Sue Burke’s most recent science fiction novel is Usurpation, the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Semiosis and Interference. She began writing professionally as a teenager, working for newspapers and magazines as a reporter and editor, and began writing fiction in 1995. She has published more than 40 short stories, along with essays, poetry, and translations from Spanish into English of short stories, novels, poetry, and historical works. Find out more at https://sueburke.site/
I’ve been asked if there’s anything new coming out. I have some short stories looking for a home, and if they’re published, I’ll announce it here.
As for another novel, I’m almost done with the very shitty first draft tentatively titled A Nice Galaxy. It tries to deal seriously with the size of the Milky Way, which is almost unimaginably vast. Suppose we humans have settled the galaxy. How can humanity remain united when even something as basic as a radio transmission becomes too attenuated to decipher less than a quarter of the way across the galaxy, not to mention the thousands of light-years it would take to arrive?
Imagine no handwavium shortcuts like faster-than-light travel. Then imagine humanity’s many self-destructive foibles and the problems of survival in a galaxy mostly hostile to human life. That is, imagine trying to carry out the impossible task of keeping humanity connected.
As part of an Audible sale, my novel Interference will be available for $6.99 from June 4 to June 26! This sale is only offered to Prime membership subscribers in the US. This is also a cash sale, meaning it will not affect those using an Audible credit to purchase.
Interference is the second novel in the Semiosis trilogy. More than two hundred years after the first colonists landed on Pax, a new set of explorers arrives from Earth on what they claim is a temporary scientific mission. But the Earthlings misunderstand the nature of the Pax settlement and its real leader. Even as Stevland attempts to protect his humans, a more insidious enemy than the Earthlings makes itself known.
“Narrators Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas May reprise their roles, and between them, they’ve once more captured the essence behind the voices of multiple characters, and even more impressively, this time there are non-humans thrown into the mix.” — Bibliosanctum Book Blog.
I’ll be reading at the Last Fridays Poetry open mic on Friday, May 29, 8 p.m., at Esquinaevent space, 4602 N. Western Ave., Chicago. It’s a supportive environment, and all are welcome. This time, I won’t be reading poetry, I’ll be talking about poetry, specifically about translating poetry. Here’s what I plan to say:
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Today, I won’t be reading poetry, I’ll be talking about poetry, specifically about translating poetry. I’ve lived in Spain and the United States, and sometimes I write poetry in English and Spanish, and there can be problems with translation.
For example, the Spanish language doesn’t have a verb equivalent to “finesse.” You can express the idea, of course. “She finessed her way into the party,” can be said in Spanish: Se las ingenió para entrar en la fiesta. “She used ingenuity on things to get into the party.” Not quite the same, but close.
That technique, using “ingenuity” to approximate “finesse,” is called compensation. Here’s another example. My English-language haiku:
nodding heads —
lavender flowers
weighted by bees
My translation into Spanish:
abejas
meciendo las flores
de lavanda
In Spanish, you nod by asentir con la cabeza or “to agree with the head.” A literal translation would not work. The closest word, mecer, means “to rock,” as in “the hand that rocks the cradle.” So I wrote a Spanish version that means, literally, “bees / rocking the flowers / of lavender.” It supplies the same physical picture, but the implied meaning is different.
You can also paraphrase, which may or may not get you what you need. In Spain, the famous festival in July in Pamplona, known for its running of the bulls, honors St. Fermin, so the fiesta and by extension the run are known as los sanfermines. The Spanish haiku:
sanfermines
el semáforo parpadea
amarillo
Literal translation:
the running of the bulls in Pamplona
a stoplight blinking
yellow
It still needs a little work.
Another problem is cultural, which can be solved with adaptations. In Europe, the bird called a blackbird is the Turdus merula, basically an all-black version of the American robin, Turdus migratorius. (The European robin is a flycatcher, Erithacus rubecula. New World blackbirds don’t exist in Europe. Yes, it’s confusing.) For both these Turdus birds, their beautiful song is a harbinger of spring, so if I’m writing for an American audience, I might adapt the name of the bird to avoid confusion.
Eurasian blackbird
But the following haiku has another problem that also requires a compensation. In Spanish, the adverb ya emphasizes the time of the event. What time? Now, then, soon, already, immediately, finally, never … you know from the context, and there’s no exact English equivalent. Consider this haiku:
el mirlo canta
cigüeñas rumbo al norte
¿ya? ¿cómo que ya?
The Spanish version, translated over-literally, is “the blackbird sings / storks in direction to the north / ~time? how that ~time?
My translation:
the robin sings
storks headed north
now? so soon?
A particular problem is wordplay and puns. In this example, Spanish words often distinguish gender, although English words can’t. The translation of this poem is exact, but the humor doesn’t quite come through.
lectores – lectoras
los servicios de
la Feria del Libro
In English:
male readers – female readers
the rest rooms
at the Book Fair
Of course, poems can also employ rhyme, rhythm, assonance, figures of speech, and all the other resources that form the art of language. They tend to resist translation, but these exacting challenges are what makes translating poetry as much fun as writing it.
