Author: Sue Burke

Pumpkins are squashes, but are squashes pumpkins? Some are. Regarding your holiday pumpkin pie, if the pumpkin comes from a can, it’s at least 95% certain that it is from the Dickinson pumpkin, which is more or less a butternut squash. But as Libby’s Pumpkin insists, the Dickinson is really a pumpkin—and that’s true. Botanically speaking, “pumpkin” is a squishy squashy category.

Anyway, I can attest that a good butternut squash/Dickinson pumpkin is a little more flavorful than the classic pie pumpkin, so don’t feel cheated. And both of those taste better than the variety of pumpkin we carve for Halloween. A jack-o-lantern makes a great addition to the compost heap, not the dinner table.

One more fun fact: Almost all pumpkins for canned pie filling are grown in and around the village of Morton, Illinois, near Peoria. So when you eat your pumpkin pie, think about the Land of Lincoln. In these fraught political times, what can we learn from Honest Abe?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Anthologies tend to make less money than novels, yet they keep appearing. And I keep reading them. An anthology offers the chance to read a carefully curated selection, and I love short stories as an art form.

Apex Book Company asked me if I’d like to read an advanced copy of ECO24, The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, and offer a blurb if I liked it.

I liked it a lot. Like every good anthology, the stories offer a range of approaches, including literary science fiction, magical realism, and dark fantasy. Some are set in the present, such as the war in Ukraine, others in the future, and they feature settings around our planet and beyond. Some are grim, many hopeful.

My favorite is “The Plasticity of Being” by Renan Bernardo, which illustrates the paradoxes of offering help to poor people. I also especially enjoyed “Bodies” by Cat McMahon about the dangers of being a clone, and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackened Husk of a Planet” by Adeline Wong about the emotional weight of being a student, with hints of poetry. But I could go on. There’s the quiet wisdom of “Batter and Pearl” by Steph Kwiatkowski, and the aspiration of “Father Time Dares You to Dream” by Trae Hawkins — and both stories take place near me.

My blurb:

Each author offers us a unique ecological niche to reveal what our present and future could be, ranging from wrenching disasters to elating possibilities of recovery. These stories are personal and lyrical, and the breadth of imagination and styles make this anthology dazzling. Every story is a gem.

You can read or listen to a story I translated from Spanish into English by Ramiro Sanchiz, “Trees at Night” (Árboles en la noche) at the November 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. The podcast of the story is read by Kate Baker.

Sanchiz is a Uruguayan writer whose work has been described as “new weird.” “Arboles en la noche” is available in the original Spanish at the magazine Contaminación futura 8.

In the story, a librarian at a hospital-like sanatorium befriends a young patient for reasons that eventually become clear. It offers a distant echo of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (which I recommend): aliens come to Earth, and what they leave behind is incomprehensible to humans.

Rather than the self-destruction in the Strugatsky novel, in “Trees at Night” the response is estrangement. I don’t know how to summarize the story without spoilers. This sentence, taken from close to the end, might say enough:

“The Sanatorium rose far away, its sight mostly blocked by trees; the sun had already set, and a globular cluster of stars sparkled in the sky to remind all us humans that we were not on Earth and, in fact, we did not know where we were.”

Come to the Deep Dish Reading at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, at After-Words Bookstore, 23 E. Illinois St., Chicago, organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation. Featuring Devi Bhaduri, Tina Jens, Philip Janowski, Brendan Detzner, Harold Holt, Katherine Ervin, Winifred Burton, and Sue Burke.

I’ll be reading this short piece called “Intricate Stardust.”

If you haven’t yet read Usurpation, here’s your chance to buy it at a more economical price. The trade paperback will be released on Tuesday, October 21, available from any bookseller.

This is the third book in the Semiosis trilogy. As you may recall, Stevland, an aggressive, intelligent plant on a distant planet, longs to send his seeds to Earth. In the second book of the trilogy, Interference, he finds a way.

Now Stevland’s descendants grow everywhere, but no one on Earth knows they are intelligent, and humans have fallen into a violent crisis. They need help. But how? Stevland sends advice: “Compassion will give you courage. Love will be ferocious.”

Apples are my favorite fruit — but is it the forbidden fruit? Probably not. The idea seems to have come from a mistranslation or artistic liberty rather than the gospel truth.

The Bible’s Book of Genesis tells the story of the serpent who talks to Eve about a particular fruit that, if she ate it, would cause her to “be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:4, St. James Version). It doesn’t say which fruit, and many different fruits have been proposed. The idea that it’s an apple could come from a confusion between the Latin word “malus” for evil and “malum” for apple. Or the Latin word “pomum” for fruit; in French, it became “pomme” and eventually meant apple. Or the Biblical story became mixed with Greek legends about apples.

In any case, apple trees are a good example of how plants manipulate us. Apple trees grow tasty fruit so that we pick it, eat it, and spread the seeds when we toss away the core. Like many kinds of fruit, some varieties of apples even change color as they ripen to encourage us to eat them. Apple trees now grow all over the planet and enjoy tender loving care. Like every plant, apples want to take over the Earth — or at least conquer every niche they can fit into. Apples have used us humans to achieve world domination.

It’s apple season. Enjoy! And consider the mutualism that brings you this sweet treat. Just because you eat something, you might not be the apex predator. You might be cheap labor.

I’m sharing this photo because I wrote a story set in that volcano, “Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons,” which you can read at Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. I wrote the story because a meme informed me that Mars is the only known planet inhabited solely by robots. Then I thought, what is the stupidest thing robots could do on Mars?

NASA’s caption for their photo:

“Arsia Mons, one of the Red Planet’s largest volcanoes, peeks through a blanket of water ice clouds in this image captured by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter on May 2, 2025. Odyssey used a camera called the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) to capture this view while studying the Martian atmosphere, which appears here as a greenish haze above the scene. A large crater known as a caldera, produced by massive volcanic explosions and collapse, is located at the summit. At 72 miles (120 kilometers) wide, the Arsia Mons summit caldera is larger than many volcanoes on Earth.”