Author: Sue Burke

If you weighed every living thing on Earth, what kinds of things would weigh the most?

Scientists Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo tried to answer that question. They estimated the amount of carbon stored in organisms — that is, our planet’s biomass: wild birds, viruses, fish, plants, fungi, etc. Overall, it amounts to roughly 550 gigatons of carbon. Their paper, “The biomass distribution on Earth,” was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America on May 21, 2018.

The numbers are rough but revealing. The authors come to several conclusions, including “the mass of humans is an order of magnitude higher than that of all wild mammals combined.”

You can see it in the chart. Humans amount to 0.06 gigatons. We outweigh wild mammals, which are a mere 0.007 gigatons; our livestock outweighs us both together at 0.11 gigatons. Wild birds amount to 0.002 gigatons, while domesticated poultry weigh three times more.

Plants rule the planet at 450 gigatons of life, but the authors of the study estimate that since the start of human civilization, the total biomass of plants has fallen to half its previous level.

You can read the six-page article at PNAS or reports about the article at The Economist and Vox. Vox has created an especially easy-to-understand chart. The Economist explains briefly but carefully the enormous impact that human beings have had on the planet.

We rule the Earth and have changed it in ways we don’t notice day to day. The big picture is instructive. It tells us how a single species can entirely reshape the structure of life on a planet.

On a related note, this article at Bloomberg shows how land in the United States is used: pastures, forests, crops, urbanizations, and special uses like parks, roads, and golf courses. Most land is used as livestock pasture/range. Considering the weight of livestock, this comes as no surprise.

Not every mind is human, which is a challenge for authors. It’s hard enough to write from a different human point of view: we’re a varied species, each one with our own experiences and quirks, but at least we can talk to each other. Non-humans … well, they never have long conversations with us, alas.

Yet, if we’re going to write speculative fiction, we can’t let that stop us. For my novel Semiosis, I wanted to write from the point of view of a plant — an alien plant with similarities to Earthly ones. All right, where to start?

Obviously, we know some things about Earth plants, and I began researching them. What is their experience of life? For one thing, they’re under a lot of stress. Growing seasons are short, and weather is uncertain.

Spring ephemerals, such as trilliums and snowdrops, illustrate this anxiety. They grow and flower as early as possible in spring, sometimes even through snow, dangerous though that must be. They catch the sunlight before the trees put out leaves and cast shade. Spring ephemeral flowers offer nectar to the first bees that wake up after winter, monopolizing their attention. Then these plants go dormant until next spring: that’s the extreme step they have to take to get their day in the sun. They leap upward at the first hint of springtime.

Plants compete for sunlight and actively fight over it. A common houseplant called the asparagus fern (Asparagus setaceus) has pretty, lacy leaves — and thorns it can anchor into other plants to climb over them. Its aggression has earned it the status of noxious weed in some parts of Australia. Roses have thorns for the same reason. If the ferns or roses happen to starve other plants by blocking out the sunshine, that’s just survival of the fittest.

Vines climb up trees to get sunshine without the cost of growing a sturdy trunk. Other plants may grow large leaves quickly to cast shadows on their neighbors, or poison the ground to keep out competition.

So plants lead lives of quiet desperation, in constant combat using a variety of weapons.

The book What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz documents what he and his fellow botanists have long known. A plant can see, smell, feel, know where it is, and remember. “Plants are acutely aware of the world around them,” he writes.

Trees, like us humans, have social lives. In The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, German forester Peter Wohlleben describes how trees of the same species in forests create communities that help each other. As a result, they enjoy much longer, healthier lives than isolated city trees. Trees also make decisions, such as when to drop their leaves, which can be a life or death gamble on the coming weather.

Plants are alert to their surroundings and can recall the past and plan for the future. They’re gregarious, and being isolated hurts them.

As we would expect from highly aware, social creatures, they relate to other species including animals. They grow flowers to attract pollinators, they grow fruit to encourage animals to spread their seeds, and they enter symbiotic relationships with animals to further their needs. If nutrients are especially scarce, plants turn carnivorous. (The leaves depicted on the cover of Semiosis are of a sundew. The drops are glue to catch insects.)

Through photosynthesis, plants create their own energy. We can’t know how that feels, although we can observe how sap courses up and down stems and through leaves, and how carefully plants arrange their leaves in a “leaf mosaic” to capture light efficiently. Plants that store food for winter know how much they have because they stop and shed their leaves when they think they have enough. They have body awareness.

Plants differ from us in one essential way: they have no set body type. Humans have two arms, two legs, and a standard-sized brain. A tree has as many branches and roots as it can support. A single tree can be huge, spreading out from its roots to create its own grove, and some can live for centuries, even millennia.

