Author: Sue Burke

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.

I’ll be attending WisCon, a feminist science fiction and fantasy convention in Madison, Wisconsin, from May 25 to 28. I’ve been attending off and on since the 1990s, and it’s always a fun, exciting weekend.

On Friday at 2:30 p.m., I’ll be on a panel for Speculative Fiction in Translation with Rachel S. Cordasco, Arrate Hidalgo, Crystal Huff, and S. Qiouyi Lu. Find out about the obstacles and joys of translation, the effect of the internet, and anecdotes about what’s hard to translate. We’ll also give out chocolate and M&Ms, translated books, and a catalog listing recently translated works.

On Sunday at 4 p.m, I’ll be at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association 40th anniversary round robin reading.

On Monday at 11:30 a.m., I’ll be taking part in The SignOut, a autograph/chat session. Come say hello if you haven’t already. Wind down after the fun-filled long weekend. On Tuesday, we have to go back to work — fully charged with WisCon energy.

The contracts have been signed, the manuscript has been accepted, and Semiosis will have a sequel. In it, Earth sends a mission to the planet Pax, and — no surprise — things don’t go well, for a variety of reasons. Stevland is forced to act.

I’ve begun revisions with my editor at Tor, Jen Gunnels, who is a delight to work with. The novel should come out in 2019, and the title has yet to be decided. It’s been referred to as Semiosis: Pax, but in my computer, it’s just “Pax II.”

In addition, Tor wants to buy a third, unrelated book, and I’ve begun work on that. It will be about perfect human clones and their struggle to fit into an imperfect world. At this stage in the process, which is still the zero draft (not even close to a first draft yet), it’s hard to say more because I’m still exploring the story. It should be published around 2020.

I want to thank my agent, Jennie Goloboy at Donald Maass Literary Agency, for all her work to make this happen.

Left Bank Books and Archon will present a SciFi STL and Tor #FearlessWomen event at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 10, at the St. Louis Public Library – Schlafly Branch, 225 N. Euclid Ave.

I’ll be there with Tessa Gratton, author of an epic fantasy about deposed kings and betrayed queens called The Queens of Innis Lear, and with K. Arenault Rivera, whose historical fantasy series The Tiger’s Daughter features an infamous warrior, a spoiled empress, and encroaching demons.

You can learn more about the event here. Free and open to the public, followed by a book signing. If you can come, I’ll be glad to meet you.

My novelette “Life From the Sky” appears in the May/June 2018 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. I’m excited to be there along with some of my favorite authors.

You can subscribe to print and electronic editions at the Asimov’s website and at Amazon. Individual copies are on sale now at fine bookstores and are available at some public libraries.

The story is set in the here and now. What if alien life forms landed on Earth? What would we do?

Here are the opening paragraphs: