Ecocritical Perspectives in Fiction: Object Earth as a Lens for the Planetary and the Global in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

The numerous causes of climate change and the unintended scalar effects of human activity are increasingly highlighting the chasm between the workings of the planet and human actions, entangled in a complex web of causes and effects that seems to eschew a comprehensive view. This widening gap is posing challenges to human cognition and, as a result, to ecocritical fiction. This article aims to analyse how the fracture between the planetary and the global, discussed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, is rendered in fiction in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital through the representation of object Earth. By interweaving Iovino and Oppermann’s material ecocriticism with ecocritical scholarly reflections, I will show how the object Earth in the novel —apparently observed from the outside area of the International Space Station— thematises the difference between the planetary and the global, and how Harvey’s narrative strategies attempt to capture climate change and the planet by circumventing the hurdle posed by scale.