A possible personality for my imaginary plant has begun to emerge: anxious, active, aggressive, alert to its surroundings, impatient, reflective and forward-looking, physically singular, self-aware, long-lived, manipulative of animals, and painfully lonely if it has no companions of its own species. Add intelligence and we have a point of view:

“Growth cells divide and extend, fill with sap, and mature, thus another leaf opens. Hundreds today, young leaves, tender in the Sun. With the burn of light comes glucose to create starch, cellulose, lipids, proteins, anything I want. Any quantity I need. In joy I grow leaves, branches, culms, stems, shoots, and roots of all types. … Intelligence wastes itself on animals and their trammeled, repetitive lives. They mature, reproduce, and die faster than pines, each animal equivalent to its forebearer, never smarter, never different, always reprising their ancestors, never unique.”

Did I succeed? Readers will decide. I tried, though, and I hope other writers will, too — because I love to read about non-human protagonists.

(This article also appeared at Unbound Worlds. Photo credit Aiwok.)

I am a total Earthling. By that I mean I am entirely used to this planet’s environment.

Here’s a small example:

One day I was out on my morning walk, and up ahead a wood pigeon sprang into the air and started flying toward me. With a 30-inch wingspan, it’s a fairly big bird. But I didn’t flinch. I knew that the bird, very common in that neighborhood, had no interest in messing with me. It would swerve with plenty of time.

Think about all the other potentially scary if not genuinely dangerous natural wonders we encounter on a normal day, such as a bee, dog, or cactus — to say nothing of technology.

Imagine Earthlings on a new, unexplored planet. How could they know if what looked like a bird or a mere stick of wood was really harmless? They couldn’t know. They would have to face their new world with courage.

What have you encountered so far in your day that would frighten a newcomer to Earth?

Plants move slowly — except when they need to move fast, for example to capture insects (and eat them). They can even explode to scatter seeds or spores, and sometimes spores can jump around. Find out how they manage to move so fast in this ScienceNews article and watch a fun little video of speedster plants set to the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

We know that plants communicate with each other. So do pathogens. Sometimes, though, plants and pathogens share the same communication system. Botany One takes a look. Plants and pathogens do this because they are a holoboint, a “macrobe and its numerous microbial associates.” The web of life gets more and more complex the closer we look at it.

Quartz brings us this article: “A debate over plant consciousness is forcing us to confront the limitations of the human mind.” I wrote my book to explore that question on a planet far away because I didn’t think it could happen here. I may have been wrong.

The Onion offers its own satiric approach to that question. The Onion is Earth’s humor root.

Finally, enjoy a very short story (one paragraph), “The New Trees” by Ben Black at Daily Science Fiction.

Some readers have asked why the Glassmakers left the city — and too many are asking for it to be a coincidence.

I thought I’d explained, but I just checked and I’d cut a passage from an earlier version of the novel because I thought it repeated something said elsewhere. Apparently I erred. I’m embarrassed and apologetic.

This was cut from Chapter 7 in a section by Stevland, talking about the Glassmakers:

“We have also learned why they left, according to their oral tradition. Their colony was failing, and because their genus is nomadic like moths or certain large crabs, they decided to return to the old ways in hopes that it would prove more helpful, but nomadic life did not increase survival since the problem was malnutrition and illness. Females were especially vulnerable, perhaps due to the strain of childbirth, and the orphans grew ungovernable. Finally, after many decades of unceasing decline and in desperation, they decided to return to the city, only to find it occupied.

“I am sorry I was unable to provide better care when they lived here earlier. I will do so now, and I have learned what I must do to keep them in the city.”

Here they are, all my houseplants, gathered for a group photo. My current apartment has few good windows, so I don’t have many plants, but they seem to be happy:

• a garden croton, Codiaeum variegatum
• two varieties of shamrocks, actually wood sorrel, Oxalis
• an “air plant” or “sky plant” in the martini glass, Tillandsia ionantha
• three “lucky bamboo,” Dracaena sanderiana.

I got the Dracaena as gifts when my book was published. (Thank you!) They’re not bamboo at all, but they might be lucky. Although none of my plants seem exceptionally intelligent, they are competent and ambitious, so I keep them under constant supervision. Never trust plants.

The acknowledgments to Semiosis begin, “I owe thanks to Gregory Frost, whose writing exercise about a special kind of wall led to this novel.”

That exercise took place in 1996 at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. Greg was one of the instructors, and he assigned several exercises over his week of teaching, one of them involving a wall. As I recall, it went something like this:

“Imagine a wall that appears overnight between two groups about to go to war. They can see through it, they can communicate through it, but they can’t pass through it and attack each other. Begin that story.”

We only had to write the opening paragraphs, but some of us were inspired to continue. Mike VanWie wrote a bittersweet love story that we would now call steampunk, but back then we just called it imaginative. Dan Jeffers came up with a comic sword and sorcery novel with sex scenes and other digressions in the appendices.

(The photo shows us hard at work on a different exercise, a group project involving tropes.)

I eventually wrote a science fiction story in which the wall was a human colony on a distant planet. That story was published in 1999 as “Adaptation” in the magazine LC-39, and later I expanded it into a novel, Semiosis.

