Author: Sue Burke

What can stories teach us? Here are three quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018).

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel — or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel — is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.… And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite fully what it is to be human. For the story — from Rumpelstiltskin ” to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” (1970)

“Distancing, the pulling back from ‘reality’ in order to see it better, is perhaps the essential gesture of SF. It is by distancing that SF achieves aesthetic joy, tragic tension, and moral cogency.” (1973)

“Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.” (1976)

Like many avid readers, I read more than one thing at a time, and one of those things is the “insomnia book.” This book remains at my bedside, and when I can’t sleep — perhaps I don’t feel well, perhaps something weighs too heavily on my mind — I open up that book.

Right now, it’s The Education of Henry Adams, the autobiography of Henry Adams (1838–1918). It won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize.

Four virtues make this a good insomnia book:

First, it’s calm and calming. Even when Adams shares his distress over the US Civil War or laments over all the time he wasted in his youth, he does so looking back with a mature, serene appraisal.

Second, it’s interesting but not enthralling. I want to turn the page, but I don’t feel compelled if I start to feel sleepy.

Third, it’s not complex. Adams does something, then next year he does something else. I don’t have to keep track of a large cast of characters or series of plot twists. I can go a couple of weeks without reading it (I usually sleep well) and not feel lost when I pick it up again.

Fourth, it’s distracting. The events occurred long ago and far away.

At other times, my insomnia book has been an explanation of the mathematics of game theory or a deep dive into English grammar. I find that non-fiction tends to work best.

I write this not to recommend Adams’ book but to recommend having an insomnia book. You should find an author who will help you feel that if you can’t sleep, reading this book is a good option — but if a little while later you can sleep, putting this book down is a good option, too. In fact, if you pick the right book, it will nudge you toward sleep.

I wish you sweet dreams.

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Warning: contains spoilers.

Although this novel was praised by Alfred Bester as “one of the finest flashes of heat lightning to dazzle us this year,” that is, the year 1960, and John Clute, in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, called it “now widely regarded as an sf classic,” I respectfully disagree.

I think there was a great SF story in there trying to get out, but it stood as much chance as an escape from Alcatraz. The author also seemed to be trying to write a different story than the SF one, and he failed at that, too.

Clute said the “perfectly competent surface narration deals with a hard-SF solution to the problem of an alien labyrinth, discovered on the Moon, which kills anyone who tries to pass through it.” Well, it aspired to being competent. Readers are shown some technology about the means to reach the Moon, or rather, the reader must wade through long monologues about the technology. This could have been a story with a lot of action. Instead it’s largely a collection of windy speeches: a lot of telling, not much showing.

In addition, the alien labyrinth on the Moon is a piece of nonsense once we get on the inside. Passing through it added no more meaning to the story than swimming through an alligator-filled moat. It’s a lost opportunity to create a transcendent story about an alien artifact that tells us something about our universe.

Clute also says, not unreasonably, that the means to get to the Moon, which involves creating two copies of a person, then killing one of them, “is a sustained rite de passage, a doppelgänger conundrum about the mind-body split, a death-pean.” Well, it aspired to being that, too. The idea isn’t really explored, however. Instead, various characters deliver long monologues about life, death, courage, and what it means to be a man (to be macho masculine, that is, not a human being).

For example:

“A man should fight, Hawks,” Barker said, his eyes distant. “A man should show he is never afraid to die. He should go into the midst of his enemies, singing his death song, and he should kill or be killed; he must never be afraid to die; he must never be afraid to meet the tests of his manhood. A man who turns his back — who lurks at the edge of the battle, and pushes others in to face his enemies –” Barker looked suddenly and obviously at Hawks. “That’s not a man. That’s some kind of crawling, wriggling thing.”

The reader will also find long, sometimes shouty, monologues in which men jostle over who is the sexually dominant alpha male. (What does this have to do with an alien artifact on the Moon?)

In addition, although Budrys gives us strong characterizations, those characters are deeply emotionally troubled, disturbingly self-destructive, and some of them might be sociopaths. They spend a lot of time (and speechifying) trying to hurt each other emotionally and sometimes physically in a vicious psychodrama that is a pointless sideshow to the actual SF story. Edward Albee could have written it, and probably less tediously.

Carl Sagan, in a 1978 article for the New York Times, called Rogue Moon one of the “rare few science fiction novels [that] combine a standard science fiction theme with a deep human sensitivity.” He seems to have read it as a boy, and I think children have such an intense, sensible hunger for big ideas with that they can be willing to overlook big ideas that are poorly presented. An adult might think otherwise: this is a could-have-been-good SF story that gets obscured by a different story, and both are badly told.

View all my reviews

All Things Huge and Hideous by G. Scott Huggins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I bought this book from the author at a Deep Dish reading here in Chicago (http://speculativeliterature.org/prog…). The section he read sounded funny, and there’s never enough humorous speculative fiction, so I started this book with high hopes.

