Samantha Harvey: ‘I like Alien as much as anybody else. But I see this novel as space pastoral’

Samantha Harvey, 48, was born in Kent and lives in Bath. Her six books include The Wilderness (2009), her Booker-longlisted debut about dementia; The Western Wind, about a murder in medieval Somerset; and The Shapeless Unease, a memoir of her chronic insomnia, praised by Tessa Hadley as “gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when it is most philosophical and far-reaching”. For critic Gaby Wood, she’s “this generation’s Virginia Woolf”. Her new novel, Orbital, gives us a day in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

What led you to write Orbital?
I’ve been looking at images of Earth from space for years. There’s a live camera from the ISS – you can watch the astronauts do spacewalks. Doing multiple orbits of Earth for months online made me want to try to do justice in words to the beauty of the Earth and how I feel about the unnerving fact of its aloneness – could I do justice to that in the way an image can? I put astronauts in it because the novel needed a heartbeat, but they’re just part of the image, not the lens.

Was this a lockdown project?
I wrote 5,000 words before lockdown and then lost my nerve. In lockdown I accidentally opened the document and felt an electricity I wasn’t feeling with the other novels I’d started in between. I thought, I’ll just go for it. It was the perfect novel to write over lockdown – what a place to go every day while stuck at home. Zooming right out let me escape our web of concerns about our impact on each other and on the planet.

How come you initially lost your nerve?
We’re in an age of first-person veracity. By some bizarre spasm of fate, I’m doing a radio interview next month alongside Tim Peake. I’m filled with anxiety: why would anyone care what some woman in Wiltshire has to say about what it might be like to be in space, when she’s sitting alongside Tim Peake? Maybe the answer is that there’s somewhere the imagination can go that experience can’t. Nasa’s website has hundreds of fascinating but quite humdrum journals that astronauts have written while in space. I was thinking, there’s a gap here – a sort of metaphysical gap, a magical experience that isn’t being documented the way I’d like to document it.

Did you want to write against more plot-driven space narratives?
I like Alien as much as anybody else. I never saw this novel as being against sci-fi, but I didn’t see it as having an awful lot in relation to it either. I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of what’s disappearing. Not just on Earth, but also the ISS itself, this really quite retro piece of kit which is going to be deorbited after 23 years of rattling around at 17,500 miles an hour.

Does the novel draw on your experience of insomnia?
Insomnia did seem to feed into writing about how orbiting Earth 16 times a day explodes any sense of time. I’ve always been interested in time as a thing in which we live, and what the elastic form of the novel can do with it. Having insomnia so severely for such a long time has definitely changed how I think and work. Orbital is shorter and more fragmented and restless than my other novels. That’s just how I write now – more quickly, intensely, impressionistically.

What draws you to such different settings for your novels?
It looks as if I’m always doggedly going out of my way to reinvent myself: “Last time, I wrote a novel set in 1491; the only place I can go now is space.” But if anything, I see the same preoccupations again and again: time, faith. When I wrote Orbital, I thought, I’m not going to talk about religion, I won’t! Then it snuck in. I want to break out of my own thought systems but it’s always me being me, whether in 1490s Somerset or getting dementia or whatever. Maybe such disparate subjects are a way of hoping to think differently.

You studied philosophy. Has that shaped your approach to fiction?
When I applied to do my degree, I turned up as an 18-year-old at the interview and was asked what philosophy I liked reading. I said: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.” The professor said: “If that’s the best you’ve got…” It seemed quite philosophical to me! I still love The Unbearable Lightness of Being and do believe it’s a form of philosophy. Philosophy takes an idea and gives it the kind of attention it rarely gets in daily life. Novels can do that too. I don’t think they’re about storytelling; you can tell someone the story of a novel in two minutes.

You teach creative writing. What advice do you give your students?
Something I come back to is how you can allow the form of a novel to say something that can’t be put into words. The Remains of the Day is a perfect book in terms of the relationship between form and content. Home by Marilynne Robinson is another.

Is there a writer you always return to?
I admire Woolf probably more than any other writer I can think of. I didn’t think about parallels with The Waves while writing Orbital, but I can see there’s something [similar] about the way voices surface and dissipate. If the influence was there, it wasn’t conscious.

Was there a book that made you want to write?
Reading Still Life by AS Byatt in my late teens made me think, I want to try that. I didn’t until I was in my late 20s but perhaps that’s where it started, going to the library, finding books. I just came to them myself; we didn’t really have books in the house. My dad had never read a novel until he read The Wilderness.

Name a novel you’ve enjoyed lately.
Ben Lerner’s 10:04. I read it in a state of bedazzlement; he takes every thought about 16 miles further than I ever would. I loved that.

• Orbital is published on 2 November by Jonathan Cape (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply