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/
You have eleven more months to celebrate the International Year of Plant Health. The United Nations General Assembly declared it with the slogan “Protecting Plants, Protecting Life.”
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization explains the reasons behind the declaration this way:
Plant health is increasingly under threat. Climate change and human activities have altered ecosystems, reducing biodiversity and creating new niches where pests can thrive. At the same time, international travel and trade has tripled in volume in the last decade and can quickly spread pests and diseases around the world causing great damage to native plants and the environment.
I can see the truth behind that statement every time I travel around Illinois, where I live. The Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle that attacks ash trees, has turned once-beautiful forests into vast stands of dead trees. In Italy, olive trees are being killed by xylella fastidiosa, a plant bacteria. A fungus may wipe out the most common banana.
Plants make up 80% of the food we eat and produce 98% of the oxygen we breathe.
We can do a lot to help. For starters, be careful when taking plants and plant products with you when you travel because they may spread plant pests and diseases. Be cautious when ordering plants and plant products online or through postal services because small packages can easily bypass regular phytosanitary controls. Try to manage or reduce your environmental footprint and protect and manage natural resources.
I’m honored to announce that Semiosis is this year’s Community Read at Longwood Gardens, along with the nonfiction book Weird Plants by Chris Thorogood, and for younger readers, The Enormous Potato by Aubrey Davis.
Longwood Gardens is a public horticultural garden in Kennett Square, near Philadelphia, PA, where “garden design, horticulture, education, and the arts interplay to inspire and enlighten our guests.”
Community Read events start on February 1, including book discussions at local public libraries, workshops such as a potato planting, and storytimes.
I will be at Longwood on Friday, March 27, and Saturday, March 28.
On Friday morning, I’ll teach a class, Creative Writing: Telling a Plant’s Story. The class description:
“Open your mind to the endless possibilities about plant life and its interaction and interdependence with humans. Join acclaimed author Sue Burke as she guides you through writing exercises to explore ways to approach plants as a point of view, using the tools of both speculative and literary fiction. Spend the afternoon writing and reflecting using Longwood Gardens as your inspiration. What new plant might you invent? What new world might you create?”
If you attend, I can tell you about the writing exercise that led to Chapter 1 of my novel.
On Saturday evening, I’ll participate in ”Attack of the Plant Nerds: Science Fiction vs. Science Fact. The event description:
“Are you Team Science Fiction or Team Science Fact? Join Semiosis author Sue Burke and a team of plant nerds for an evening exploring plants both real and imaginary. Burke discusses the inspiration behind the world of Pax, as well as answers questions about Interference, the sequel to Semiosis. Plant nerd experts round out the evening by sharing tales of their favorite odd and unusual plants.
“Following the talk, continue the conversation in our glorious Conservatory. Burke will hold a book signing, and the plant nerds will be available to answer questions. A light dessert reception adds to the fun.”
I’m hoping for a chocolate dessert.
When I’m not busy with events, you’ll find me wandering through the beautiful gardens.
If you can make it to Longwood Gardens, I’d love to meet you.
“I would go out to share some truffle with Pitman soon, and I would sing him a sad song about fear and hope, failure and healing, about sweet and fresh sap in leaves evergreen with grief. Maybe I could teach the pack to coo along. Music the Pax way. Cross-species communication. They never did that on Earth. Singing fippolions. Dancing fippokats. Helpful, talkative plants with a sophisticated appreciation of abstract ideas. Good times. They can happen. Wait and see.”
Here are the lyrics to that song. Feel free to set them to music if you want, and I would love to hear it if you do.
Grief Evergreen (Higgins’s Song)
People will die, and I knew that yesterday.
People will cry, and I know that now today.
I would have been fine just knowing that yesterday.
I didn’t want to learn I was right today.
(Chorus)
Fresh sap in the leaves evergreen,
clean and new every season,
grief evergreen.
The ache of a soul that lived a night too long,
the one that brought sorrow and failure and wrong,
the one I saw coming. I knew all along
I couldn’t stop it. I wish I were that strong.
(Repeat chorus)
Life is a song, and time never stops breathing.
I can’t be quiet, I can’t refuse to sing.
I can’t stop sunrise, and I can’t stop the spring.
It hurts more to keep silent. I have to sing.
On Thursday, January 9, I took part in the monthly Tangelo Reading here in Chicago. We had a wonderful evening with talented and passionate readers and an engaged and friendly audience. I read the opening pages of Semiosis and then a little essay about houseplants — with a window full of beautiful houseplants behind me as I spoke. If you couldn’t attend, here’s the essay I read:
***
Perhaps you have houseplants. I do. Perhaps you’ve killed a few. I certainly have. That means we’re serial killers.
So, do our houseplants hate us? No, they don’t, no matter how much you neglect them. In fact, they’re praying to their green gods for your prosperity. They’ll struggle on as best they can, offering you beauty and silent non-judgmental companionship in exchange — they hope — for more or less regular watering and a spot near sunlight.
