Harvey, Samantha
Entry updated 2 September 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1975- ) UK teacher and author whose third novel, All Is Song (2012), clearly does not represent its reincarnation of Socrates (470-399 BCE) in contemporary London as literally intended, though there is a clear similitude between the eidolon and the man dying now. She is of sf interest for her fifth novel, Orbital (2023), a contemplative rendering of its six protagonists' sensory responses to their visions of the planet beneath them during sixteen orbits of their Space Station, which amount to a single day of the world. The trip to the Moon undertaken at this point, the political situation beneath them, and the visible signs of Anthropocene devastation, hint at a moment in the very Near Future. The flattened affect of the six hints at the supernumerary future of flesh creatures in the exploration/exploitation of the universe. The novel ends with a vision of our Posthuman destiny, if any of us survive the Suicide below, an insight quoted in at least one review of the tale, where future iterations of Homo sapiens are seen as "exo-skeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who've harnessed the energy of some hapless star and guzzled it dry". [JC]
Samantha Harvey
born Kent: 1975
works (highly selected)
- All Is Song (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012) [hb/]
- Orbital (London: Jonathan Cape, 2023) [hb/]
links
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