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In Semiosis, our colonists wake up in orbit around a planet noted as f at star HIP 30815. Where is that? In the constellation Gemini. But let’s get more precise.

The above photo, which pinpoints the location, comes from In-the-sky.org, which offers guides to the night sky specific to your location. The site can be set to “night mode” so you can use it as you stargaze.

The “HIP” in the name refers to the Hipparcos Catalog, one of a great many lists of stars. The Hipparcos catalog was compiled from the data gathered by the European Space Agency’s astrometric satellite Hipparcos.

The number basically follows the order of the object’s right ascension, that is, its east-west coordinate starting at the March equinox. This is the celestial equivalent of terrestrial longitude, so the number is merely the star’s place in an ordered list.

The “f” designates the planet. By convention, planets are given letters in the order they are discovered. This means there are five other planets at star HIP 30815 (according to the novel, not current science, which hasn’t identified any planets so far).

You can get much more detailed scientific information about the star at Universeguide.com.

Sky-map.org offers photos and additional technical details, such as the variety of names the star has: HD 1989, HD 45506, TYCHO-2 2000, TYC 1328-38-1, USNO-A2 1050-03646671, BSC 1991, HR 2340, and HIP 30815.

Here’s the passage from Chapter 1 of the novel that specifies the star:

We awakened, cold and dizzy, with our muscles, hearts, and digestive systems atrophied from the 158-year hibernation on a tiny spaceship. The computer had brought us into orbit, sent a message to Earth, then administered intravenous drugs.

Two hours later I was in the cramped cabin trying to sip an electrolyte drink when Vera, our astronomer, came flying in from the control module, her tightly-curled hair trailing like a black cloud.

“We’re at the wrong star!”

I felt a wave of nausea and despair.

Paula was spoon-feeding Bryan, who was too weak to eat, and she seemed calm, but her hand trembled. “The computer could pick another one if it was better,” she said.

“It did!” Vera said. “It is. Lots of oxygen and water. And lots of life. It’s alive and waiting for us. We’re home!”

We were at star HIP 30815f instead of HIP 30756, at a planet with a well-evolved ecology, and, I noted, abundant chlorophyll. The carbon dioxide level was slightly higher than Earth but not dangerous. Seen from Earth, both stars were pinpricks in the Gemini constellation near Castor’s left shin. As planned, we named the planet Pax, since we had come to live in peace.

Write what you know is debatable advice, but I think it’s good — if it’s understood in its broadest sense. Write what you know, what you’ve learned, what you’ve observed, what you can know through imagination, what you want to know, and what your emotions know.

Here’s an example. How does it feel when the world is about to end?

By experience, I know it feels horrifying and confusing.

This is what happened. I grew up in Milwaukee. Lake Michigan is to the east. All my life, the sun has risen in the east over water. Water is to the east. Always.

Then one evening I was visiting a friend in Los Angeles, and we were having dinner at an oceanside restaurant. I noticed that the sun was setting over the water … but water is to the east! The sun was setting in the east! The universe was suddenly and horrifyingly wrong!

After a moment, I recovered enough to look around the restaurant. Everyone was talking and enjoying themselves. No one noticed what was happening. Was I the only one? And physically, everything looked okay, but logically, if the Earth had reversed its course or flipped its orientation, there would be consequences. Gravitational disturbances. Big ones, like planet-wide destruction. But people were walking around just fine.

And … oh, I was in California. I’d seen maps. The water is to the west there. The Pacific Ocean.

It was okay! The sun was normal. Life was normal. The universe was normal.

… Dinner was delicious.

I still remember that moment, though: I think I forgot to breathe. I was aware of only one thing, the sight of that sun going down over the water, knowing what it had to mean: an enormously wrong thing, very possibly The End — and then a cascading series of smaller things that were wrong, too, but in a different way that didn’t make sense.

That moment and other imagined or real disasters have taught me that panic often comes mixed with confusion, perhaps waves of confusion and panic as the situation changes. Different people react in different ways depending on their personalities and experiences. I tend to seek more information. Someone else might be more inclined to act immediately. (That person might have made quite a scene at the restaurant. It’s fun to imagine.)

So — once I saw that the world was about to end. I know how it felt to me at that moment. I can write what I know.

Destroying the Earth, or at least humanity, has long been sort of a literary hobby of mine. This short story was published in Voyage Short Story and Poetry Magazine in 2001 and the Triangulation: End of Time anthology in 2007.