In fact, the book turned out to be genuinely funny high fantasy. It’s more a collection of short stories than a novel, although the stories are linked by overarching circumstances. A human veterinarian, Dr. James DeGrande, lives in the realm of an evil Dark Lord, and he treats dragons, vampires, dire-wolves, minotaurs, and the like. The problems, however, more often result from the owners, not the patients, although invisible animals do pose unique difficulties. Orcs, vampires, beast masters, and wizards come to him with some sort of failed plot or misdeed that has caused medical problems for their pets. The treatments quickly become complicated in ridiculous ways that might cost James his life.

Throughout it all, James maintains a wry detachment. If you like Murderbot, you might like this. It’s a bit lighter and obviously fantasy rather than science fiction, but the humor touches some of the same notes.

View all my reviews

It’s all cancelled: the Deep Dish reading on March 14, the Longwood Gardens Community Read on March 27 and 28, and other events I was planning to attend, from church to cocktails.

Of course, we have to do what we must to keep ourselves and others safe. We’re all in this together. I’m 64 years old, and although I feel well and have no special health problems (that I know of), people my age and older are at a higher risk. But you youngsters aren’t 100% assured of survival, so you should take care, too.

I’m not much of an introvert, as you may know, and this comes at ironic moment for me. I’ve been hunkered down for a while, working hard, staying home, trying to meet a deadline, and now that I’m on track and can go out and enjoy human contact again, suddenly I need to maintain social distance.

On the other hand, I’ve worked from home for decades, and I’m enough of an introvert to enjoy it. I can sit in my nice little home office in splendid seclusion. But soon, I won’t be alone. My husband has been ordered to work from home starting on Monday. My Fortress of Solitude is about to be invaded.

I’m joining an especially exciting lineup for the Spring Deep Dish Reading on Saturday, March 14, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Volumes Bookcafe, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago. It’s organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation.

“Francine (Draft for the September Lecture)” is a short story by Maria Antònia Martí Escayol, a science fiction writer who lives in Barcelona, Spain. My translation of the story appears in World Science Fiction #1: Visions to Preserve the Biodiversity of the Future. This haunting tale investigates the death and posthumous life of Francine, daughter of René Descartes. It’s one of sixteen outstanding works in this anthology by some of the world’s finest authors.

The Deep Dish reading will also feature Dawn Bonanno, Steven H Silver, Evan Steuber, and Laura Kat Young. In addition, it will celebrate the release of Mary Anne Mohanraj’s new book, A Feast of Serendib: Recipes from Sri Lanka. Come and sample some delicious treats from the cookbook! I know Mary Anne, and she’s a great cook and passionate about her family’s homeland. Volumes Bookcafe also sells coffee, beer, wine, and baked goods, and Deep Dish is always a friendly event.

Since I can’t give you some of her chili-mango cashews over the internet, let me give you a taste of “Francine”:

The joy of the house was Francine. She was born in 1635, the same year in which France declared war on Spain, and Japan prohibited its merchants from traveling overseas. Her childhood took place amid the tree-lined streets and lawn-filled parks of the city, and the books and discussion circles of her home. Helena’s hospitality inspired an extensive group of intellectuals to form the Orbis de Deventer (for more information, consult historian Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit’s 2021 book by Goethe publishers).…
… A few months after her visit to the laboratory, the first symptoms of Francine’s illness, scarlet fever, made their appearance. According to the official account, the illness began on August 21st, and the girl died three weeks later on September 7th. According to Helena’s diary, the illness began in April, and the next day the girl lost her ability to speak, a little later consciousness, and she died five months later. Francine herself, in her notes from 1650, described the sensations she recalled of those initial moments:
“The warm glow of consciousness pulled me down into an insupportable interior heat. My body became a glass vial haunted by atoms teeming amid red ashes. Some atoms found a proper place inside myself and squeezed in harmoniously. Others simply remained suspended, colliding from time to time in senseless struggle. Some atoms were terrestrial, flat, and square; others aqueous, round, empty, wet, and spongy; or gaseous, long, and straight; or igneous, acute, and sharp. Their random movements traced out the destiny of my new world. A world where, for a long time, I would be merely a body without a head.”

Dying Earths: Sixteen Stories from the Ends of Times by Sue Burke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I’m a contributor to this anthology. When I got my contributor’s copy, I read the other stories. It’s a theme anthology about living (or not) on a dying Earth, and the stories range from high fantasy to grim science fiction.

The strength of this anthology is the variety. It opens with a tale of science gone wrong, then a story about the making of a movie on Earth, followed by a sort of parable about Gaia herself. In the sixteen stories, sometimes humanity survives, sometimes it doesn’t. Maybe cockroaches are the future. Maybe we just have to survive in the wreckage of a grand failure. Two of the stories seem to start the same and then head in very different directions. My story deals with an ecological disaster, but other disasters are possible. Gods might die, or humans might die — and they might deserve to die.

My favorite story is the last one, “Convertir” by Andrew Leon Hudson. It starts with a lot of tension: a girl is being raised in a cult whose beliefs she doesn’t share — then it takes a wild, weird turn. Andrew tells me he’s expanding it into a YA novel, and I want to read it.

