Samantha Harvey: 'This is what fiction can do'

The weather may be up the spout but it's still summer, so it's time for another batch of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Susan Muaddi Darraj, Carolina Bruck, Patrick Cash and Jack Klausner in this summer season. But Summer opens with Samantha Harvey and her mighty short story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch.

If you haven't read it already, you might want to head over there before you hit play, because Harvey got straight to the nub of things as soon as we started talking.

She told us how she got started on a story that looks death square in the face. Sitting beside someone in their last days, "You know that you should be feeling something splendidly profound," Harvey says, "but you can't quite find what it is."

Time grinds to a halt, with normal life suspended – just as it is for the astronauts in her latest novel, Orbital. Set across a fractured day on the International Space Station, Harvey says she relished the challenge of translating that "extremely rich visual world to the world of black marks on a white page", but struggled to feel "it was all right for me to write it in this age of great veracity".

"I wonder why this would be interesting to anybody," she asked herself, "that some woman in Wiltshire has made up some stuff about being in space."

In the end she decided to give herself permission, Harvey adds, "and it just has to be good enough".

"This is what fiction can do," she says. "I believe in fiction."

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