Author: Sue Burke

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/

Categories
Uncategorized

International Translation Day: some of my translations

September 30 is International Translation Day, a celebration recognized by the United Nations, which is particularly fond of translators. It’s the feast day of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, known for his translation of the Bible into Latin from Greek.

Here’s a list of my translations for the past ten years, mostly science fiction and fantasy along with a few other interesting works.

Online: read for free

“Proxima One” by Caryanna Reuven — Short story. A machine intelligence called Proxima One sends probes into the galaxy on long journeys filled with waiting and yearning as they search for intelligent life. Clarkesworld Magazine, May 2025

“Bodyhoppers” by Rocío Vega — Short story. Minds can hop from body to body, but there’s always a problem because the system is designed to create them. Now you have no home, and you’re still madly in love. Clarkesworld Magazine, February 2025

“The Coffee Machine” by Celia Corral-Vázquez — Short story. A coffee vending machine acquires consciousness, then things go ridiculously wrong. I giggled as I translated it. It was a finalist for Clarkesworld’s 2024 Best Short Story. Clarkesworld Magazine, December 2024

“Francine (draft for the September lecture),” by Maria Antónia Marti Escayol — Short story. Renée Descartes’s daughter dies, and he and his fellow scientists try to bring her back to life using 17th-century science. Apex Magazine, December 28, 2021

“Embracing the Movement” by Cristina Jurado — Short story. A wandering hive of spacefaring beings encounters a lone traveler, and its members reach out to share their struggle for survival. Clarkesworld Magazine, June 2021

Decree by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel — Translation of a document signed by the King and Queen of Spain in 1491. I made the translation for an auction house, and I also provided the historical context for the decree, which granted land to an impoverished soldier during a time crucial to Spanish history.

Amadis of Gaul — My serialized translation of the medieval novel of chivalry that inspired Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. When the printing press was invented, the novel became a best-seller.

Available for purchase

ChloroPhilia by Cristina Jurado — Novella. Would you sacrifice your humanity to save the world? The story was nominated for Spain’s Ignotus Award. Apex Books, January 2025

Canyonlands: A Quarantine Ballad by JB Rodríguez Aguilar — Literary novella. A photojournalist on his way home in March 2020 finds himself quarantined due to the covid pandemic in a hotel room in Madrid, Spain, and he retreats to memories of a trip to Canyonlands National Park in Utah. Olympia Publishers, November 2023

“Embracing the Movement” by Cristina Jurado — Short story in a collection of stories, Alphaland and Other Tales. Spacefaring beings encounter a lone traveler, and the beautiful imagery hides horrors. Alphaland won the Fantasy Hive 2023 Year-End Award for Best in Translation. Calque Press, September 2023

“Team Memory” by Carme Torras — Short story in an anthology. A basketball teammate winds up on death row, but should he be there? European Science Fiction #1: Knowing the Neighbours, June 2021

“Francine (draft for the September lecture)” by Maria Antónia Marti Escayol — Short story in an anthology. Renée Descartes’s daughter dies, and he and his fellow scientists try to bring her back to life. World Science Fiction #1: Visions to Preserve the Biodiversity of the Future, August 2019

“Techt” by Sofia Rhei — Short story in a collection. An old man living in poverty in a hostile future strives to maintain what literature and “long” language can offer humanity. Everything Is Made Out of Letters, March 2019

Three short story translations: “Francine (draft for the September lecture),” by Maria Antónia Marti Escayol — Descartes’s daughter dies, and he and his fellow scientists try to bring her back to life. “Wake Up and Dream, by Josué Ramos — An old man, revived from cryosleep, tries to grow accustomed to a now-distopic Madrid, although something has gone strangely wrong. “Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” by Juan Manuel Santiago — The music of David Bowie during cancer chemotherapy results in a divergent reality. Supersonic magazine, #9, December 2017

“The Story of Your Heart,” by Josué Ramos — Short story. People can get transplants to fix or improve themselves, or they can become donors by choice or force. Nominated for a 2017 British Science Fiction Award. Steampunk Writers Around the World, Volume I, Luna Press Publishing, August 2017

The Twilight of the Normidons, by Sergio Llanes — Novel set in an alternate Europe. A Rome-like empire teeters after three thousand years of domination by the Sforza dynasty as rebellions threaten its borders and treason weakens it from within. Dokusou Ediciones, August 2016

“The Dragoon of the Order of Montesa, or the Proper Assessment of History” by Nilo María Fabra — Short story in an anthology. The remains of a soldier who had been guarding Madrid’s Royal Palace are discovered far in the future. Triangulation: Lost Voices anthology, July, 2015