I’m interviewed about Goal-Based Sci-Fi Research by Beth Barany for the May 18, Episode 205, of her podcast How To Write The Future. We talk about how to know when to stop researching and start writing, how research can find conflicts that lead writers away from clichés, and surprises hiding in rabbit holes.
The podcasts are meant to offer fiction writing tips for science fiction and fantasy authors who want to create optimistic stories. A vision of what is possible can make it so. Beth Barany is a science fiction and fantasy author and fiction writing coach.
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I’m interviewed in the May 2026, Issue #1, of Small Planet, the Science Fiction in Translation Magazine. It includes columns on forthcoming books, reviews of older and newer SFT, interviews with translators (me), wish-lists of books for translation into English, and reports from countries around the world on their SF scenes.
In the interview, I answer questions from Cristina Jurado including: What is it about Spanish that appeals to you? What genre do you find more challenging? Can you share with us examples of key decisions you had to make in order to translate a story?
The short story “Spiders” (you can read it here) has been translated into Spanish as “Arañas” by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman (you can read it at Microficciones y Cuentos).
The story is set between Chapters 3 and 4 of my novel Semiosis. When Roland was a boy, his father took him out for a walk. This story was also published at Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in March 2008 and Year’s Best SF 14 in 2009.
I’ll be reading my translation of the short story “Francine (Draft for the September Lecture)” by Maria Antònia Martí Escayol at the Deep Dish reading at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 7, at The Book Loft, 1047 Lake Street, Oak Park, Illinois. Nine other outstanding writers will also present their work. The event, organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation, is free and open to the public.
Maria Antònia Martí Escayol is a science fiction writer and an environmental historian who teaches at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Her haunting tale investigates the death and posthumous life of Francine, the daughter of Renée Descartes.
I came to writing fiction after years of just-the-facts journalism, so infusing my writing with emotion remains a challenge. That’s why I found this book helpful. In the first chapter, Donald Maass challenges writers to ask themselves: “How can I get readers to go on emotional journeys of their own?”
Perhaps because he reads a lot for his job as a literary agent, he has opinions about the direction of emotional journey, too. “The ultimate in emotional craft is nothing more than trusting your own feelings. Having faith. Confidence.” But not all feelings, he says. “You can sense when fiction is masking cynicism or anger…. Cynical writing tries too hard.”
Instead, he suggests that readers are seeking an emotional experience, and they want to come away feeling positive rather than crushed, uplifted rather than disappointed, authentic rather than desperate. “How do you get your best self on the page? Let’s look at some practical ways.”
He offers plenty of examples and questions to ask yourself about characters, scenes, themes, stakes, and plot. I learned a lot, and I recommend this book to other writers.
This sonnet is about my sister, who died in 2014 and would have been 66 years old today. Small love can do what big love can’t. The poem was published in UU World, Summer 2015.
Relatively few people usually vote for the shorter works for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Nebula Awards, and we only had a month to evaluate all the works on the ballot with its many categories, so I started with the short stories, which was doable. This year, I wasn’t entirely impressed. I thought some of the stories were simple and shallow — but not all of them.
“Because I Held His Name Like a Key” by Aimee Ogden (Strange Horizons 6/16/25) — An immortal being seduces a human, and we all know what’s going to happen next. This is a low-energy retread of a familiar story.
“Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots 5/25) — A woman who uses a wheelchair discovers that superpowers will not overcome indifference to accessibility needs. The story works better as grievance catharsis than literature.
“The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” by E.M. Linden (PodCastle 2/18/25) — The ghosts left behind on Tawlish Island feel lonely as the descendants go on with their lives elsewhere. Nostalgia and sadness make for a sweet but oft-told story.
“Through the Machine” by P.A. Cornell (Lightspeed 5/25) — An actor’s image is used to make movies that he never participated in, and he feels bad about it. Although the storyline is timely, it is explored with little emotional nuance, and the telling struck me as simplistic.
“In My Country” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 4/25) — In a strange country, people are permitted by law to speak plainly or not at all. This story is sort of a parable, and its telling is not plain, and that kind of story can make you feel.
My vote: “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny 1-2/25) – Liza is sure she needs to change to find peace because a corporation is persuasively selling its services for change to vulnerable, anxious people. But what to change and why? It’s hard to find good advice. The unflinching characterization told me early on that Liza was self-deluded. What could make her wise up?
“If and when aliens make first contact, who should answer? Maybe humankind should turn to people like me, translators of science fiction. We’ve already thought through this kind of problem.”
Those are the opening sentences of my essay “When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder.” You can read the essay here.
It was originally published by Calque Press in 2024. In it, I explore the development of human language and the challenges it poses to translation here and now, and how the lessons learned from translation and from science fiction can help us if we come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Whomever we find, wherever they are from, they too will be made of star-stuff, and that should be enough to let us find a way to know each other.
Semiosis 