This kind of anthology, in the end, invites the reader to dive deeply into the theme. How might the Earth end, and will humanity go down with it? Will it involve radiation, robots, or dragons? If speculative fiction predicts the future (or helps us try to avoid bad futures), can we get any hints about what to do, here and now, to keep Earth alive?

View all my reviews

A Community Read Conversation with Sue Burke: I’ll be at Longwood Gardens as part of its Community Read program on March 27 and 28. Semiosis is one of this year’s books. At the Longwood blog, I answer some questions about the book and my love for plants.

Lisa Carter is founder and creative director of Intralingo Inc., and she’s a leading professional in the translation world. She was kind enough to feature me in her Spotlight series, meant to promote authors and translators and their work. In this 22-minute video interview (also available as a podcast), we talk about language, including the challenges of creating languages for Semiosis and Interference that were alien “enough” but still comprehensible to the reader.

Spain has a tradition of tertulias, which are informal social gatherings, usually in bars, often to discuss art or literature. When I was living in Madrid, Spain, the Tertulia Madrileña de Literatura Fantástica (Madrid Tertulia for Speculative Fiction, called TerMa for short) was meeting, and I had the pleasure to take part. TerMa became an engine for science fiction, fantasy, and horror from its founding in 1991 and for the next two decades. Now a half-hour documentary revisits those exciting times. Available on YouTube, La TerMa, semblanza de una época interviews the people whose literary lives were changed. I say a few words, too. In Spanish.

On YouTube, Linguistics in SFF Recommendations by Kalanadi, a book reviewer, has a v-blog about language, xenolinguistics, interspecies communication. “This is my favorite topic in science fiction by far” she says. “I’ve been asked occasionally for a recommendations video about this, so today I attempt to deliver.” Among the recommendations is Semiosis.

Author Karen Hugg interviews me for her blog.

Steven J. Wright reviews Interference.

The Nerd Cantina interviews me for its podcast.

Finally, on YouTube, you can listen to this Clarkesworld Magazine podcast of my novellette, “Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons?” The story was published in the November 2017 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and is read by Kate Baker.

I took this photo last summer at Blarney Castle* in Ireland. The castle’s grounds contain a wonderful variety of gardens — jungle, Himalayan, bog, fern, and more — as well as the poison garden.

The castle’s web page describes it this way: “Hidden behind the castle battlements, you will find the new poison garden, which you must enter at your own risk. In this garden, the plants are so dangerous and toxic that they may be kept in large cage-like structures.… ”

Why is this plant behind bars? Because it’s poison ivy, Toxicodendron radicans. You have to be protected from it. Study it carefully, and if you see it in the wild, back away slowly.

This garden also grows wolfsbane, mandrake, and other plants that have medical or toxic properties, or were once believed to have an effect on humans.

I also saw a scraggly little plant growing inside a big cage: a marijuana seedling. That plant was being protected from us.

*I didn’t kiss the Blarney Stone. I gab too much already.

I’m going to Capricon this weekend, February 14 to 16, a science fiction convention held annually in the Chicagoland area since 1981. We’ll be at the Westin Chicago North Shore, discussing and debating topics about books, movies, television, anime, space exploration, and science, with special tracks for children and teens. This year’s theme is the Tropics of Capricon. Specifically, as the con describes it:

The tropics is a band around the globe from 23 degrees north to 23 degrees south. This region includes 40% of the world’s population and is underrepresented in science fiction and fantasy. These areas will also be disproportionately affected by global warming. For example, entire island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu are in danger of being wiped out by rising sea levels.

The word tropics evokes sun-drenched beaches, bustling marketplaces, and lush rain forests. The tropics can be a setting for escape and exploration, or for colonialism and dystopia. Will the future of the region be filled with glittering cities, or a wasteland ravaged by climate change? What does it mean for a science fiction and fantasy setting to be tropical? Come with us as we explore the nexus between geography and culture for science fiction and fantasy settings.

I’ll participate in two panels:

Real Tropical Killers, Friday, 2:30 p.m.
A jungle is a war zone. Jaguars and snakes and other animals will try to kill you, but there’s so much more danger. Many plants will also try to kill you or each other, animals hunt each other, disease lurks, and the climate might get you, too. In our fiction, we can invent all kinds of perils, or we can just incorporate all the threats that menace us in real life. Panelists: Jonathan Brazee, Patricia Sayre McCoy, Shelly Loke, Sue Burke, and Mari Brighe.

Lessons I Learned as a First-Time Novelist, Friday, 8:30 p.m.
From finding a publisher, working with an editor, to marketing your book and everything in-between, our panelists discuss what it’s like to publish your first novel. Panelists: Mark Huston, Sue Burke, John O’Neill, Clifford Johns, Tracy Townsend, and Jon R. Osborne.

I’ll also be autographing at the Autograph Table on Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Come by and say hi! You don’t have to bring something to sign, and there probably won’t be a line.