Category: Uncategorized

Some of my houseplants have names. Steve, the lucky bamboo, was named by my sister-in-law. Coy is the aspiring gingko bonsai that does not reveal its growth plans. Swamp Thing is a palm tree native to wetlands. Bambino is literally its name: Alocasia amazonica ‘Bambino.’

The basil plants and scallions have no names — because we eat them, and they shouldn’t be treated as pets. I was taught this by my paternal grandfather, Peter Burke, who grew up on a farm. When the time came for his family to eat Hardhead, the beloved calf, no one could bear to kill it, even though they were hard-scrabble poor. They had to trade it for an anonymous calf from another family.

Food is best thought of as food. I trim back some of my plants with names to keep them healthy and well shaped. Cutting up Helen and eating it would be a step too far.

***

Growing herbs and vegetables is a delicious way to justify a house full of plants. In fact, my husband jokes that they’re all I should grow. Scallions are especially easy:

Buy a bunch of scallions, also called green onions, at the grocery store. Choose a bunch that looks healthy and has relatively long roots. Chop off the white part with an inch or two of the green leaves, and put them in water. (Eat the rest.) The roots will grow, and you can plant them in soil. They like lots of sunshine and moist soil. Eventually, you can harvest the plants, and if you only take the mature leaves, you’ll have fresh green onions forever.

Among my houseplants, large and small, is this little tillandsia, probably a Tillandsia ionantha, also known as an air plant. I got it several years ago, either at a local plant shop or the grocery store’s flower department.

It’s easy to grow. Just dunk it or spray it with water once or twice a week. It doesn’t have roots to absorb water, although it might sprout roots to try to grab onto things. I saw this kind of tillandsia growing on tree branches in Mexico. At home, you can set the plant inside a pretty glass or on a plate, rock, or chunk of bark. It likes lots of sunlight.

And, every few years, it will bloom. Flowers will emerge from the center of the rosette of leaves, and the leaves may turn pink to attract pollinators. Then, slowly, it will die back, but the plant will normally grow offsets of more rosettes, so life goes on.

My tillandsia has just bloomed, right in time for the holidays, so my decorating woes have been solved. Behold these small but superb flowers!

I’ll be at C2E2, the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, which will be held December 10 to 12 at McCormick Place on the lakefront here in Chicago. It’s one of the nerd highlights of the year, and it may draw 50,000 people — wear your mask and get your vaccine or covid test to attend.

I’ll be on two panels:

Beyond the Stars: Worldbuilding in Science Fiction, Friday, December 10, 5:15 to 6:15 p.m. Location: S405B. The greatest science fiction is all about grappling with the question: what else is there? Whether it’s exploring far-off galaxies or looking ahead to our tomorrow, these authors have seen what is and looked beyond to what could be. Join them as they discuss how they created whole new worlds that still feel real and relatable, and what issues they hoped to confront while leaving the present behind. Guests: Timothy Zahn, Delilah S. Dawson, J.S. Dewes, Sue Burke.

I’ll be signing books from 6:30 to 7:00 p.m. at Anderson’s Bookshop, Booth 1049

Women in Sci-Fi, Saturday, December 11, 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. Location: S405B. Join two friends and sci fi authors as they discuss their new books, their writing tips, their favorites of the genre, and more. J.S. Dewes, Sue Burke.

I’ll be signing books from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. at Anderson’s Bookshop, Booth 1049.

Finally, I’ll be volunteering both afternoons at the Science Fiction Outreach Project, Booth 1865. We will be giving away information about science fiction — and free books for all ages! Come anytime and choose a free book to take home.

This fippokat has read and enjoyed my most recent novel, Immunity Index. Books make an excellent Christmas gift for others and for yourself!

Windycon, Chicagoland’s longest-running science fiction convention, is back in person for 2021! This year’s theme is “Urban Fantastic.”

Windycon 47 will be held from Friday to Sunday, November 12 to 14, at the Westin Lombard Yorktown Center in Lombard, Illinois. At its core, it’s a literary-based convention, but we’ll also enjoy games, costumes, art, filk and other music, science, poetry, anime, a dealer’s room, theater, and miscellaneous fooling around.

Last year’s Windycon was canceled due to covid complications, and this year masks and other restrictions will be required — and for me, welcome. We can see our friends again and be safe doing it.

Due to restrictions, there will be fewer panels this year. I’ll be on this one:

Representation of Space in Science Fiction in Lilac B/D room, Saturday, November 13, at 1 p.m.: Few settings in science fiction have received as much attention or excited the imagination as much as outer space. Our panelists discuss the different ways that space has been portrayed. AJ Rocca (moderator), Toni Lichtenstein Bogolub, Sue Burke, John O’Neill.

Personally, I think the show that gets it the most right is Doctor Who. Don’t start me on Star Wars…

I imagine the usually lively evening party scene will be a bit chilled, but I’ll be at the party Friday and Saturday night starting at 9 p.m. in Room 1421, hosted by Capricon, Chicago’s other major convention (February 3 to 6, 2022), and by Chicon 8, the World Science Fiction Convention (September 1 to 5, 2022). Come enjoy some refreshments and chat about the coming year in local and world fandom.

Every flower is unique. And yet, some small yellow flowers have a nickname among botanists: DYCs, Damned Yellow Composites. Those are plants of the Asteraceae family, common worldwide, usually tenacious weeds with small yellow flowers. They may be pretty, but they’re so much alike that they’re hard to tell apart.

Botanists sometimes don’t even try. It may not matter ecologically exactly which species those flowers belong to. Identifying them as DYCs serves for all but the most rigorous scientific purposes.

