Vanessa Franke: The Earth on the Horizon. On (Extra)Terrestrial Perspective with Samantha Harvey’s Novel "Orbital" (2024)
Wednesday | June 18, 2025 | 11:30-12:15
Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
The experience of outer space has preoccupied poets, authors of science fiction, and philosophers alike, not only since the early days of space travel. It is often assumed that the extraterrestrial experience, decentering humans from Planet Earth, is existentially disorienting: no horizon, ground, place, or landscape, only space. The human body turns into a floating mollusc, depending on a highly technological environment. In contrast, the recent novel "Orbital" (2024) by S. Harvey, set on the International Space Station, describes an experience of space that is a phenomenological as well as ecological (re)orientation towards Earth, driven by its contemplation in movement. I will discuss how the novel depicts Earth not in a totalizing globality, but rather creates a terrestrial horizon, relating the local and the global. Through addressing various media, the text opens up broader questions on perspective inherent to subjectivity, and media's capacity of creating a common point of view.