I’ll be reading my translation of the short story “Francine (Draft for the September Lecture)” by Maria Antònia Martí Escayol at the Deep Dish reading at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 7, at The Book Loft, 1047 Lake Street, Oak Park, Illinois. Nine other outstanding writers will also present their work. The event, organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation, is free and open to the public.
Maria Antònia Martí Escayol is a science fiction writer and an environmental historian who teaches at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Her haunting tale investigates the death and posthumous life of Francine, the daughter of Renée Descartes.
I came to writing fiction after years of just-the-facts journalism, so infusing my writing with emotion remains a challenge. That’s why I found this book helpful. In the first chapter, Donald Maass challenges writers to ask themselves: “How can I get readers to go on emotional journeys of their own?”
Perhaps because he reads a lot for his job as a literary agent, he has opinions about the direction of emotional journey, too. “The ultimate in emotional craft is nothing more than trusting your own feelings. Having faith. Confidence.” But not all feelings, he says. “You can sense when fiction is masking cynicism or anger…. Cynical writing tries too hard.”
Instead, he suggests that readers are seeking an emotional experience, and they want to come away feeling positive rather than crushed, uplifted rather than disappointed, authentic rather than desperate. “How do you get your best self on the page? Let’s look at some practical ways.”
He offers plenty of examples and questions to ask yourself about characters, scenes, themes, stakes, and plot. I learned a lot, and I recommend this book to other writers.
This sonnet is about my sister, who died in 2014 and would have been 66 years old today. Small love can do what big love can’t. The poem was published in UU World, Summer 2015.
Relatively few people usually vote for the shorter works for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Nebula Awards, and we only had a month to evaluate all the works on the ballot with its many categories, so I started with the short stories, which was doable. This year, I wasn’t entirely impressed. I thought some of the stories were simple and shallow — but not all of them.
“Because I Held His Name Like a Key” by Aimee Ogden (Strange Horizons 6/16/25) — An immortal being seduces a human, and we all know what’s going to happen next. This is a low-energy retread of a familiar story.
“Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots 5/25) — A woman who uses a wheelchair discovers that superpowers will not overcome indifference to accessibility needs. The story works better as grievance catharsis than literature.
“The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” by E.M. Linden (PodCastle 2/18/25) — The ghosts left behind on Tawlish Island feel lonely as the descendants go on with their lives elsewhere. Nostalgia and sadness make for a sweet but oft-told story.
“Through the Machine” by P.A. Cornell (Lightspeed 5/25) — An actor’s image is used to make movies that he never participated in, and he feels bad about it. Although the storyline is timely, it is explored with little emotional nuance, and the telling struck me as simplistic.
“In My Country” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 4/25) — In a strange country, people are permitted by law to speak plainly or not at all. This story is sort of a parable, and its telling is not plain, and that kind of story can make you feel.
My vote: “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny 1-2/25) – Liza is sure she needs to change to find peace because a corporation is persuasively selling its services for change to vulnerable, anxious people. But what to change and why? It’s hard to find good advice. The unflinching characterization told me early on that Liza was self-deluded. What could make her wise up?
“If and when aliens make first contact, who should answer? Maybe humankind should turn to people like me, translators of science fiction. We’ve already thought through this kind of problem.”
Those are the opening sentences of my essay “When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder.” You can read the essay here.
It was originally published by Calque Press in 2024. In it, I explore the development of human language and the challenges it poses to translation here and now, and how the lessons learned from translation and from science fiction can help us if we come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Whomever we find, wherever they are from, they too will be made of star-stuff, and that should be enough to let us find a way to know each other.
I received a preview copy this book in exchange for writing a blurb if I liked it. The description intrigued me: a science fiction story from an outstanding author about translation. A psychic connection allows a linguist to impersonate a species upon whom space travel depends.
But I didn’t get the story I expected. Here’s my blurb:
I felt shattered, betrayed by all my hopes. Everything we believe about linguistics says shared language leads to greater understanding and compassion. This is why I translate. But language is also a technology, and technologies can destroy. S.L. Huang shows how lies using language can create an unthinkable disaster.
I can’t say more without spoilers. The Language of Liars will be published on April 21. You won’t be disappointed.
Knowledge is power, but perfect knowledge is impossible.
Suppose you knew when and how you were going to die. Could you avoid crossing the street in front of a speeding taxi? Get a mammogram in time? Stop smoking right now?
You might have to learn to face certain death with aplomb.
Possibly, everything in space and time already exists, just like a museum diorama, unchangeable as the evolution and disappearance of the dinosaurs. Their story began two hundred thirty million years ago, when Thecodonts began to walk upright. It ended 65 million years ago when the eight-ton Tyrannosaurus rex got squashed by a giant asteroid.