Every small songbird is also unique but far too many are similar. The ones that are hard to distinguish are sometimes called dickybirds by birdwatchers, and often these birds, especially all those warblers, have a touch of yellow.

There are more galaxies in the sky than grains of sand on Earth’s beaches, so how many stars will be standard M-class yellow star like our own Sol? Too many to count.

Flowers, birds, stars: yellow abounds. So does ambition.

Flowers, birds, and suns all strive for more, and our universe undergoes constant change as a result. Birds compete with song. Stars create more complex matter at every generation. Imagine what a weed will be like as eternity gives it time to perfect its art. The bouquets will astound us with their sheer ambition.

Yellow means aspiration and change — changes too small and slow for us to see, yet we can enjoy their success so far: a field of flowers, a morning filled with birdsong, and a sunny day. Yellow unites them in beauty.

My writers critique group here in Chicago recently released an anthology, Over the Edge Again: An Edgy Writers Anthology.

Samuel Durr, who also edited the anthology, used his experience as a hunter to explore the relationship between two people who didn’t seek each other’s companionship in his story, “Wild Heart.” In this essay, he shares the best part of hunting.

Forest to Table

By Samuel Durr

Scouting, hiking, climbing, freezing, spotting, calling, shooting, tracking, celebrating, gutting, dragging, hoisting, skinning, quartering, grinding, butchering, packaging, and finally, cooking, sharing, and enjoying. Deer hunting is hungry work, but the part that makes me consider buying a lifetime license is the last bit. Preparing meat harvested from the forest takes an enormous amount of time, money, and energy, but is worth the cold toes.

The first time I tried deer meat I was struck by its similarity to beef. Cue the eye rolls, but it’s true. The less desirable cuts on a cow, those which contain connective tissue like the shoulder and neck, are identical to the same cuts on a deer and can be used to substitute any beef recipe traditionally utilizing those cuts. Which is a long way of saying venison is fantastic for jerky, braised dishes like Italian beef, ossobuco, or beef stew. One of the great myths of deer meat is that it’s tough, but it’s only tough if it’s cooked inappropriately.

In truth, the sought-after cuts, those from the back legs, the back straps, and the tender loins, cannot compete. That’s because a cow has a great deal more fat between layers of muscle. That’s not to say these are terrible on a deer. They can be juicy and almost fork tender; wrap them in bacon and grill them if there’s any doubt, but consider that they’ve been taken from a lean athlete who’s been hounded by coyotes, fought for breeding rights, and slept under the stars. Not from a diabetic heifer who’s been so unnaturally bred it chews its own stomach contents like bubble gum.

Another, often-disdained, form of venison is ground venison. Just like the quality cuts on a cow, high quality ground beef is hard to beat, but that’s not to say ground venison doesn’t have a place at the dinner table. This stuff is fantastic and incredibly versatile. On a side note, if an outdoorsman says they have a lot of freezer-burned, six-year-old ground venison, it’s because they don’t cook as much as they should and will probably end up tossing it. I get offended by hunters who don’t cook in the same way that animal rights activists get offended by hunters. Point being, it’s a tragedy because this stuff is great for chili, tacos, and is a crucial ingredient for the best food harvested from these mystical forest creatures: sausage.

Sausage is the ultimate, the apex, the pinnacle. Good sausage is the most impressive stuff a hunter can prepare. If you hand someone a well-made sausage, regardless of whether they hunt or not, they will be impressed if they’re at least a skosh outdoorsy. But sausage also requires the greatest number of tools to get the job done right. A competitive sausager — my fancy, made-up term — may use a grinder, meat thermometer, stuffer, and a smoker just to make one kind of sausage. Last year, I spent close to fifteen hours making breakfast sausage, brats, Italian sausage, summer sausage, snack sticks, and Polish sausage, all from venison. Most of it was good, some of it great, some just so-so, but all worthy as a meal.

I’ve included a recipe for venison Italian beef which highlights the above-mentioned deer and beef similarities. It requires a slow cooker and access to venison, moose, or elk, but that’s it. Easy peasy. If it’s your first time trying wild game, it’s a great introduction to the part of hunting that, for millions of years, has always mattered most: the eating.

Easy Italian Beef (Venison) Recipe

READY: 3 to 5 hours

SERVES: 6 to 12

INGREDIENTS

2-3                   lbs venison roast

3                      beef bouillon cubes

1                      (5/8 oz) packet Italian salad dressing mix

1                      cup water

1                      (18 oz) jar of hot or mild giardiniera

1                      package of French rolls

Directions

1. Place roast in crock pot.

• Add Italian salad dressing mix, bouillon cubes and water.

• Cook on high until tender (3 to 5 hours). Shred with forks. Serve on rolls with giardiniera.

My latest novel, Immunity Index, has a woolly mammoth in it. I don’t think this product, for sale at the Time Travel Mart, is for real, but I would buy a dozen cans if it were.

SF² Concatenation, a British on-line magazine, asked me to write an article about “Getting published: From draft manuscript to print.” I wrote about my most recent novel, Immunity Index.

I tell about mistakes I made, misadventures I didn’t expect, and something I decided to never ever do again.

Read the article here: http://www.concatenation.org/articles/burke-sue-getting-published.html

“IN MEMORIAL: This plaque commemorates an oak tree that graced this site for forty years. It was felled by the bureaucracy in December 1990 to make space for one more car.”

This is a real plaque at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, located at the carpark  between the Wai-te-ata Apartments and the Boyd Wilson clubrooms. I haven’t been able to learn much more, besides that it was put up anonymously, and that rogue plaques are sort of a thing in New Zealand.

I believe this sort of thing should be encouraged worldwide.