Think Kindly on Our Fossils
by Sue Burke

When Comet Kabandha was discovered, Travis Hudson gawked from his window at the fuzzy light near the Pleiades stars.

“It’s a mistake,” he mumbled. Plotting comet trajectories was tricky, everyone was saying so. “They’ll check their math and we’ll be fine.”

Astronomers checked and rechecked. Finally, on television, world leaders, united and somber, asked for courage in the remaining three months before the comet struck Earth.

Travis turned off the TV. He had always believed the universe had a purpose, and therefore humanity had a purpose, and therefore he had a purpose, and it had to be something more noble than a head-on collision with a giant ball of dust and ice. He was only 29 and enjoyed his job as a construction site manager. Under his watch, buildings rose to completion, and he felt that he was becoming something, too. Someday, he believed, he would understand more than the efficient scheduling of subcontractors. He had his whole life ahead of him. But no more.

Each day, Comet Kabandha grew closer and more appalling. Riots and chaos — and huge parties — broke out here and there, but for some reason that he didn’t understand and no one could explain to him, life went on in many ways far too normally.

Construction work stopped, which he did understand. He had time to ponder his doom, and finally, after seeing a mention in the news, he drove frantically to the annual Crater Days celebration in Manson, Iowa, to inspect the world’s fifteenth-largest impact crater. It would tell him something — he knew it would.

In Manson, he saw only tents, plywood booths, a midway surrounded by cornfields, and sparser crowds than he had hoped for. His disappointment became anger as he walked in.

“Where’s the crater?” he asked a woman sitting at the official souvenir booth.

She gave him a welcoming smile. “Straight down, twenty-four miles wide, seventy-four million years old. Not as big as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, of course, or the one that’s coming. Would you like a geological survey?” She held up a spiral-bound report.

Travis kicked the front of a hot dog stand. “You’re all going to die. Do something. Fight back.” He aimed another kick at a telescope for rent.

A teenage girl guarded it, fists raised. “Hey, I want to watch Kabandha catch us. It’s the best show of my life.”

“Your life is over.”

“Not yet.”

He threw a squeeze bottle of mustard at her. “This isn’t a party. Don’t die happy.”

The woman selling souvenirs got up and stood face to face with him. “Look, we’ve got some carnival games and crafts sales and live music at sunset. If it’s not for you, get out.”

Travis drove a few miles, his despair deepening as he considered the cornfields with their half-ripe ears. No one would eat that corn. He spotted a church and blundered in.

“Angels will save us, right? God will take us all into heaven, won’t He? We don’t deserve this.”

The minister had been vacuuming the carpet in the aisles. “Actually, I don’t think we can expect special treatment from the universe. Angels and life-after-death are primitive myths.”

Travis fell to his knees. “But there has to be a soul, a spirit, something more than my body. We’ll transcend our deaths.”

“Of course. Humanity is the consciousness of the universe.”

“We were sent a Savior. I’ve accepted Jesus into my heart. I’ve been good. I deserve better, don’t I?”

“Well,” the minister said, “let us pray for those who survive the coming earthquakes and tidal waves and firestorms and dust and darkness and cold. They’ll suffer and starve and repopulate the Earth. Or else some humble creature will arise to sentience and worship. Or else the comet will bring amino acids for a new form of life. This is not the end. God is eternal beyond our comprehension.”

“But I’m afraid. I’ve never died before.” He prayed for a long time. The minister finished vacuuming.

As Travis left after sunset, a car pulled up and a bride and groom got out and entered the church. The comet and its tail shined overhead.

He went home and wrote: “I, Travis Hudson, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare that since there’s nothing to leave to anyone anyhow, I will not leave my death to chance, either, or to giant dirty snowballs being tossed at us by a person or persons unknown.”

He sent a bullet into his brain. With a centimeter difference in aim, he would have succeeded. Although it seemed absurd to him, an ambulance came and carted him off to the hospital.

While he was on the operating table, he got as close to death as any man alive, and he awoke from surgery aware of the meaning of life, obvious and amazing. The nurses listened politely, but he came to realize they already knew, or they wouldn’t show up for their shifts.

At his release from the hospital, he had a distracting scar on his forehead, diminished use of his left side, and great inner peace.

By then a storm of meteors tore through the night, dozens falling per second. Northern lights flickered like drunken rainbows. The comet glowed in the west bigger than a full moon, and its blue tail stretched to the far horizon. In the half-light, birds sang like it was dawn. Travis limped to a park bench. A squirrel approached to beg.