Perhaps God has already thought things through. Or perhaps, in an atheistic universe, space-time exists such that all its event-lines are locked in place from beginning to end. For the dinosaurs, it was a fatal surprise when an immense rock from space the size of Halley’s Comet smashed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and blasted out a crater 175 kilometers across.
But it was fate, kismet. The moving finger wrote, and it had to happen. Orbits had intersected, and God, or anyone with a telescope, could have seen it coming.
Philosophers and physicists have propounded for and against this idea of a pre-determined universe. Despite its logical consistency, Western minds can’t quite get around the fatalism. It means that no matter what we do now, we can’t change anything. We are as fierce, beloved, and doomed as T-rex. Our big brains make no difference.
So, you have no free will. You were pre-destined to read this essay, in fact. You can’t change a thing, can you?
Ah, but you have. One small example: Do you remember your school teacher when you were seven years old, Mrs. Sobel? In reality you were nine years old when she was your teacher. Yet you go on blithely making decisions thinking that you live in the seven-year-old-with-Sobel universe.
Mentally, we rearrange events to happen the way we think they should have happened. Then we interact with other people, every one of us with deluded memories, and we change our evolution and redesign our fates en masse.
Worse yet, without monumental research into every moment of your past, you can’t even know what you’ve misremembered. You may have forgotten major events, or made up others out of thin air. You may be planning a vacation to the Yucatan. You hope to swim at the white sand beaches, play a little golf, and take a day trip to the Maya ruins of Uxmal. Or have you already gone? Can you be sure? Was Mrs. Sobel there? Did you see any dinosaurs?
That’s why, in the Yucatan, the ancient Maya wrote down their history. They needed to remember everything that happened because they believed time moved like a wheel, which is why their calendars revolved in circles. Dates would repeat. When time turned around again, if they knew what had happened on the same date the last time, they could be prepared. Their records indicated that huge floods usually destroy the world on a certain date, 13 Baktun 0 Katun 0 Uinal 0 Kin. Fortunately this date doesn’t recur often, most recently on December 23, 2012, by our Gregorian calendar. But was the Earth destroyed? No, because we were prepared!
Knowledge is power. But you have to have accurate information.
And you don’t. You’ve already forgotten who knows what, and so have I.
What’s going to happen next? Somewhere, someone might have known, but we’ve ruined it for them. You may wish to quit smoking, get a mammogram, or look both ways before crossing anyway. We still need all the aplomb we can get, because we will all die, we just can’t know when.
***
This essay appeared in Issue 2, Summer 2002, of Full Unit Hookup magazine. Illustration: This painting for NASA by Donald E. Davis depicts an asteroid slamming into the Yucatan Peninsula as pterodactyls glide above low tropical clouds.
My translation of “Bodyhoppers” by Rocío Vega, published at Clarkesworld Magazine, has been nominated in the category of the Best Translated Short Fiction for the British Science Fiction Association Awards. The annual awards are voted on by members of the BSFA and will be presented at this year’s British National Science Fiction Convention, called Eastercon because it takes place over Easter weekend, April 3 to 6.
I’m honored to be listed among such talented translators, and the full BSFA Awards shortlist is a great reading list. Congratulations to all the nominees!
You may have heard that air plants (Tillandsia species) live on air. This is untrue. They live in air, usually clinging to trees, rocks, telephone wires, or roofs. They do not have roots. They get their water and nutrients from the air.
You may have also been told the plant magically subsists on air alone. So you set your air plant somewhere and ignore it. Eventually your plant dies
The photo is of my Tillandsia ionantha on a dinner plate. I’ve had it for ten years, and it keeps getting bigger. Here’s the secret to success:
I’ve visited the Yucatan in Mexico where it comes from, and I saw it growing on tree branches. While I was there, I couldn’t help noticing that it rains a lot in the Yucatan in the summer. Like every day. Air plants don’t live on air, they live on thunderstorms.
The Yucatan also suffers droughts. The plant can survive a drought, but it doesn’t like them. An unending drought will kill it.
Since it doesn’t rain in my living room, I regularly spray it or dunk it in water. It has little cups in the leaves that collect water. It shouldn’t be left to sit in water, though. It lives in the air, not in a swamp.
It also lives in sunny places. An air plant belongs on a windowsill, not in a dark corner.
Tillandsia are great little house plants, and your service to it as a emotional support animal will be rewarded. Just don’t believe everything you’re told, especially if it sounds too good to be true. That’s one of an air plant’s gifts to you: healthy skepticism.
Semiosis 