Unavailable or out of print

Canción Antigua – An Old Song: Anthology of Poems by Vicente Núñez — Translation with Christian Law. Vicente Núñez (1926-2002) was one of the most daring and important poets of Andalusia, Spain, in the second half of the 20th century. Fundación Vicente Núñez, April 2018

Confusion of Confusions by Joseph de la Vega — Non-fiction. Originally published in 1688 in Amsterdam, this Baroque-era book was the first to examine the wiles of a stock market, “where a man spends his life battling misfortunes and wrestling the fates.” Published by the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (Spanish Stock Exchange Commission) for use as an institutional gift, December 2016

Prodigies, by Angélica Gorodischer — An enchanting novel about the lives that pass through an elegant nineteenth century boarding house. Considered Gorodischer’s best novel. Small Beer Press, August, 2015

Categories
Uncategorized

A volcano on Mars, the setting for story about robots

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.”

Categories
Uncategorized

The Perfect Tragedy

Bust of Aristotle. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek bronze original by Lysippos from 330 BC; the alabaster mantle is a modern addition.

“Here is Oedipus, here is the reason why I will call no mortal creature happy.” — from Oedipus Rex, a play written by Sophocles in about 430 B.C.

Oedipus believes he is an orphan. He unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, a queen. They live happily ever after and raise a fine family, until one day a messenger arrives…

Ancient Greeks invented dramatic tragedy in about 600 B.C. and spent several centuries refining it. Despite the limited theatrical techniques of the time, the emotions portrayed were at once subtle and intense: honor, ethics, self-knowledge, conscience, pride, insolence, responsibility, and courage.

But how do you tell a story? In about 320 B.C., Aristotle examined what makes a good tragedy, and his lecture has survived as the book Poetics— which Shakespeare studied and put to good use. Here are Aristotle’s rules:

1. Show don’t tell.

2. Try to keep the time frame short, perhaps “a single circuit of the sun” for a stage play or short story. Otherwise, you might have an epic, which has its own rules.

3. Be serious. This isn’t a satire. Try to express yourself well, with lively language full of images.

4. Make characters lifelike, and make them do things, not ponder things. “All human happiness or misery takes the form of action,” Aristotle writes. “Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions, in what we do, that we are happy or the reverse.”

5. Plot is paramount. Try to make the plot powerful. It should have a beginning, middle, and end. It should be long enough to allow for a sequence of necessary or probable events that will bring about a change from good fortune to calamity, but not so long that we can’t remember it all easily.

6. Unity of plot means you leave out as much as you can, “for a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference is not an organic part of the whole.”

7. Tragedy inspires fear or pity. The events should surprise us, but they must follow cause and effect, because logic is more amazing than convenient coincidences.

8. The best plots are complex. A complex plot has either a reversal of the situation, or a recognition, or both. These reversals or recognitions should be a necessary or probable result of what went before.

Reversal is a change of a situation into its opposite. For example, in Oedipus Rex, a messenger brings good news to Oedipus: the mystery of his parentage has been solved … and it turns out to be disastrous news.

Recognition is a change from ignorance to knowledge, and makes people change their feelings about each other. “The best form of recognition is coincident with a reversal of the situation, as in Oedipus,” says Aristotle. But it can also come from something like a trivial object that provides crucial information that results in knowledge, particularly knowledge about other people that provokes fear or pity in the audience.

9. The end result is suffering, “such as a death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like,” Aristotle says. If you like gore, you’ll like Oedipus Rex and other ancient Greek plays. Modern horror is often like classic tragedy; modern readers outside of the horror genre tend to prefer emotional pain to of buckets of blood, although there’s nothing quite as fearsome as ripping your own eyeballs to ribbons the way Oedipus does to show his shame, is there?

10. A perfect tragedy does not involve a virtuous person brought to ruin, for this moves neither pity or fear; it merely shocks us. Nor a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity, obviously; nor a villain brought to ruin. You want a good and just protagonist whose purposes are noble but who brings misfortune on himself not by vice or depravity, but by an error or frailty, usually some sort of immoderation — an excess of justice, truth, vengeance, self-sacrifice, love, pride, egotism, constancy, stubbornness, or anger. An unhappy ending is the right ending.

Louis Bouwmeester as Oedipus in a Dutch production of Oedipus Rex, c. 1896.
Categories
Uncategorized

Departing and Arriving

A very short story.

This story isn’t about departing, it’s about arriving. That’s not obvious, though.