I first got paid to write when I was in high school as a columnist for the local newspaper. It was fun, and how many jobs are fun?

By fun I mean it was creative and difficult enough to keep me from getting bored, since you could never fully master the art of writing. It involved variety, since you couldn’t write the exact same piece again and again like making widgets in a factory. By definition, it was interesting, since the final product was supposed to be interesting and sometimes even entertaining for the reader.

I also physically enjoyed the act of writing itself, of arranging and rearranging words in search of perfection, the way some people like to play basketball or guitar.

Besides all that, writing produced a tangible product. I could point to a published article and say, “I did this.”

I spent decades working as a journalist. Someone (exactly who isn’t certain) said you have to write a million words before you get good. Well, I wrote that many – and added to those are the countless additional words that ran past me as an editor.

So for me writing should be easy. Yes … and no, not at all.

Journalism has taught me invaluable lessons: to write to length, on deadline, on almost any topic, clearly, succinctly, engagingly, with the reader in mind. In addition, it taught me to write with proper punctuation and formatting, which always endears you to editors.

But when I decided to branch out into fiction, only some of what I’d learned did me any good. Journalism had taught me to write with dispassion and leave out emotion. Wrong, wrong, wrong – for fiction.

Fiction requires emotion. That’s what readers want most of all: a story to tug at their hearts, to excite them with ideas, to fill them with anticipation. I had to learn how to do it.

So I began writing stories fully aware of how much more I had to master. You can learn from workshops, from books about writing, and from careful reading, and I did all that, but writing is a practice discipline, like playing basketball or guitar. You learn by doing. So I began writing stories, expecting success to take time.

It did. A long time. I got rejections. Lots and lots and lots of rejections. Those early stories boasted of proper punctuation and formatting, maybe even a good idea, but they lacked so much else.

A few times, magazines decided to buy my stories, then folded up shop before they could get them into print or pixels and pay me. Once, a publisher bought a novel and dropped the ball. I might sound dispassionate about these things now, but they hurt. If you were around me at the time, thank you for your sympathy. If you’re hurting about the same sort of thing now, you can cry on my shoulder. I’ll understand.

But I’ve kept going. Why? Because writing is still fun: creative, full of variety, interesting – and I have yet to fully master the art. If I won the lottery, I’d keep on writing.

It’s fun like playing basketball or guitar. Look at how many people are smiling on the court or the stage. Are you smiling when you write?

I think that’s the secret to getting published. Everyone will tell you to be persistent and work on your craft, and you do have to do that, absolutely. But volunteer for each part of the job just like you’d fight and yearn every step of the way to get to play the big game or the big gig. Love every minute of it.

If you don’t enjoy writing, you might not be doing it right – by which I mean doing it the way that will sustain you through all the trials you face. Have fun! (Readers can tell.) The rest will come.

Let’s Talk about Plant Sex
In this podcast from the Newberry Library, Katie Sagal tells how women writers in the 18th century engaged with botany, which was considered both an activity for cultivating feminine virtue and a weedy thicket overrun by the perils of intellectual rigor and plant sexual reproduction.

Ten Plants Used to Spice up Sex
Speaking of sex, Botany One lists ten possible human aphrodisiacs. Many things seem to work on rats, but we know less about their effect on humans. And then there’s the bonus eleventh plant that might work for you — but only as a gambit.

Learning to Speak Shrub
Plants do talk about sex, but as this article in Nautilus says, more often they use molecular codes to cry for help, ward off bugs, and save each other.

The World’s Shiniest Fruit
Just for fun, here’s a couple of photos of the fruit of the African plant Pollia condensata and an explanation about why it’s so shiny.

Hermann Hesse on What Trees Teach Us About Belonging and Life
This beautifully poetic passage speaks about trust and happiness. “So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours.”

An Enduring Literary Classic
Finally, this Wondermark cartoon jokes about how slowly plants grow. Slow plants is one of the reasons why the novel Semiosis is structured in chapters that sometimes jump a generation ahead. I tweaked the vegetation on Pax as much as I felt I reasonably could to speed it up, but plants are naturally slow beings. They needed time to react to the new arrivals, and I had to think of a way to build that time into the narrative. I decided to skip ahead a couple of decades between chapters and try to tell compelling stories within that framework.

My essay “We Lost Control a Long Time Ago” is available for your reading pleasure at From Earth to the Stars, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine’s blog for authors and editors.

In my post, I discuss Barry N. Malzberg’s sometimes uncomfortable idea about what sets science fiction apart from “literary” fiction: external events matter more than individual self-realization. Literary fiction tends to focus on one kind of change, increased self-understanding and self-control, as a means to gain control of your life. Science fiction says that you might achieve self-realization, but technological change is and always has been out of control, and that change and our inability to control it matters more to our lives.

This is what makes science fiction a dangerous and plot-oriented kind of literature.