and so thank you for that, and thanks for taking the time to speak to us about it.

SPEAKER_02 58:34

Thank you too, truly. Likewise, thank you so much, Sam. It's my great pleasure.