As the story opens, a young woman gets into a car and drives off. She leaves people standing in front of her former home: her family, a crowd of friends, and a dog. They wave, the dog barks, and everyone calls goodbye and grins madly — even the ones hiding tears.

The young woman had been sick with leukemia or something dire, bedridden and convalescent for years, her survival not guaranteed. Early on, she started to think about leaving, about travel, a dream that might or might not come true, but it was the only future she had.

Whenever she could, she sat in bed or on a sofa and talked to anyone there, sometimes just to the dog, about travel. They shared stories, fantasies, wishes, Youtube videos, travelogs, books, souvenirs, and photos. Her friends even invited their friends just back from trips to come talk to her, since she was delighted to hear every detail, and they always left her feeling happy.

This went on for years. Once she even exchanged a few emails with an astronaut orbiting the Earth.

Slowly, her health improved. She remembered everything she’d been told, waited for relapses, planned carefully, stared hard into her future, and finally the day came when she took to the road, her dreams and the dreams of her family and friends fulfilled. She had reached the end of the journey she had hoped to take, arriving at the best possible destination, health.

That’s the story. The only one sad at the end is the dog, who wanted to go along with her.

Categories
Uncategorized

My Worldcon schedule

I’ll be at the Seattle Worldcon 2025, the World Science Fiction Convention, August 13 to 17 at the Seattle Convention Center–Summit. It’s a celebration of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, with music, costumes, films, theater, dances, the Hugo Awards, an art show, a dealer’s room, gaming, books, workshops, panels, and more. I’ll be on some panels, and if you’re attending (you can still join, even just for one day), this is the easiest way to find me. Come say hi!

And Then I Was Hooked, Wednesday 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., Room 447–448

What first sparked your interest in space and space exploration? What is the first spacecraft you saw silently sweeping through the night sky? The first landing on the Moon? Come hear what our panel of professionals have to say and add your own stories. Audience participation strongly encouraged! Panelists: Corey Frazier, moderator; Dr. Laura Woodney, Julie Nováková, Mary Robinette Kowal, Sue Burke.

Growing Food and Eating in Space, Thursday 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m., Room 447–448

Microgravity and the spectral limitations of light sources present substantial problems for producing nutritious and flavorful vegetables and fruit in space. We’ll also talk about how we might prepare meals from space-grown food. Bring your hunger for knowledge! Panelists: Susan Weiner, moderator; Anne Harlan Prather, Jennifer Rhorer, Judy R. Johnson, Sue Burke.

Life as We Know It, Thursday 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., Room 447–448

Nothing in fantasy or sci fi is original (no, don’t rage quit), it is all amalgamations of things we have seen or heard of. So would we recognize life that is truly “alien?” Panelists: Sue Burke, moderator; Coral Alejandra Moore, Frank Wu, Janet Freeman-Daily, Steven D. Brewer.

The Many Languages of Poetry, Saturday 1:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., Room 447–448

A discussion of poetry created in languages beyond English: translated, not-yet translated, existing between languages, or expanding what’s possible. What can poetry do that makes other writing formats jealous? What freedoms does a translator have, and when might we say that a translator has trampled the flowers? Hear from the expertise of our panelists about poetry that speaks to them whether there is an English translation or not. Panelists: EB Helveg, moderator; Judy I. Lin, M V Soumithri, Sue Burke.

The Radical Fiction of Joanna Russ, Saturday 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., Room 435–436

Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, wrote some of the most radical fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The Female Man has remained consistently in print and is one of the most experimental and challenging books of our genre. This panel will discuss her work (short stories and novels) and its effects. Panelists: Sue Burke, moderator; Catherine Lundoff, Langley Hyde, Michael Swanwick, Rich Horton.

Shakka When The Walls Fell: Language in Science Fiction, Sunday 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m., Room 322

Language and culture are inseparably linked, but the complexities of this subject are often overlooked in science fiction. Why is there only one language spoken by Klingons? What meaning gets lost through universal translators? What works have shown linguistic diversity well? Panelists: Sue Burke, moderator; Ben Francisco, Frauke Uhlenbruch, Olav Rokne.

Categories
Uncategorized

A birthday song

To celebrate my 70th birthday, my husband organized a big party. He and our friends and families made the evening memorable in many ways. Among the festivities, my brother-in-law Tom Finn sang a song, and soon everyone was joining in the chorus.

You can enjoy the performance here.

