If you’re crazy enough to write a novel and lucky enough to get it published, at the copy-editing stage, you’ll receive what’s called a style sheet. Among other things, it will list all the proper nouns that appear in your book – all the characters, yes, but also places, organizations, and federal agencies. This will flag any neologisms or unusual terminology. This will summarize the story chapter by chapter, like an overzealous Wikipedia entry that is destined to be flagged for excessive detail.
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But the most unsettling part of the document will be the section titled “Common Usage and Pronunciation.” Here, your copy editor will uncover all your grammatical quirks: for example, your preferences for serial commas, or for writing newspaper headlines in all caps. Now every authorial thought and statement you make will be portrayed clearly and somewhat conclusively.
Hi God, I thought, reading my own. I find that when a dramatic pause is intended I place a comma after “and then” at the beginning of the sentence. It was marked “Author Preference”. was it? I didn’t realize I had added those commas until he pointed them out. I certainly had no conscious intention when doing this. It felt as if I had seen a photo of myself from an unpleasant angle: Is that really what my chin looks like when I smile?
However, I had a preference that was completely deliberate, a grammatical choice that was, in fact, central to why I wrote. Sailor In first place:
Earth as a capitalized planet, Read my style sheet. Earthlinga is capitalized when not specifically mentioning planet, Earth is not capitalized.
I think the same is true for Earth and the Earth; That one capital letter makes all the difference.
My novel is about aliens, both real and imaginary. It moves back and forth between the ufology scene of the 1990s and early 2000s and the present day, where the world seems to be on the verge of first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. But I wrote about visitors from space because I loved Earth, and ironically, aliens seemed the easiest lens through which to filter this love. I wanted to show how amazing our planet can seem to someone fresh faced in the vastness of space. Writing about the Earth in this way means showing it some respect, even if my form of respect is not grammatically acceptable.
“In normal prose,” suggests the Chicago Manual of Style, referencing our home planet, “lowercase is almost always appropriate.” CMS notes that the only exception to this rule comes when referring to Earth in relation to other celestial bodies. (“Mars, Earth, Venus” vs. “Where on Earth did you get that?”) I find this hair-splitting a bit silly. Isn’t planet, by definition, always a proper noun? Why should it be located so close to its cosmic neighbors to have such a qualification? We do not make similar demands from other places like the countries. France is always France; It does not require companies from other countries to boost their capitalisation.
Eve Babitz agrees with me, even if CMS doesn’t agree:
“I believe that places should be capitalized on,” she writes in the introduction. Eve’s Hollywood. “As far as I’m concerned, North, South, East and West are all places (…) The West, in particular, is a serious place that should always be capitalized on. Going west feels more adventurous than going west.”
Isn’t it just that? Eve Babitz cared about West and how things looked on the page. He capitalized on his work accordingly. I feel the same way about Earth and Earth: That one capital letter makes all the difference. At the sentence level it reminds us that we are inhabitants of a place, a capital-P planet. My passion for Earth vs. Earth extends far beyond my own writing. Quite a shame I read Sayaka Murata Earthlings Because of the title alone, I was surprised when the novel’s translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori, told me via email, that this was not the universally preferred choice: apparently, an editor—who had not read the manuscript—said to call the novel. Earthlings “Will destroy it.” But Takemori was “confident” that it was the right choice.
“The title in Japanese is 地球星रें – 地球 is Earth, 星रेन is an inhabitant of a planet,” she wrote me in an email. “The common term for Earth’s inhabitants is 地球文, so the addition of 星文 brings an added nuance of seeing the people on Earth objectively from the perspective of extraterrestrials, which accurately describes the alien eye’s vision of Natsuki, Tomoya, and Yuu.”
I’m not naïve enough to think that a change in genre guidelines will completely change our relationship with the Earth.
Earthlings Follows two cousins who, as children, believe they may be aliens, and hope to one day return to their home planet. In adulthood, rather than outgrowing it, their “alien eye” becomes even more powerful, creating a force field of astonishing strength between them and societal norms. This protects them, even though it shocks the reader. As Murata wrote about his experience: “In our minds the alien is always roaming around trying to save the Earthlings and has no place to turn.”
i loved Earthlings; I felt as if I had seen through a foreign eye. It made me think of Darko Suvin’s description of alienation in fiction, how it allows us to “see all ordinary phenomena in a suspicious light.” This is what Murata’s novel does. It presents the ordinary world as something unfathomably strange, starting with the title: humanity seen from space, observed by an extraterrestrial Other.
Yet the strangeness of the term Earthlings as a mechanism of cognitive dissociation is that, really, nothing could be less strange. Our position as Earthlings is fundamental and basic, the truest thing we know. We are all born on this planet. Most of us will never leave. People who spend their time in blurry replicas of the world they left behind. We may be made of stars, but only on Earth do we find the conditions necessary for our existence. “Like it or not,” said Carl Sagan. “Earth is where we stand.” This is our reality – what if we wrote like this? What might change if we were to accept our planet’s capitalized uniqueness at the sentence level? If our grammar told us that Earth is special, would more people start believing it?
I’m not naive enough to think that a change in genre guidelines will change our relationship with the Earth. Before the pandemic, I covered environmental stories as a journalist and I remember coming home from a particularly gut-wrenching shoot where I filmed with people suffering from a cancer cluster around a coal ash pond in North Carolina. I cried to a friend in a noodles shop when I described her belief that my story would make a difference. His faith in storytelling broke my heart. At that point in my career I had ceased to believe that the barrier between our environmental problems and their obvious solutions lay only in public awareness. I wanted my story to help the people I made the film with and hoped that it would. But I struggled to see how it could transcend the high walls of money and power and the carefully taught helplessness that stemmed the tide of action.
In the face of all this, my doubts about the Chicago Manual of Style may seem silly. Who cares if you call it Earth on Earth – a planet, by any other name, is still on fire. And yet, I believe it might make some small difference. Maybe it’s because I’m a novelist now and words are the nails of my proverbial hammer, but I think what we call ourselves and our home world has moral power. “‘We are earthlings, we are terrestrial among terrestrial beings,’ is not the same politics as saying ‘we are human in nature,’ writes Bruno Latour. “The two are not cut from the same cloth – or rather from the same clay.”
Earth, like Babitz’s West, is a grim place. I like to honor it that way. Remember, when I write, what I am made of. “We are not protecting nature,” says the French slogan of Extinction Rebellion. “We are nature protecting itself.” When I think about it this way, even Earthlings feel like I’m going too far with a word. We are not actually inhabitants of our planet, but extensions of it. Less tenants than a house. The plan is to create themselves beings that can live in other worlds. hell, complete ipo Made on this. But in the meantime, I plan to make my case on Earth, starting with a rebellion against standard English usage. It’s a small thing, I know. But, in the grand scheme, so are we.
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Sailor Available from HarperCollins by Meg Charlton.
