But reindeer herders like Utsi have noticed how quickly their language is fading alongside their changing landscape. Though Northern Sámi is his mother tongue, he is keenly aware of the gaps in his vocabulary — words that don’t seem to make it from one generation to another. “When you talk to someone older today, they have a richer language. They have more words about nature, about formations in nature, animals and reindeer especially. They certainly have more snow words,” said Utsi, who is also a former chair of the language board and vice president of the Sámi Parliament of Sweden. “It’s a source of sorrow for me.”
Both scientifically and in broader society, we are tied to the species as the bedrock unit of the animal kingdom. Species are, for want of a better term, easy. Look, for instance, at how we speak about extinction. We talk about the dodo and the great auk, the blue whale and the giant panda. But there are various subspecies that deserve to be better known and protected. Trinomialism – resisted for a long time by some in the establishment – offers not only scientific clarity and variety, but an enriched view of the living world and our relationship with it.
I have been taking the New York City subway for twenty-five years. My first train was the 7. It’s considered a national treasure for its diversity, and also very fast if you catch the express from Queensboro Plaza to Sixty-first Street–Woodside. Then for a long time I was on the 2/3, first in Manhattan, where it was speedy, and later in Brooklyn, where it was slow. Briefly, I had to catch a bus to get to the Q, but it was worth it to go over the Manhattan Bridge and see the river and the skyline. For six months, I lived directly above the C train, so close that I could hear it rumbling into the station from my apartment. Then the G—initially a disappointing train, so truncated that in some stations you had to run to the middle of the platform to get on, and the only one that doesn’t go into Manhattan. But as time passed, and more and more of my destinations were in Brooklyn, it was just right. The G was all I needed. When I moved back to the 2/3, it was a mixed blessing. I could go into Manhattan again—but did I really want to?
Like a beautiful symbiote, the language, verve, glitter-bomb swagger and shoot-from-the-hip-with-one-of-those-prop-guns-that-unfurls-and-says-BANG-on-it of Space Oddity has just become a part of me. It has crooned at me through moonless midnights, tap-danced across my cranium outside of blurred commuter windows, it has mimed at me, okay, so four words, theme is music, (you’re goddamned right it’s music), the guess is, “Rock and Roll, baby,” and the guess is always right when you play with this book, the band at its heart, and the writer who brings them all to life with 9,000 volts of “Hello, Science Fiction! How are you tonight? It’s been too long! This genre is one of my favorite venues to play in!”
This is a bizarre coming-of-age novel, describing visions of girlhood in all its viscera, never shying away from the anger or abjection its characters experience. This novel explores consumption in all its forms, detailing a literal hunger as well as the toxic desperation of codependent love. A strange and bold debut from an exciting new voice for those who enjoy Julia Armfield, Kirsty Logan, and Daisy Johnson.
How much better is the world since the arrival of what Nicholas Carr calls our modern “technologies of connection”—cell phones, personal computers, the internet, social media, artificial intelligence? As we watch these systems undermine democracy, flood our lives with misinformation and deepfakes, transform our children into screen-obsessed zombies, and threaten to eradicate us entirely, we might be tempted to respond with a hollow laugh.
But to what extent are these bleak scenarios real? What about being able to navigate by GPS almost anywhere in the world, or call for help when stranded in the middle of nowhere, or stream any song we desire? The cost-benefit calculation is complicated and nuanced, requiring us to find a course between apocalyptic visions of civilizational decline and the naive utopianism of Silicon Valley.