Author: Sue Burke

Megan Leigh at the website Breaking the Glass Slipper has asked me five questions about the novel Semiosis and science fiction: the lure of first contact stories, the affinity between hard SF and horror, communication obstacles in the story, overlooked female SF writers, and why you should read Semiosis. Read it here.

Some plants are carnivorous: they capture and eat animals. But at least one plant, a pond inhabitant called bladderwort, captures plants as well as animals. Botany One describes what they do with them. (Photo from Wikipedia.)

Plants seem to notice not just what but who is around them, and if the plant next to them is genetically close — a family member, so to speak — they might help each other out. Science magazine details how some plants grow better when planted with kin and how others avoid throwing shade on their relatives.

Can plants hear? Apparently certain flowers are listening for pollinators, and when they hear the right buzz, they sweeten their nectar to become more attractive. Read about it in the Atlantic, the New Phytologist, or the scientific article documenting the discovery.

You may know Emily Dickinson as an important poet. She also gathered, classified, and pressed all the local flowers she could into an album — 424 flowers from the Amherst, Massachusetts, region. Brain Pickings reproduces her herbarium. Some of the flowers still show their lovely colors.

Finally, Smithsonian.com ponders the puzzle of the avocado. When North American megafauna went extinct, the wild avocado should have gone extinct, too, since it depended on them for seed dispersal. Instead it managed to hang on until humans took note and domesticated it.

The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior by Stefano Mancuso

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stefano Mancuso, an authority on plant neurobiology, begins by showing how plants can remember things, although they don’t have a brain. They can move, although they have no muscles. They can imitate items in their surroundings like stones or other plants, although we don’t think they can see. It’s clear that plants pay scrupulous attention to their environment. He describes the ways plants do all this in an entertaining and easy-to-understand way.

Then, in Chapter 4, he pulls these abilities together by stressing the differences between plants and animals. Beings that can move (animals) tend to avoid problems. If the sun is too hot, animals try to find shade. If something wants to eat the animal, it runs away. Beings that are rooted in place (plants) have to solve problems. Beings with brains and other central organs can react faster, but that also makes them more vulnerable. Decapitate an animal and it’s dead. Chop off a branch of a tree, and the tree carries on. Beings with dispersed problem-solving abilities may react more slowly, but they’re more resilient.

How can a being with no central intelligence solve complex problems? Mancuso suggests that plants act more like flocks of birds: each part, each cell, reacts to its environment, and the changes in the cell and changes in the environment affect the other parts of the plant around it. Together, the plant acts as a coordinated whole. He offers several ways for decentralized intelligence to work in order to reach what looks to us like a decision.

He goes on to describe the ways that plants manipulate animals, the lessons we can learn from plants in fields like architecture and robotic design, and how plants respond to weightlessness.

I received this book as a gift, and I lingered over the stunning photos. Plants are beautiful, and the presence of plants seems to soothe human beings.

Most of all, Mancuso’s love for plants permeates the text – and his respect for them. By weight, the vast majority of life on Earth is plants. They are master problem-solvers, he says, and we can learn from them how to solve some of our own problems.

— Sue Burke

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I’ll be reading at an open mic Saturday, January 26, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Second Unitarian Church of Chicago, 656 W. Barry Avenue. Free and open to the public to listen or participate. Light snacks provided, BYOB (bring your own beverage, alcoholic or otherwise).

We hold these open mics every few months at my church. Readings, music, spoken word, dance, and other forms of creative expression are welcome. You can find out more at the Facebook event page.

I’ll read this essay, which I wrote while I was living in Madrid, Spain. Spain is famous for encierros, or running of the bulls, and when I learned there was going to be one at a fiesta in a suburb of Madrid, my husband and I went to watch. (Not to run.) There was no violence, no blood, no harm to the bulls — but no courage on display, either.

Instead, I observed something quite different about humanity, and perhaps not even Ernest Hemingway could have turned it into a novel.

— Sue Burke

I lived in Austin, Texas, in the late 1990s — not for very long, sadly, but long enough to be improved some and to be legally entitled to say “y’all.”

So I’m excited that the Texas Library Association has included Semiosis in its 2019 list of outstanding fiction that merits special attention from adult readers.

“Since 2009 the goal of the Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List has been to highlight outstanding fiction that is simply ‘a pleasure to read.’ Each year 25 outstanding fiction titles are selected by a nine member committee.”

It’s an honor, y’all.

Here in the upper Midwest, the landscape looks desolate right now. Gardens and weeds are dead or dormant. Trees and bushes are as bare as if they suffered some sort of apocalypse — and they did! The air got freezing cold. That’s fatal to most plants unless they make complex adjustments.

What happened, of course, is winter, a regularly scheduled event. Come springtime, everything will turn green again — fast. From one day to the next, the landscape can change before your eyes.

This sudden rejuvenation happens in part because, during winter, nutrients are stored in the soil, which is famously fertile in this corner of the world. That’s how plants survive the hostile climate. Plants recycle their “food” from year to year as leaves fall and annual plants die and decompose.

By contrast, soil in tropical rainforests tends to hold few nutrients. Growing conditions are always good, so nutrients get reused almost immediately.

You probably knew this already. It’s basic environmental science. But it’s not simple science. Soil takes centuries to build up its riches. So if you’re staring at bare trees, you’re looking at the visible part of a complex and carefully adapted ecosystem, starting with what’s beneath your feet, buried treasure in the soil.

