Author: Sue Burke

This disgression should appear on Page 324 of the hardcover version of Semiosis. It illustrates an ongoing difficulty on Pax and the rights its Constitution grants children. This little bit (in blue) about them from the final chapter about Bartholomew was cut because the book was getting too long, but I enjoyed writing it, and it might amuse you. A team including Bartholomew is deciding how to cut down the orange trees.

“Fire,” Erasmus said. “Not a bad idea, and I like the sentiment. The thing is, the fire would hurt other trees, like that ponytail over there next to the oranges, those pines, even these friendly little palms. No, wouldn’t be right. Good thinking, though.”

People nodded. It wouldn’t be the Pax way.

Piotr stood next to me. The downy hairs on his upper lip had darkened in the last year. He had loved Lucille and he would have been blind not to, the only grown woman in Generation 7. She had been his future, and she died before his eyes, and his heart broke. Could it heal, or could he replace it? If I talked about Bess, would he understand?

“Did you paint your face green to be like Lucille’s?” I asked.

He looked away, fumbling with something in his pockets. “No.” Then, “Yes,” in a louder but not stronger voice on the edge of a squeak.

“That’s a nice gesture,” I said. He nodded and tried to smile and failed utterly.

Maybe we could have saved Lucille. Did he need to know that? Cedar had refused to act, but then Pacifists arrived, fought and almost won. Almost. If the fighting had started a minute earlier, maybe. . . . No. The orphans already had the acetone, they already had a plan to burn the women to distract us.

But Cedar hadn’t known that. Could I forgive her? Would that be good for Pax? Would that be just?

Piotr was suddenly hugging me. “Take care of yourself,” he said, as if I were the one needing care. He turned and left down a path, whistling in something like Glassmade, and two Glassmade majors followed him.

Six of Lucille’s students were coming toward us down another path, the six most boisterous children in all Pax, painted and ready to get in the way.

Erasmus started muttering, and when they got closer, he said, “Listen, kids, this isn’t a good place for you. Cutting down trees is dangerous work.”

“They’re bad trees,” said a little boy with a face painted with blue stripes.

“Exactly.”

“But you’re a 4. We’re 7s. You can’t tell us what to do.”

The old lumberjack looked at me. Age didn’t matter, according to the Constitution, a flawed document, so what could we do? The Parents who wrote it on Earth never thought about four-year-olds who would want to wield axes.

“But he’s the team leader,” I said. Erasmus smiled at me, then at the children.

The boy lost his bravado. “Can we be on the team?”

“Yes, and it’s like this.” Erasmus dropped to one knee to talk face-to-painted-face. “There’s some saplings near the dominant locustwood. You know which one that is, right kids? Really big and tall, off that way. It told its saplings to help us out. If we plant them where the orange trees were, the little locustwoods will be sure the oranges don’t grow back in case we miss some roots. All right, what we need are people to go dig up the saplings. Piotr’s already going with the Glassmakers and he needs some helpers. How about it, kids? You and the Glassmakers. You’re great at digging, aren’t you? A pack of birds, that’s what you are. Owls, real owls.”

The proposal interested them. Flattered them. They began barking. “I’m not a owl, I’m a eagle.” “I’m a tree. Trees are better. They can do more.” Boisterous, they followed Piotr and the majors.

We adults fetched ladders and got to work, one tree at a time. I held the ladder for Fabio’s father, trying to hold it steady, but he chopped wildly, long swings with more force than precision, almost knocking himself off the ladder, though he didn’t seem to notice. He couldn’t notice. He was attacking in his own private battle, and how could I not sympathize for the loss of a son? Tears or sweat filled the fine lines around his eyes. I kept my feet planted firm, my eyes on his swinging arm to know when to tense, listening to the rhythm of seven other axes and the crunch and crackle of live wood yielding to steady assault, and to sniffs and sobs and relentless progress, making way for good trees.

If you’re around Chicago, any day now you can witness a corpse flower in bloom, a rare event. A titan arum named Spike is getting ready at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Read all about it at the garden’s special Spike 2.0 web page.

I saw a titan arum at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in 2010. These huge flowers famously smell horrible, like a rotting corpse — or if you’ve never experienced that, like very old garbage. That’s how it attracts carrion beatles and flesh flies to pollinate the flower.

If you can’t make it, there’s a live webcam on the web page, also here at YouTube.

Enjoy your visit, and hold your nose.

How do you write a novel? That’s a hard question, and I wish I knew the definitive answer — because I’m writing a novel right now. (I’m always writing a novel, in fact. Writing a novel is fun.)

But there’s no definitive answer. Generally, though, writers use one of two approaches: plotter or pantser, sometimes called architect or gardener. Some writers plan and outline their writing projects, while others just start writing and see what grows.

I began my writing career as a newspaper reporter. In that job, being a plotter/architect made sense. You’d gather up all there was to know for your article, or at least everything you could learn before deadline, and then try to force that information into some sort of logical sequence. You needed an explicit plan before you started writing.

I used to create fiction the same way, but now I’m not sure that process works, at least for me. I don’t seem to know everything I need to know before I start writing. At the same time, I’ve become convinced that if you don’t have a goal in mind when you start to write, you might arrive at a place not worth the trip.

So I’ve changed the way I write fiction in two ways. First, I’ve adopted the “zero draft” strategy: the initial version doesn’t even count as a first draft. It’s all an experiment. I view it as a way to collect the kind of facts and quotes I would have on hand to write a newspaper article. It’s where I do the research. The result doesn’t even have to be particularly coherent. That will come later in the rewriting.

Second, I have a minimalist plot. I know vaguely what happens and how it all ends (presuming I don’t get a better idea along the way). When I was writing the novel Semiosis, my outline was a sentence or two for each chapter.

For example, Chapter 5: “The colonists in the city find a way to meet the other aliens, and it goes badly.” Chapter 6: “The other aliens come to the city. It goes very, very badly.”

What did I mean by that? Well, I had to figure it out. Or rather, as I wrote Chapters 1 to 4, I knew I had to set up the situation in which the meeting and return visit would happen. At some point, the colonists needed to know where to find those other aliens, and the aliens needed to want to come to the city. I needed to set traps that could be sprung to make things go badly — very, very badly.

(I think I’m a reasonably nice person, but when I start typing, somehow I wind up killing people. Sometimes a lot of people. If you value your life, stay out of my imagination.)

I seem to have found the best of both worlds: when I start to write, I do have a plot of sorts. Like a gardener, I can see what blooms and pull up the weeds that sprout in the process. Like an architect, I can test-model a concept before I begin final construction. Along the way, I can design a beautiful city and plant seeds that will grow into murderous flowers.

… … …

This article originally appeared at the Red Sofa Literary Agency 2017 blog series for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

Thrillist calls Semiosis one of the best books of 2018 so far.

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro reviews the novel at the InterGalactic Medicine Show.

The Quillery asks me some questions, including my two favorite lines from the book.

Fictional Frontiers interviews me in a podcast.

Anderson’s Bookshop asks me Three Questions (and a few more) in a YouTube video.

I’ll be at C2E2, the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, on Sunday afternoon, April 8. I’ll appear on a panel called The End of the World As we Know It: Dystopian & Utopian Futures in Fiction, from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. in Room S405b.

“From 1984 to The Handmaid’s Tale and everything in between, the best science fiction pulls from current events to create terrifying alternate futures and shine a light on the political and social issues of today. Could these realities come true? Join Sue Burke (Semiosis), Kristen Simmons (Metaltown, The Glass Arrow, the Article 5 Series), Ada Palmer (The Will to Battle, Terra Ignota Series) and Sam J. Miller (Blackfish City) as they gaze into dystopian worlds eerily similar to our own.”

Then we’ll be at an autographing session from 2:45 to 3:45 p.m. at tables 33 and 34 in the Autographing Area. Books will be available for purchase, but the autographs will be free, and we’ll be glad to talk to people. (For some celebrities, free autographs isn’t the case. I’m definitely not a celebrity.)

C2E2 will be held April 6 to 8 at the South Building at McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive. It’s a Chicago convention for fans dedicated to comics, pop culture, books, graphic novels, anime, manga, video games, toys, movies, and television. Last year 80,000 people attended. C2E2 is especially known for its cosplay championships.

This should be fun.

On Earth, plants are active, aggressive, and sometimes they fight to the death for sunlight. They employ cunning weapons and strategies, both offensive and defensive.

For example, strangler figs (several varieties of Ficus) start as seedlings that germinate up on tree branches and trunks in jungles. As they grow, their roots wrap around the host tree and eventually strangle and kill it. The fig starts halfway up to sunshine, which is an advantage.