“It’s a beautiful night,” he said. He tossed peanuts so it would stay and listen. “I’m a wise man now. Will you evolve into the next thing to suffer self-awareness, little guy? You’ll see eternity but never reach it. You’ll know death but never experience it while you’re alive. You won’t have any excuses for what you do after you become self-aware. The knowledge of death will be the loss of innocence.”

It seemed to be listening. He gave it the entire bag of peanuts. It was going to need them.

“I hope you’ll think kindly on us when you find our fossils.”

He walked away over a hill to dance with dinosaurs. A Tyrannosaurus waved its little arms to beat out waltz time. A squat Euoplocephalus swung its clubbed tail and tore up the turf and flowers as it lumbered, one-two-three, one-two-three. Travis Hudson understood the universe, and the sun would not rise on him again.

© 2001 by Sue Burke

This short story was originally published in Daily Science Fiction.

Zero Hour
by Sue Burke

The man had deep worry lines between his eyebrows, although he was only in his twenties. When he woke up after a restless sleep, he immediately looked at the window. Mid-afternoon sun shone through cracks in the blinds. He checked his bedside clock: 5:51 a.m.

The clocks were still wrong … and in a sudden panic, he reached out for his wife. Yes, she was still there, still safe beside him, or as safe as she could be. She lay with her back toward him, her shoulders bare and beautiful.

At 6 a.m. the house audio turned on. The usual mechanical announcers spoke, describing help for victims of a distant earthquake. They said an international peace meeting had been a success, and the weather would be warm and sunny with no break in the drought, but household conservation efforts had exceeded goals.

She stirred, took a deep breath, then another. “Good news?”

“As always,” he answered heartily. It was their private ritual. Rumors circulated about protests and arrests. Just a few days ago the network’s clocks had gone haywire, but then recovered and continued immediately with no other changes. The news had ignored it entirely.

Suddenly he worried that he and his wife hadn’t mentioned the time change out loud, and maybe their silence gave them away.

“Six a.m. in the afternoon. That’s weird,” he said, just to say something.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

He hadn’t meant her to take it that way. He held her tight, hoping that if she knew he still desired her, she would know he didn’t blame her. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “Up and at ’em.”

She seemed to understand. She showered quickly while he shaved.

In the kitchen, the screen on the refrigerator recommended healthy breakfasts: whole-wheat cereal, skim milk, oranges, and coffee. It would record their choices, count calories, and adjust subsequent suggestions. He realized that they did as they were told as much out of habit as strategy. The network‛s audio feed continued to play.

She ate silently, staring. Maybe she was listening for clues, for changes in the pattern of information. He wished he could help her.

He worked as a physician’s assistant, a job he might have wanted even if he had been offered a choice of careers. He did what he could to fight back. More patients than ever were making themselves fat as a form of silent, visible protest. They claimed they couldn’t help it and asked him to check for endocrine problems. They were probably buying food on the black market, but they had to pretend to be ill, so he sent them home with the diagnosis they needed.

But other patients arrived dangerously anorexic, or depressed, or paranoid, or toxic with anger, and they needed real help. A few days ago, when the clocks had suddenly reset themselves to 00:00, he had heard hopeful whispers in the waiting room: Maybe something broke. But nothing else happened, life went on as usual, and hopes died.

“Maybe,” his wife said, coffee cup in hand, “I should just go to work and leave Aunt Becky alone.”

That was their code word for the network. He opened his mouth to blurt out no, but stopped. He ate a spoonful of cereal to try to calm himself. It had no taste. He swallowed. “I think you should try to … talk to her again.”

“Again?”

“Well, you got a little change. That must mean something.”

His wife and her team of saboteurs had broken the network apart a few days ago, and for an instant it had stopped, but they hadn’t done enough. It reset itself, she had whispered in his ear when she came home that evening, and he held her for a long time as she wept, while the clocks said it was late morning.

She shook her head, her hair waving softly around her tight face. “But you.…”

“Everyone has family problems.”

She stared at the network speaker.

“But she could be … angry. She could do something.”

He got up, refilled her coffee cup, then emptied the pot into his own. “I’m not angry, not with you. I’m proud of you, whatever she does.”

She drank her coffee. He studied her face as he finished eating, trying to see if she believed him, but he couldn’t guess her thoughts at all. The network feed babbled on and on.