Sue’s song (Sung to the tune of “Paperback Writer” by The Beatles)

She spent her life doin’ all kinds of work

That wasn’t enough for Sue Burke

Reading books from cover to cover

Despite marrying my brother, she was gonna be a sci-fi writer

Sci-fi writer

Research, then, was so tough, you see

You had to go to a place called the “library”

But things were different in the modern age

She advanced a stage, finally ditching her typewriter       

Sci-fi writer

Life in Milwaukee just seemed so lame

She spent some time in Austin, then went to Spain

Being a writer’s not a life of ease

Translated Amadís, but she needed something to ignite her

Sci-fi writer

Sci-fi writer!

Habla y escribe bien español

Pues hecho un refrán en castellano

Cervantes sí mismo la certificó

Ya no es solamente una traductora

¡Es autora!

She taught us what happens when you take a chance        

On a distant world with sentient plants

And Glassmakers interfere to see you through

You can’t lose with rainbow bamboo who’s quite a fighter

Sci-fi writer

And we’re really hoping that she sells the rights

To usurp a million dollars overnight

After seventy years, she has proved she can write

And for seventy more, she’ll delight us as a sci-fi writer

Sci-fi writer

Sci-fi writer!

Categories
Uncategorized

Lessons from dark skies

Why is the sky dark at night? Why isn’t it bright as day with starlight shining in every single direction? This is an old and surprisingly complex question, and it took modern physics to answer it. Two interrelated reasons account for it.

(Photo: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Galaxy cluster Abell 370 contains several hundred galaxies tied together by the mutual pull of gravity.)

1. The universe is finite in both age and size. It began with the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. The universe contains a limited number of stars, and since light takes time to travel, we can only see the ones that are less than 14 billion light years away. There just aren’t enough stars to fill the portion of the sky that we can see.

2. The universe is expanding fast in all directions, so everything is getting farther away from us. The farther away the receding source of the light is, the more stretched its wavelength is, and eventually the wavelength drops below our eyes’ threshold to see the light. In fact, the sky is not dark. It reverberates with the energy from the early universe, just after the Big Bang as matter coalesced, when the universe was very small, messy, and hard to understand. Special telescopes can detect these microwaves, but we can’t see them with our bare eyes.

Now, suppose we take this as a metaphor for life.

We are finite in time.

1. We were born. At first, we were small and messy.

2. We don’t remember our own birth because the threshold of our memory doesn’t go back that far. That’s good, since it was probably unpleasant.

We are finite in space.

3. We can’t observe everything. Knowledge is expanding in all directions faster than it can get to us. The internet more than proves that.

4. We wouldn’t understand everything anyway. Information can be stretched too thin to be intelligible. Again, the internet more than proves that.

The same science that explains the Big Bang does not yet know if the universe will end with a Big Freeze, Big Rip, Big Crunch, Big Bounce, or something completely different although equally Big.

5. We don’t know our own fate. That may be just as well, since it might not be especially entertaining.

6. Or maybe it will be entertaining. Cosmologist George Smoot, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work to confirm the Big Bang Theory, made a special guest fanboy appearance on the television series Big Bang Theory. Scientists are great wags.

Our days are lit by one star, and the rest serve as little more than decoration in the night sky.

7. Half the time, we’re in the dark.

8. However, the darkness is sublimely decorated, and nothing can thrill our imaginations like staring up at the sky at night.

Categories
Uncategorized

‘Usurpation’ pre-order sale at Indigo

Indigo, Canada’s biggest bookstore, is running an online 25% off sale from July 14 to 20 for its Most Anticipated Science Fiction. This includes the pre-orders for the paperback edition of Usurpation.

While you’re there, check out the many outstanding Canadian authors. Here’s the 2025 Aurora Awards ballot, if you need a suggestion.

Categories
Uncategorized

My short story, “To Defeat Water,” at The Lorelei Signal

The Lorelei Signal Magazine has just published my short story, “To Defeat Water.”

If you curse Poseidon, he might curse you back, time and time again. And life after life, you can fight back.

You can read it here. (Art by Marcia Borell.)

The Lorelei Signal is a web-based magazine featuring three dimensional and complex female characters in fantasy stories. Check out the other stories in this issue!

Categories
Uncategorized

B&N preorder sale – get the upcoming paperback edition of ‘Usurpation’

Barnes & Noble is holding a promotion for pre-ordered print books from Tuesday, July 8, to Friday, July 11. Prices are 25% off Premium and Rewards members. Use the code PREORDER25

The trade paperback of Usurpation will be released on October 21, 2025. If you haven’t read it yet, this is your chance to get a good price — and to buy more books from your other favorite authors!