Plants need you, no matter how inconstant you are. A lot of the vegetable kingdom depends on animals, in fact, and plants haven’t always chosen well.
Consider this story of apples and oranges — osage oranges, to be exact.
First, the apple: colorful and tasty. Many animals love sugary treats. Apple trees make sweet fruit for us to munch on so we’ll throw away the core, and the seeds can germinate in a new place. (They don’t trust us much, though. They’ve made their seeds too bitter to consume so we’ll do our job right.)
How has this strategy worked out?
Apples originated in central Asia, and ancient peoples brought them east and west. When apples reached North America, they found a champion named John Chapman, “Johnny Appleseed,” who brought orchards to the United States frontier. In the 20th century, with more human help, the trees conquered large portions of Washington State. Now, 63 million tons of apples are grown every year worldwide, much of them in northern China.
From the apple trees’ point of view, it doesn’t get better than this. They grow worldwide and get lots of tender loving care. Human beings have served them very well.
In contrast, there’s the osage orange tree. It also produces fruit: green, softball-sized, and lumpy, full of seeds and distasteful latex sap. No one eats it. The tree originated in North America and once grew widely, but by the time European settlers arrived, its territory had shrunk to the Red River basin in eastern Texas. How did it fail?
The fruit had appealed to the Pleistocene’s giant ground sloth, a member of North America’s long-lost megafauna. The sloth scarfed them down, not chewing much, and the seeds traveled safely through its digestive system, emerging in new territory. Then, 11,000 years ago, human beings came to North America and couldn’t resist the allure of a couple of tons of meat per slow-moving beast. Giant ground sloths disappeared, and six of the seven species of osage orange also went extinct.
Why haven’t the remaining trees adapted their fruit to contemporary tastes? Because trees live for a long time, and 11,000 years ago for them is like the High Middle Ages for us. Lucky for them, humans find their wood useful and rows of the trees effective windbreaks, so they currently grow across the United States and the world.
Still, useful wood isn’t much to offer the animal kingdom. Plants usually bribe us with food, the way that prairie grass entices grazers like bison to clear its domain of weeds. The bison nibble away weeds at the same time they munch on tasty grass leaves, which grass plants can easily replace. There used to be a lot more bison in North America, though. This strategy is starting to look shaky.
Flowering plants give bees nectar in exchange for hauling pollen from flower to flower, but bees seem to be having a rough time these days, too. If they go, both wild and domestic plants are in deep trouble.
Plants find animal partnerships tempting. We’ll work hard for a fairly low price. But we’re unreliable and short-lived as individuals — and too often as species.
Back to your houseplants. Many of them likely originated in tropical rainforests. Your living room resembles a jungle: warm, reasonably humid, and moderately lit. Growing in confinement there isn’t such a bad life.
You, on the other hand, are fragile, distractible, hyperactive, and a bit murderous of your own kind as well as other species. Have your houseplants fallen into good hands? Can apples rely on us, and for how long? Are osage oranges one more extinction away from their own disappearance?
Your houseplants suffer from existential angst. Food is love, and so is fleeting beauty. They give their all for you. Go water them, offer reassurance, and consider what you owe to plants. You — and other species — need to be there for them now and in the future. Make them happy.
I’ll be participating in the Tangelo reading series, held from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, January 9, at The Martin performance space, 2515 W. North Ave., in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago.
I plan to read from Semiosis and share a short essay — about what? I haven’t decided yet.
The event, the 23rd of the Tangelo series, will also feature: Emma Casey, a writer and performer and maker from Chicago. Levi Todd, a queer poet and lifelong Chicagoan, working as a healthy relationships educator with youth. Jitesh Jaggi, a recent immigrant from India who uses storytelling, poetry, dance, and writing to share his narratives.
Actually, I feel kind of bad about doing that. We have a nice planet. What I really enjoy are big ideas, so when I was asked to contribute to SSFWorld’s anthology Dying Earths, I thought, “What fun!”
Specifically, I was asked by the editors, Andrew Leon Hudson and N. E. White, for an ecological apocalypse — and I could interpret that theme broadly.
I had a head start thinking about that, given our own real-life ecological apocalypse. I also knew the Earth had gone through an ecological apocalypse — not by human hands — at the end of the Carboniferous Period. That led to some “what if” ideas, and soon I had a new, future apocalypse as a means to wreak destruction.
Dying Earths is out now as an ebook from Amazon for only $2.99, but it will also be available as a print-on-demand paperback early in the new year.
Stories from sixteen authors from around the globe are included: P.J. Richards, Daniel Ausema, Jez Patterson, Jeremy Megargee, N.E. White, Matthew Hughes, Andrew Leon Hudson, James Maxstadt, Lena Ng, George Bradley, Shana Scott, Christopher Stanley, Jude Reid, Scott J. Couturier, Kat Pekin, and myself.