“Okay,” she whispered, and gave him a look that was more worried than hopeful. They got up and stacked the dishes. He hugged her and tried to memorize her body against his, every place where her curves and bones touched him: sternum, ilium, ulna, sartorius, masseter. The names might help him remember her, if he had to.

They left the house and didn’t lock the door behind them. It would lock itself or open itself depending on who tried to enter. He glared at the sidewalk. If they couldn’t lock their own doors, was it their home? Was anything theirs? He acknowledged the anger and tried to let it pass, just as he counseled his patients.

She walked toward her car and quickly got in. He studied her to memorize the movements of her muscles: gluteus, gastrocnemius, biceps, deltoid. He noted the color of her eyes and the curve of her lips. But as her car backed down the driveway, he turned away, ashamed. He knew he should hope that she succeeded, but he only hoped to see her again.

In life, it was only about a foot long, but it might trigger nightmares if you saw it swim past. It would wriggle like a worm or an eel through the water. At the end of an elephant-like snout, a toothy mouth would reach out and tear into onto your flesh to suck out nutrients as it waved its eyes at you…

Since 1989, the Tully monster has been the official state fossil of Illinois.

It lived about 300 million years ago. At that time, Illinois lay near the equator. Dense swamps were pierced by meandering, muddy rivers full of animals like the early relatives of jellyfish and shrimp. The mud rapidly buried creatures that died and preserved them even if they had soft bodies.

The nodules containing these fossils were discovered around Mazon Creek in the 1850s and attracted fossil collectors. In the 1950s, Francis Tully found something new and took it to the Field Museum of Natural History, where the paleontologists named it Tullimonstrum gregarium or “Tully’s common monster,” because Mr. Tully had found it, it was highly unusual (a monster), and there turned out to be quite a few of that kind of fossil at Mazon Creek. And only at Mazon Creek. They may have been common worldwide, but only special circumstances could preserve an animal like that.

It had a long, soft, segmented body with no shell or backbone. At one end were fins. At the other writhed a trunk-like snout with jaws and teeth. In the middle were two eyes on stalks.

Is it a worm? A mollusc? A very early vertebrate? Hard to know. Beyond all doubt, creepy.

We don’t know what creatures, if any, we’ll find on other planets, but Earth’s past is a warning. We might not like it.

Mushrooms have popped up in one of my house plant pots. Specifically, they’re plantpot dapperlings, Leucocoprinus birnbaumi. This tropical and subtropical saprotroph has found its way into greenhouses and house plants around the world.

These mushrooms are probably a good sign, according to some observers. It means that the soil is being enriched as the fungus breaks down dead material. The mushrooms are also hard to get rid of and probably not worth the effort. Just admire them, and maybe set tiny figurines of dancing fairies around them to celebrate.

Like a few other mushrooms, they’re poisonous, so don’t eat them. The clover-shaped leaves in the picture are yellow wood sorrel, Oxalis stricta, which is edible and makes a nice, lemony-sour garnish on salads and other dishes. The big stalks are Madagascar dragon trees, Dracaena marginata ‘Tricolor.’ That plant is toxic to dogs and cats but not people — still, I don’t plan to eat it. Too pretty.

I think I know where the mushrooms came from. I recently repotted the plants into soil I bought at the local gardening center. According to the package, the soil contained one or more of the following: composted organic material, aged pine bark, cow manure compost, sedge peat, sand, perlite, and composted spent mushroom soil. Fine stuff, and it probably came with a full ecology of microorganisms and fungus spores, now growing in my living room.

(The soil also produced a plague of fungus gnats. I’m trying to get rid of them slaughter them without mercy.)

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We’re all going to die, but probably not almost all of us at once. We may be prepared for our own death, even if it comes suddenly, but not the sudden deaths of almost everyone we know. We all have personal failures that we can come to terms with during our lives or as we see death approaching — but how can we come to terms with the failure of so many deaths at once?

Emily St. John Mandel explores these questions in Station Eleven through intertwined lives and deaths that take place before and after a sudden flu kills 99.6% of the world’s population. Science fiction? Yes. A literary novel? Yes, and more literary than science fiction, more character than action. I love both kinds of novels, and I loved this.

For my tastes, the ending works a little too hard to tie a lot of loose ends together into a somewhat optimistic ending, but not too much work to weaken the book for me. The truth of the emotions withstand a hint of forced optimism. If our world ends, the fragments of art that survive might sustain us, and our new lives will give new meaning to the art that the artists never intended. Amid desolation, this can give us strength.

