Category: Uncategorized

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

My novel Semiosis was released by Tor a month ago, and here’s some of the latest news and reviews.

I wrote an article about writing non-human points of view at Unbound Worlds: “…plants lead lives of quiet desperation, in constant combat using a variety of weapons.”

At the signing at Anderson’s Bookstore in La Grange, Illinois, I talked about what would happen if I could practice photosynthesis. You can see a video of the 5-minute talk here and read the short essay here.

Today, at Lawrence Schoen’s blog Eating Authors, I describe my most memorable meal – a snack at the Eiffel Tower that proved something essential about the French people.

You can read an interview of me by Sean McLachlan, who helped me write the book as a beta reader, at Black Gate, and an interview by Paul Semel.

There are reviews at Christian Science Monitor, Biblio Sanctum, Kirkus Review: Of Plants and Men, a featured review, The Perks of Books video review, Open Letters Review, and Lynn’s Book Blog Friday Firsts.

(A brief, moralizing rant cut from the original manuscript because the book was getting too long.)

Sadly, I am the only one of my species. In addition to genetic advantages, sexual reproduction provides certain physical pleasures, and thus some hedonistic plants are self-pollinating despite the congenital defects that often occur; self-pollinators must make many seeds to ensure a reasonable number of healthy ones.

More abstemiously, I create asexual, agamospermic inflorescences whose always-healthy seeds result from modified meiotic division of the chromosomes inside the reproductive cells in virgin ovaries, rather than through fertilization by my own pollen. Some genetic crossover occurs, providing a certain amount of variation, although the offspring are very nearly clones. It is the best I can hope for, being alone.

Instead, I use flowers and pollen mostly for other purposes: pollen for communication, and flowers for the sheer beauty.

(This is a section that was cut from the manuscript because the book was getting lengthy.)

Human meteorologists tell me that rain comes as the result of vast movements in the air that bring warmer or cooler, and wetter or drier air masses from here to there, and that the heat from sunshine powers these movements. But the meteorologists are Sun worshippers, and thus they will see the Sun as the causative factor behind everything. The same humans assure me that planets without water are dead, though the Sun shines on them. They do not make the obvious conclusion: Water is life.

I inherited a root that identifies a god of water, a vast animal that lives in the oceans and whose minions are other animals, in particular large intelligent ones, clearly a superstition by its irrationality and ignorance, and the elaborate stories in the root concerning the water god and its minions obscure the facts about water and animals. The stories allege that god sends water to help its animals and that the animals can petition for rain, so I must win the favor of the animals and keep them near. Even less sophisticated plants hold large, intelligent animals in a certain appreciation that points to awe.

It is true that in times of drought, many animals die, go dormant, or leave; animals, especially large intelligent ones, make up a minute part of the biomass of life and their presence is an indicator of water, but it is not a causative agent. Animals irrigate their favored plants, so animals do control water to an extent, and the idea that currying favor with those animals brings the blessing of water is true only in its most mundane sense. The human meteorologists can predict the rain, and with that information, they and we intelligent plants can make plans accordingly.

But water moves as it will, a god of total power that feeds on the Sun’s energy just as we plants do, a god that permeates all life but whose life differs from mine the way a fire differs from the Sun. I must accept its acts, whether helpful or harmful, always impersonal, and I must cope as rationality gives me the tools.

Water may not have sent the human animals, but water has allowed me to grow and understand their role. The belief that animals were divine agents did not prevent us bamboo from slaughtering them in the past; in fact, it may have encouraged it, because to kill an enemy’s minions is to harm the enemy and help oneself, even if the deaths occur so far away that their bodies’ iron cannot be savored. Being divine may be a curse. Humans are mundane, fortunately, yet they are valued not only by me but by other plants.

As you know, my novel Semiosis was released last week to all the fanfare Tor and I could muster. Here are some recent highlights:

You can read reviews (beware, spoilers) by Liz Bourke, and at The Verge.

I wrote a column about the novel for John Scalzi’s Big Idea series at his blog, Whatever, asking: Who is in charge of the plant where you live? There’s also an interview at MyLifeMyBooksMyEscape.com.

In celebration of that, there have been some interviews and posts around the internet.

At the Tor/Forge blog, I answer the question of whether your neglected houseplants want revenge. Short answer: no. Consider the fate of the osage orange…

At Mary Robinette Kowal’s website, I share “My Favorite Bit” about Semiosis.

At the Chicago Review of Books, I talk about where science fiction writers get their ideas, and how Semiosis started with my houseplants.

SFRevu has a review of Semiosis and an interview with me.

At Shelf Awareness, there’s a review of the book and an interview.

At the Cartesian Theatre, Andrew Leon Hudson asks me some questions, not all of them somber and serious.

The Qwillery has an interview asking writing-related questions.

A review in Spanish is at the Dreams of Elvex blog.