One Day in the Anthropocene: The Ecological Value of Temporal Forms in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital

This article examines how Samantha Harvey’s Orbital engages with ecological crisis through the mediation of narrative forms. Central to this process of cultural negotiation is the novel’s temporal structure, which is compressed to twenty-four hours depicting an ordinary day in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Drawing on cultural narratology and New Formalism, this essay argues that Orbital, as a one-day novel, stages the ideological and ethical tensions characterizing the Anthropocene through its distinctive narrative configuration. Two formal components are considered. First, the collision between terrestrial clock time and accelerated orbital time produces defamiliarization and fosters the adoption of a cosmic scale, capturing the dialectical relationship between humanity and nonhuman world. Second, the novel’s focus on the mundane dimension of astronaut life resists teleological plot progression, introducing textual patterns – including mental imagery of space and a cosmic summary – that construct a sense of narrative slowness, inviting readers to rethink human history within a deeper Anthropocene temporality. This narrative analysis demonstrates that Orbital aesthetically negotiates central concerns of contemporary ecocritical discourse, interweaving human sensibility and nonhuman reality in a dialectic that emerges primarily through textual forms.