You can read an interview of me and Matthew Hughes here.
I have an article in Slate Magazine today: “Trees are smarter than we give them credit for, but they may not be smart enough for we’ve got coming next.”
Trees — and plants in general — can adapt to changes in amazing ways, but the weather might be changing too fast.
One of Ancient Rome’s greatest poets, Ovid, wrote this fable, the story of two honored trees:
Baucus and Philemon, an elderly couple in Greece, had little to share, but when two weary travelers sought a place to sleep for the night, they welcomed them into their hovel. This couple was pious, and hospitality was a joyful duty. The town’s other residents, all wealthy and wicked, would share nothing with those strangers, mere peasants.
The couple provided the two strangers with all the comforts they had, and with food and drink, though their best was poor and meager. Their guests soon admired their deep love for each other. Baucus and Philemon noticed that their guests’ wine cups were refilling themselves magically, and they realized that these were no peasants — they were gods in disguise.
They apologized for their humble offerings, but the gods, Zeus and Hermes, assured them they were content. However, they had deep wrath for the other people of the town. They sent Baucus and Philemon to higher ground and destroyed the town with a flood.
When he was done, Zeus turned their hovel into a grand, beautiful temple, and, to honor their love for each other, he bade them to ask for their dearest wish. They asked to be able to serve in the temple and worship him, and that when the time came, for them to die together, so neither would grieve alone.
Zeus granted that and more. When the hour of human death arrived, they sprouted leaves and roots, and they had time to say goodbye and kiss before they became trees and spent several more centuries in companionship with each other.
Those trees, Ovid wrote, grew together and were celebrated by their new neighbors, who recognized their sacredness. Their branches were hung with garlands, and prayers and vows were made beneath their shelter.
In our day, we know through scientific observation that trees care for each other, something the ancients could easily imagine.
“Woods in Winter” by Charles Warren Eaton, 1886, at the National Gallery of Art
In Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, a character called Duke Senior has been exiled by his younger brother to the Forest of Arden. As befits a gentle comedy, he finds the woods a fine place, and he has “merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.” (From Act I, Scene I)
What place could be better than a woods, even in winter? In the opening of Act II, Duke Senior speaks of the wonders of nature. May it inspire all of us to take a walk in the woods as the days grow short, and may we enjoy the good in everything we find.
… … …
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
“This is no flattery. These are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
— from As You Like It by William Shakespeare, Act II Scene I, lines1–17
Kill your darlings, they say. Cut the parts from your book that don’t move the plot forward, even if you love them. So, on the wise advice from my editor, I killed the final section of the novel Interference about some fippokats (well, they were going to die anyway) and write a different ending that was much more dire.
Here’s that darling for you: the alternate epilogue to Interference.
EPILOGUE—KELLY—LATER THAT DAY—IN ORBIT
Oh, this is the strangest place and the most wonderful. It frightened me at first, yes, although the Big Ones are happy, so we are happy, Moss and Emerald and Lime and I am Kelly. We have our sleeping box and we drink water from a tiny pipe next to strange food dishes and it is a game just to eat because the food floats. It all floats, the Big Ones and the food and the toys and us and everything.
But we do more than float, Moss and Emerald and Lime and I. We jump and hop and chase each other, leaping from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, anyplace to anyplace, and look at this somersault, three in a row! We can fly!
We hop and we glide along the walls and ceilings and floors and tabletops, and it is easy, a twitch of the toes and now a somersault again. Here I come at a Big One, and I spread my legs to steer and slow, and the Big One catches me and says Kelly Kelly Kelly and pets me and we float to the window to look outside, but it is night, so I will stay where it is bright and warm and full of fun.
The Big One helps me spin, whee! and I come to a wall and jump off because Lime is down the hall and we can chase each other through the air. Lime sees me and launches herself at me and we meet in the air and bat at each other’s back feet and we connect and here we go! Back and forth and up and down, wall to floor to ceiling. It is the best game ever.
You have eleven more months to celebrate the International Year of Plant Health. The United Nations General Assembly declared it with the slogan “Protecting Plants, Protecting Life.”
I’m honored to announce that Semiosis is this year’s 
Chapter 3 of Semiosis ends with Higgins saying:
I’ll be participating in the Tangelo reading series, held from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, January 9, at 
I always enjoy destroying the Earth.
I have an article in Slate Magazine today: “Trees are smarter than we give them credit for, but they may not be smart enough for we’ve got coming next.”
One of Ancient Rome’s greatest poets, 
Kill your darlings, they say. Cut the parts from your book that don’t move the plot forward, even if you love them. So, on the wise advice from my editor, I killed the final section of the novel Interference about some fippokats (well, they were going to die anyway) and write a different ending that was much more dire.
Semiosis 