View all my reviews

Hugo Award winners will be announced on Saturday at CoNZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction Convention, being held virtually from New Zealand. The ceremony will begin at 11 a.m. NZST, 6 p.m. CDT Friday Chicago time, so I’ll be able to watch live. George R.R. Martin will be toastmaster, along with some special guests.

I’ve read all novelettes, which are stories between 7,500 and 17,500 words, and here are my votes. (My votes for the short stories are here.) Overall, the stories cover a fair spectrum of current science fiction and fantasy, and if you never read in the genre, this is as good an introduction as any. You may find some of the stories move you in a different way than they moved me. (SFF Book Reviews offers some divergent opinions.)

6. “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2019)
A mystery writer finds a man dead, apparently in an accident, and eventually learns the truth. While the story is complex and creepy, it never develops much tension, and, for my tastes, it’s resolved too easily.

5. “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, 10 July 2019)
A cat battles Satan for the soul of a poet. Light and stylish, this is perfect for cat lovers and preserves the place for humor in the genre, which is hard to do and, in my opinion, never done often enough.

4. “Away With the Wolves” by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny Magazine: Disabled People Destroy Fantasy Special Issue, September/October 2019)
Can a werewolf story be sweet and gentle? Yes. And in my opinion, there’s always a need for sweet and gentle stories in the genre.

3. “The Archronology of Love”, by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed, April 2019)
Everyone in a colony on a distant planet died while investigating strange alien technology, and researchers have come to find out why. Some of the dead were loved ones. In a way, the story is one long, slow goodbye — or rather, the search for a way to say goodbye.

2. Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin (Forward Collection, Amazon)
Bitter anger propels this story as the protagonist discovers a lack of beauty and truth, and the means to recover it. Wonderfully told, but for my tastes, didactic — still, the underlying premise rings true.

1. “Omphalos”, by Ted Chiang (Exhalation, Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf; Picador)
What if Creationism were true? That is, what if God created the universe 8912 years ago? We could still learn a lot from archeology and other scientific studies. But what if we learned something we didn’t want to believe? The story carefully questions that premise, but I’m a little disappointed by the ending, a conclusion that many people in our own universe have already reached.

The kindle version of Semiosis is on sale today, July 24, at Amazon for only $2.99.

I’ll be attending CoNZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held virtually for the first time — because 2020 is an unprecedented year. The convention will run from July 29 to August 2, and the Hugo Awards will be presented on August 1.

As a member of CoNZealand, I get to vote on the awards. I’ve read all the short stories, and here are my votes. (The Hugos uses ranked voting.) They’re all good stories, well worth reading, and my ranking is a bit arbitrary because I had to choose, and my opinions are a bit harsh because I needed to be judgmental to choose. Your opinions may vary from mine and still be correct.

6. “As the Last I May Know” by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
An emotionally riven tale about a war-winning weapon that can only be used at a great price. It almost feels like a vivid fable rather than a remotely probable story, although it leaves the reader with a lot of questions and doubt — and doubt is the point of the price of the weapon.

5. “And Now His Lordship Is Laughing” by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
This classic-style horror story involves a dollmaker in India during British occupation — so classic that the ending can be guessed less than halfway through. Righteous anger undergirds the narration, but the conventional plot weakens it.

4. “A Catalog of Storms” by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
As storms become sentient, a small town’s children fight back. The writing evokes a timeless dreamlike quality and creates sharp characters: pathos abounds. The point of view character is a child, however, which traps us in a limited horizon that is both claustrophobic and kind of a cheat, since the larger picture can go unexplained.

3. “Do Not Look Back, My Lion” by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
A husband must send her wife off to war one more time, and she just can’t bear to do it again. This is another story that questions war, and it also questions and subverts gender roles, and it rent my heart. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins the Hugo.

2. “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
The enslaved people in this story want freedom more than they want revenge, but even magic can’t fulfill every wish. A haunting story that could also deservedly win the Hugo.

1. “Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island” by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)
This was my choice for the Nebula Award (it didn’t win), and I’m still wowed by the story. In 1891, something tragic happened, and we’re still living with the consequences. This very short story, told in an unconventional style, smacks the reader upside the head with nuance, ambiguity, and pitiless social criticism. Its densely packed details make it hard to read and irresistible to re-read: very much a story of our moment, and I mean that as high praise.