As consciousness of climate change has grown, a new class of dead metaphors has entered the English language. We speak routinely of carbon footprints, of wiping species off the face of the Earth, and of greenhouse gases, but we no longer see the feet, the hands, the faces and the backyard sheds that were once vivid when those phrases were newly coined. Geologists now talk of searching for the ‘human signature’ in the fossil record. Some geo-engineers want to inject vast clouds of sulphur aerosols into Earth’s atmosphere in the hopes of ‘resetting the global thermostat’. Many of these coinages attempt to give an intimate, human dimension to planetary phenomena that can seem intimidatingly vast and abstract. Adam Smith in 1759 responded similarly to the massive scale of economic forces by inserting the human body in the form of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Today, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson brings that dead metaphor back to life, complaining that, when it comes to the environment, ‘the invisible hand never picks up the check’.
So if Musk were to establish a private Martian settlement, that settlement would be an (illegal) territory of the United States. But to a figure like Trump, who recently established the National Space Council and an agenda to support private space commerce, the prospect of a private Martian settlement may be appealing. And there’s ample precedent for the U.S. ignoring treaties that are inconvenient to its national interests. In fact, according to Dodge, the Cold-War-era Outer Space Treaty was written to be ambiguous and open to interpretation.
On December 13, 1937, my grandmother, a woman of barely 22 years named Wein-Shiu Liu Chou, heard the steady barrage of artillery from Imperial Japanese troops as they began their final assault on Nanjing, her hometown in China. The sound of shells exploding just outside the city walls must have made clear to those still in the city that the end was near. My grandmother would live a long life of 98 years, raise two daughters, see five grandchildren grow up, run small businesses in Taiwan and the United States, and sing in a choral group in Los Angeles, California, in her golden years. But on that cold December morning, such a future seemed impossible.
“Literature,” writes Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, “is a nation without boundaries. It is infinite. There are no stations, no castes, no checkpoints.” This is the promise at the heart of her new novel Call Me Zebra, that the exile who lives through books can acquire a more liberated identity than the one fate has in store. It explores the seductive qualities of this idea but also its ultimate brittleness: it is one thing to be nourished by the words of dead writers, quite another to fall in love with death itself.