Like every writer I know, I’ve started too many stories that petered out and sit there on my hard drive tucked out of sight so they don’t depress me. These are mistakes — and I know why some of them happened. Here’s an analogy:

I’ve got a great starting idea for dinner today: I should use that lovely bag of baby spinach. But how? Too many possibilities make me indecisive. I can’t start cooking until I have a goal in mind, a finished dish.

For that reason, menus list dishes rather than random, tasty ingredients. MasterChef uses the random ingredient challenge to torture its contestants because the odds are against them cooking up something delectable. It’s fun to watch them fail.

Yet writers commonly start stories “to see where they’ll go.” Stephen King champions this technique. I think his story “Obits,” nominated for the 2016 Hugo Award, shows how it can fail. In the story, a man discovers he has an extraordinary skill. And then … he runs away and never does that thing again. The consequences of his skill, good or ill, are never explored. I suspect that King didn’t know what to do with the idea. He didn’t win a Hugo, either.

By contrast, consider “Eutopia” by Poul Anderson in the 1967 Harlan Ellison anthology Dangerous Visions. In that story, a time traveler must flee for something horrible he did, although he seems upstanding. The very last word of the story tells you what happened (no spoilers), and its impact helped Dangerous Visions redefine science fiction. This was no accident. Anderson started the story knowing precisely how it would end — a great ending — and every word from the beginning pointed toward that end.

If I start a story or novel without knowing the ending, I might get blocked and, panic-stricken, grab at the first ending I think of, although it could be hackneyed or weak or miss the mark. Or I might not finish the story at all. If I start with a strong ending in mind, success is not guaranteed, but my odds are better.

I’ve learned that my ending idea need not be too specific: “He wins, although it means betraying some of his core values so he can uphold others,” or “She kills her rival and takes over,” or “He lures the ghosts to a morgue and leaves them there, trapped.”

I still hope to achieve Poul Anderson’s genius at endings — which means I have a goal (an ending) for the story of my writing career.

These days, if I’m working on a writing prompt, I try to write the ending of a story. I might draw on one of those randomish ideas rattling around my brain, or I might come up with something new. I get a story I know how to finish. Much more needs to be done to flesh the idea out, of course, but the end is in sight.

Tonight, by the way, I’ll make a chicken-pasta-vegetable toss for dinner. The fresh baby spinach should be a delicious final touch. Bon appétit!

— Sue Burke

I am gratified (and relieved!) by how many people have enjoyed my novel Semiosis. Readers send me notes, booksellers are glad to see me, and the novel has made some year’s best lists for 2018. This is an unexpected and wonderful holiday gift.

New York Public Library
“Our librarians — through their experience recommending books to patrons and as readers themselves — have highlighted their picks for 100 best books written for adults and published this year.”

New York Magazine’s Vulture
“This first-contact story is up there with the best of Le Guin in terms of beautiful, engrossing, brilliantly imagined sci-fi.”

The Verge
“Alien life likely won’t take the form of a bumpy-headed alien, but something that we might not recognize as intelligent at first blush.”

Chicago Review of Books
“The 10 Best Science Fiction Books of 2018: From arctic metropolises to killer plants.”

Powell’s Books
“The only thing wrong with this spectacular debut is that it isn’t long enough.”

The Best Sci Fi Books
“25 Best Science Fiction Books of 2018: A lot of science fiction writers got weird. Good stuff.”

A Goodreads Listopia of Hugo 2019 Eligible Novels
“It’s hard to keep track of all the science fiction and fantasy books published in one year.”

— Sue Burke

The word semiosis refers to the relationship between a sign and its meaning — a relationship that permits communication. Among humans, we usually use language to communicate, but humans have many languages, each one with a unique system of oral and written signs.

I speak English and Spanish, and here’s an unexpected way that the signs used by the two languages work differently:

I used to live in Spain, and one day when I was at home, I picked up a magazine, started reading, and the words made no sense. I felt surprised and confused. I had magazines in both English and Spanish, and I knew those languages well. There should have been no problem.

I took another look. The magazine was in English, but I had been reading it as if it were in Spanish. There’s a big difference.

In English, we read mostly by the shape of the word, not by the letters one at a time. The letters themselves don’t always signify a lot: every rule of spelling and phonics has too many exceptions. Words are what matter, and English-language readers naturally learn to decode whole words at a time.

But Spanish is written phonetically. I can look at any word, even if I’ve never seen it before, and pronounce it correctly. When I read in Spanish, I mentally sound out the letters because it’s the most efficient reading strategy for that language. The sounds naturally add up to the word.

That’s what I’d been doing with English: reading letter by letter as if it were Spanish. The result was gibberish. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that I used different techniques for different languages. I just read.

*****

Reading is only the first step to translating between languages. I’m a certified translator for Spanish into English, and among my literary translations is the novel Prodigies by Angélica Gorodischer. Recently Axion e-zine interviewed me and Amalia Gladhart, who has also translated a Gorodischer novel. We discussed why specific works get translated, and some of the technical and artistic considerations at the level of sentences and word choice. Beautiful prose follows different rules in Spanish and English.

When you read, a lot can be different and yet achieve the same goal: communication and shared meaning.

My novel Semiosis on sale until January 1: only $2.99.

You can buy it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, eBooks.com, Google books, iTunes, and Kobo. The publisher’s link to the ebook all those sites is here.

What would make a better holiday gift for yourself or for others than a story that will forever change the way you look at your garden?