But how do the seeds get up there? Birds eat fig fruit, and the seeds have a gluey covering that sticks to a bird’s feathers when it defecates. The bird wipes off its vent on tree branches and trunks, where the seeds adhere and germinate.

To combat this, the kapok or silk cotton tree (Bombax ceiba) grows spike-like thorns on its trunk and branches. Birds would risk injury to clean themselves there.

The photo shows just how risky. This is a white-flowered silk cotton tree in Gambia, and it’s well-armed against strangler fig seed deposits.

Do roses have thorns for the same reason? No. Wild roses clamber over other plants to pursue light, and they anchor their thorns into them to facilitate climbing. Like the strangler fig, they might mercilessly kill other plants in the process, in this case by starving them of sunlight.

In the plant kingdom, thorns are an offensive and defensive weapons in the battle for survival.

Veggies in space! If we’re going to go on long space missions, we’ll need to grow food, and plants respond differently in microgravity. NASA is growing plants on the International Space Station. Here’s more about the experiment, and how accidentally overwatering lettuce turned out to be the right thing to do.

Long ago, well before the dinosaurs, trees almost ruined our planet. We were saved by fungus.

Every tree tells a story. This National Geographic article introduces a number of legendary trees from around the world, including Newton’s apple tree in England and the Montezuma cypress in Mexico.

MIT has found a way to make plants glow. The scientists hope that someday trees might become self-powered street lights, or that you will read by the light of your houseplant.

Finally, Henry David Thoreau saw trees as living prayers. When he walked through a forest, he wrote, “It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.”

Once was not enough fun! I’ll be in another Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), this time in the Books subreddit on Monday, March 19, starting at about 1 p.m. CST.

At the Fantasy subreddit last week (you can see it here) I got some serious questions about my novel Semiosis. In the Reddit spirit, I also got some lighthearted questions to probe my personality. For example, “If you were a worm, how long would you be?” “What’s your favorite pasta?” “What’s the dumbest way you’ve ever been injured?”

When you say “Ask Me Anything” at Reddit, redditors really might ask anything — all in good fun.

You can join in or follow along here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Books/

Prairie grass loves the buffalo that eat it.

It’s a mutual love story that began during the Miocene epoch about 23 million years ago. This was the time when kelp forests appeared in oceans, birds and mammals were well established (including our ancestors, who were splitting from chimpanzees), and grass-grazer ecosystems took over large parts of the world.

Grass is like few other plants. Its stems grow underground. What we see as grass are merely the leaves. Buffalo can eat the leaves (or we can chop the leaves off with a lawn mower), and the grass can keep on growing.

As grasses evolved and expanded their territories, so did animals to eat them, as varied as deer, elk, elephants, wooly mammoths, sheep, horses, zebras, rabbits, cows, buffalo, and bison. (American bison are called “buffalo” because they were named by French fur trappers, who apparently weren’t taxonomy experts.) Large grazers were key to the spread of grasslands.

Here’s why: trees will take over any land they can, including prairies. As they grow, they block the sun, killing the grass. So for grass to flourish, trees must be eliminated. Grazers do this by eating seedlings as they munch the grass and by trampling the seedlings. They also eat other kinds of plants that grow with above-ground stems and would compete with the grass.

So buffalo need grasslands for grazing, and grasslands need buffalo to keep arboreal intruders from encroaching on their territory. America’s Great Plains and the American bison created and maintained each other.

If we look at it from the point of view of grasses, we can see that they get to reign supreme by putting up with the inconvenience of being grazed on from time to time. Grasslands cover almost a third of the planet’s land: they’ve found a winning strategy.

When I was researching ecologies to worldbuild a planet where plants might have more ability to control their environment, time and again I found situations were plants used animals for their own ends — that is, plants would intentionally use animals, if plants could scheme. And if plants could scheme…

The ratio of flora to fauna on Earth is 100 to 1. We humans consider ourselves the dominant species, but I think we should be more humble. There’s a lot going on, and we’re just one small player in a big, complicated game where we might not be much loved beyond our usefulness.

On Thursday, starting at 11 a.m. (CST), I’ll be in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) at the Fantasy subreddit to talk about writing, my novel Semiosis, and, of course, anything else.

Reddit is a lively place, so this should be fun.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/

— Sue Burke