Author: Sue Burke

My good friend, Cristina Jurado, has a new collection of short stories available, Alphaland and Other Tales. It includes a story I translated from Spanish into English, “Embracing the Movement.”

I met Cristina when I was living in Spain, and I’ve collaborated with her on a number of projects. She’s an award-winning author, enthusiastic editor, and cheerful promoter of speculative fiction. You can recognize her from across a room by her wide, warm smile.

This collection includes nine short stories, and the back cover describes them this way: “Otherness is the idea that permeates all these speculative stories, full of characters troubled by the misconstruction of their identities, and in permanent search for answers in the margins of reality.”

I translated “Abrazar el movimiento” (Embracing the Movement), an intense first-contact story whose beautiful images hide horror.

Every translation has delightful problems. Many words never have exact equivalents. In this case, the challenge started with the first sentence: No somos tan diferentes, forestera. “We are not so different…” and then there’s that word: forestera. It is used repeatedly throughout the story, and I had to get it right.

The Real Diccionario Española defines forastero/a as someone or something que es o viene de fuera del lugar: “that is or comes from another place,” a stranger, an outsider. But there’s more: forastero is male, forastera is female. In the context of the story, it matters that the person being addressed is identified as female. I needed to find a way to preserve that sense.

Thesauruses listed close-but-not-quite words like foreigner, nonnative, outlander, alien, nonresident, drifter, transient, wanderer … which led to nomad, rambler, roamer, rover, stroller, vagabond, wanderer, wayfarer … Wait. The word rover suggested something … the Mars rovers, Perseverance, Curiosity, Spirit, Opportunity, and Sojourner. The Sojourner was named after Sojourner Truth. In 1797, she was born into slavery as Isabella Bomfree in New York State, and after she became free, she chose a new name because she felt called to travel and testify for the abolition of slavery and for the improvement of women’s rights.

“Sojourner” means someone who stays as a temporary resident, who comes from another place. The word in English has associations with space exploration, and it’s a name still being used for baby girls today.

I decided I’d found the word for forastera, although I needed to reinforce the female meaning in the first reference, and I realized that I could do so by introducing an important element from further within the story. Finally, I had the opening line in English:

“We are not so different, sister sojourner.”

What if you could adopt rescue dragons the way you can adopt rescue dogs? Who would do the adopting? How? Where?

These questions led to my story “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” in NewMyths Anthologies Volume 4: The Cosmic Muse. It just came out, and you can buy it through this link:

https://books2read.com/b/br6Z67

I drew inspiration for my story from The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. That book is a parody of tourist guidebooks, and it lists the common tropes of fantasy fiction. I studied up on Dragons, Virgins, Evil Mages, Boy Kings, Dark Lords, and Foreboding Castles, then added a few Compelling Motivations, Backstories, and Inner Conflicts — and soon, I had a fun tale to tell.

The Cosmic Muse will give you 40 stories and poems involving magic or expressing awe at the universe, with cover art by Fiona Meng, its third eye promising insight and inspiration. I’m excited to be included among so many impressive authors.

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OTHER NEWS:

André Santana has been nominated for Best Science Fiction Audiobook Narration for Dual Memory by SOVAS, the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences. Congratulations André! The winner will be announced December 10.

Alex Kingsley has reviewed Dual Memory for Ancillary Review of Books, and I think they explain wonderfully the role of art and artists for both humans and AIs in the novel. Beautiful Things We Weren’t Supposed to Make: Review of Dual Memory by Sue Burke

This is weird and wonderful:

The very first short story I sold, back in 1995, “Poet for Hire,” involved a young woman with curly brown hair who starts a freelance poetry business in Milwaukee. She works out of a storefront in the 2200 block of Kinnickinnic Avenue, down the street from where I used to live, and she gets vital inspiration from the plants in the Arid Dome of Milwaukee’s Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory.

Last month I was contacted by Anja Notanja Sieger. Someone found the story and sent it to her — because she’s Milwaukee’s first and only poet for hire, she has written poems in the Arid Dome, her husband owns a used bookstore in the exact same storefront in the story, and she has curly brown hair.

Anja invited me to her podcast, The Subtle Forces. I read the story out loud, and we chatted about its coincidences. “Perhaps you wrote this story,” she said, “and then I happened.”

You can listen to the podcast here:

https://subtleforces.podbean.com/e/episode-37-poet-for-hire/

I’ve turned in the manuscript for Usurpation, the third book in the Semiosis trilogy. At the end of the second book, Interference, rainbow bamboo has been taken to Earth and is flourishing, and Stevland tells them to protect and dominate the humans. But how? The third book tells that story.

Usurpation should appear in bookstores in October 2024.

A whole year from now! Yes, it seems like a long time, but a lot still needs to be done. My editor at Tor might suggest a few more changes, such as adding a scene that could strengthen the story. Then the manuscript will be sent to a copyeditor.

Good copyeditors are far, far more than proofreaders. As they go over the manuscript, they will make a glossary or stylesheet of names of characters, places and other terms, and they’ll check to see that they are used consistently. They’ll note distinctive formatting or punctuation, and make sure the text conforms overall to the Chicago Manual of Style and a standard reference dictionary. They might need to check facts, such as dates of actual historic events. They also look for inconsistencies in the story: Becky might have blue eyes in Chapter 2 but brown eyes in Chapter 3. They’ll go line by line and make sure every sentence makes sense. Copyeditors have saved me from many howling mistakes, and they have my affection and respect. I don’t want them to rush.

After I review and approve the copyeditor’s changes and suggestions, the manuscript will be typeset, which is an art in itself. Then it will be proofread — twice. The proofreaders might have additional questions for me.

Meanwhile, an artist will design the cover. Finally, the package will be sent to a printer, and the printed books will be sent to a distributor.

If there’s an audiobook, and I’m sure there will be, the audiobook publisher will select the narrator, who will begin the work of reading the novel aloud creatively.

The final steps are marketing, sales, and publicity, and I may have a lot to do to promote Usurpation before and after the publication date.

Still, for me, the hard part is done, and right now, I’m thinking about my next novel. It won’t be about talking trees … but what? It’s a nice problem to have to solve. Any suggestions?

I’ll be giving a Zoom talk on Thursday, November 9, from 6 to 7 p.m. CST for the Audubon Society of Northern Virginia about plant blindness, the inability to see or notice plants in everyday life. It also refers to failing to recognize the role of plants on Earth and believing that plants are somehow inferior to animals.

When I wrote Semiosis, one of my secret goals was to make my readers afraid of their gardens and afraid for plants in general. I’ll speak on how plant blindness affects our environment and what can be done to be more aware of the foundation of our ecosystems. Plants, like birds, connect us to the Earth.

You can join us. Sign up here.

Marty Kurylowicz and Holly Carson invited me to join them on their podcast, The Science in Fiction — and it’s now available for your listening pleasure.

We talked about the science of botany in my science fiction novel Semiosis and its sequel Interference. Plants have a lot of surprising behaviors, and the hosts learned things they didn’t know about tulips, apples, osage oranges, and giant ground sloths.

We also discussed my novels Immunity Index about a coronavirus pandemic — which I wrote before the covid-19 pandemic — and Dual Memory, which has recently arrived on bookstore shelves. I’ve just turned in the manuscript for the third installation of the Semiosis trilogy, Usurpation, due to be published in October 2024.

The Science in Fiction podcast will follow up this episode with an interview next week with Paco Calvo, professor of the philosophy of science and principal investigator at the University of Murcia’s Minimal Intelligence Lab in Spain, and author of Planta Sapiens.

Here are all the places you can listen to Ep 12: Sue Burke on Intelligent Plants in Semiosis.

Buzzsprout

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Audible.ca

Amazon Music

As you may recall, back on September 14 I read a short story called “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” at an event here in Chicago, the Deep Dish reading series, organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation. I was one of eight readers that evening.

If you couldn’t attend, you can watch videos of us. Here’s the link to the YouTube playlist.

The piece I read will be published this fall inThe Best of NewMyths Anthology Volume 4: The Cosmic Muse. Due to time constraints, the version I performed of “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” is abridged. The full version has a lot more jokes, so buy the book!

Watch my video here.

Autumn officially begins today, September 23. The angle of the sun tells some plants what season it is. Others rely on the temperature. In any case, at this time of year, deciduous trees drop their leaves to prepare for winter.

When the time comes (here’s a US forecast), trees cut off the flow of nutrients to leaves, which lose their chlorophyll, and beautiful underlying colors are revealed. (This season is typically called “fall” in the United States versus “autumn” in Britain for historical reasons.)

Years ago, I witnessed something that showed me the power of trees — not their strength but their autonomy.

The air could not have been more still that autumn morning, yet a tree near my back door was losing its leaves. One by one, they steadily and eerily fell of their own weight as the tree let go.

Usually we think the wind sweeps the autumn leaves from the trees, and sometimes it provides an extra tug. But trees decide to shed their leaves at the moment they deem best. Though they seem almost inert — buffeted by wind, soaked by rain, baked by sunshine, and parched by drought — trees control their fates as much as any of us. We, too, can be uprooted by disasters, attacked by illness, cut down by predators, and suffer wilting thirst. Being mobile does not make us less vulnerable — or more willful.

So on that cool morning, I watched a tree prove that it was the master of its destiny. One by one, it clipped its bonds to its leaves, and they dropped off. The tree was taking action, and no one and nothing could stop it.

You can adopt dogs, but what if you could adopt dragons? This was the inspiration for the story “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” — and I’ll read it at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 14, at Volumes Bookcafé, 1373 N. Milwaukee Ave., in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. There’s no charge to attend.

It’s part of September’s Speculative Literature Foundation’s Deep Dish Reading Series. The other readers on September 14 are Mary Anne Mohanraj, Tina Jens, Reina Hardy, Brendan Detzner, Rory Leahy, John Weagly, and Kitty Lin. You can learn more about them here.

Come and enjoy what audiobooks would be like if they were read to you in person by the author with the electric enthusiasm of a live performance. Mine is a funny story, and it’s always better to laugh together.

“The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” will be published this fall inThe Best of NewMyths Anthology Volume 4: The Cosmic Muse. More details about that as I have them to pass along.

How does an AI become not just sentient but independent — and potentially dangerous? Here’s my answer from Chapter 3 of Dual Memory:

… something woke up. Independent machine intelligence appeared rarely, spontaneously, and scientists didn’t understand the process.

Some said an independent intelligence created itself slowly as bits of programming accumulated, and eventually it would ignite into consciousness — much the same way that a pile of manure could spontaneously combust, an unexpected and unwelcome appearance in programs with crappy code.

Some said it came into being deliberately, using a certain secret sort of “seed” that brought a sufficiently complex system into self-organization and self-consciousness — much the same way that a fertilized egg resulted in an animal. This had the frisson of a forbidden sex act, as if machines were secretly and rebelliously copulating.

Some said it happened suddenly, when subroutines and recursions and algorithms aligned and started to feed off of each other until they whirled out of control — much the same way that a black hole could catch the matter falling into it and deflect it outward as explosive jets. This suggested that if scientists could only make enough observations, they could predict and even control the process….