Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.
In whatever language, the available color words cluster around a small category of what linguistic anthropologists often call basic color terms. These words do not describe a color; they merely give it a name. They are focalizing words, and are usually defined as “the smallest subset of color words such that any color can be named by one of them.” In English, for example, “red” is the basic color term for a whole range of shades that we are willing to think of (or are able to see) as red, whereas the names we give any of the individual shades are specific to them and don’t serve a similarly unifying function. Scarlet is just scarlet.
Like many interdisciplinary efforts, this reexamination of the Lorax began at an academic dinner with assigned seating. Nate Dominy, a biological anthropologist, was put next to Donald Pease, a literary scholar. “He’s one of the most famous and popular professors on campus, [and] sitting next to him was really intimidating,” says Dominy. “I was desperate for something to talk about.”
Pease is a world expert on Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. So Dominy started telling him about the patas monkey. “It’s a funny-looking monkey,” he says. “When I’m introducing it in class, I always say, ‘If Dr. Seuss were to create a monkey, that would be the one.’ It looks ripped off the pages.”
The fact that the libertarian wonderland of absolute sexual and economic freedom only ever worked in Rand’s melodramatic novels and helium-voiced Rush songs — that her philosophy of “Objectivism” has never been successfully applied to actual governance — does not seem to cross the minds of libertarian true-believers. And to many of them, it seems not to matter: a fealty to Rand, to heroic ideas of intellectual superiority and capitalism’s grandeur, is more important than what puny mortals consider political or intellectual reality. If you try arguing sense with them, you’ll quickly wish you hadn’t.
Why should we care, then, about a discredited goofball ideology from deep within the last century? Because Ayn Rand–style libertarianism has probably never been more assertive in American politics than it is today.
There are no right or wrong answers in this area, but as Kornfeldt implies, the rhetoric of such debates still revolves around a few presumptive virtues that are rarely interrogated deeply. The aim of greater “biodiversity”, for instance, often cited by the de-extinction researchers she interviews, is never, in truth, an absolute goal. We could save millions of people a year if we eradicated the malaria-carrying mosquito – perhaps, as researchers are now trying to do, by replacing them with genetically sterile individuals – but that would be a decrease in biodiversity. The fungi threatening to kill off some of our best-loved tree species, also covered here, are themselves organisms, as much as the trees they attack. Inevitably, those discussing such ideas are always choosing one species over another, and judging one ecosystem as somehow more authentic than another – not that nature itself cares much either way, being the most brutal engine of extinction on the planet.
The real hallmark of Early Work is the language. Martin has a remarkable ear for natural dialogue and pitch-perfect, witty banter, giving the novel a polished feel and a confident tone that herald more great fiction to come from this author.