From February 5 to 7, Barnes and Noble is offering discounts to B&N members and Premium members for pre-orders for all forthcoming print, ebook, and audio titles.
This includes the paperback edition of Usurpation, coming October 21, 2025!
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Meanwhile, you might enjoy the short story “Bodyhoppers” by Rocío Vega that I translated for the February 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine. Read it here.
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Finally, the story I translated for Clarkesworld Magazine last year, “The Coffee Machine” by Celia Corral-Vázquez, is a finalist for Best Short Story of 2024. More information is here.
Alex Kingsley has interviewed me about the Semiosis trilogy for Interstellar Flight Magazine. You can read the interview here.
One of the questions:Would you trust Stevland if you lived on Pax?
Stevland is all alone, the last of his species. Even here on Earth, some plants are social creatures, just like humans. For humans, solitary confinement is torture, and Stevland suffers the same way. He has abandonment issues and other mental health problems, so although he means well and he has a moral compass, his deep-seated anxieties get in the way. And he knows, at least unconsciously, that if he loses his new community, his humans, he cannot survive, so he will do anything to keep them. Anything, even if it violates his moral compass.
The novel Usurpation discusses drop bears a lot: voracious carnivores originally from Cygni, a distant star system.
“Those definitely should not have been let loose on Earth because they didn’t just eat small animals, they’d attack human toddlers. I had friends who hunted drop bears, and I didn’t want to kill robots, but it was different for drop bears.” (Chapter 2)
“Foehn contacts Boreas and me. ‘I see a drop bear! You know what the fippokats are going to do!’” (Chapter 5)
“The drop bear (sometimes dropbear) is a hoax in contemporary Australian folklore featuring a predatory, carnivorous version of the koala. This imaginary animal is commonly spoken about in tall tales designed to scare tourists. While koalas are typically docile herbivores (and are not bears), drop bears are described as unusually large and vicious marsupials that inhabit treetops and attack unsuspecting people (or other prey) that walk beneath them by dropping onto their heads from above.”
I received an advance copy of this novel with an invitation to write a quote for its release. I love Tchaikovsky’s work, so of course I said yes.
I knew from the description that the story would involve an encounter with the dominant life-form living on a moon named Shroud — weird, wonderful life. Because that’s what Tchaikovsky is good at, right?
But as I read, I kept feeling doubt in a good way. How could life possibly exist on such an utterly inhospitable planet? How was Tchaikovsky going to pull this off? Well, he found a way.
Tchaikovsky explores worlds where no one else would dare to go, and he makes the unimaginable become believable with characters who grow to meet their challenges. As the story develops, survival becomes more desperate and necessary. This is hard-edged science fiction that never loses its soul.
“Third in the Semiosis series, don’t start here. Well, I suppose you could, it would probably stand alone reasonably well, but you should do yourself the favour of reading the first two because they’re terrific. All three books are very good, and I really liked this one. Sentient trees from another planet are on future Earth and are trying to deal with Earth’s problems, while still being alien trees. The alien POV is excellent. The future Earth is pretty grim, but overall this is a hopeful book with a lot of fascinating things going on at many levels. Sue Burke is doing really interesting things.”
The FanFiAddict website is back with TBRCon2025, an all-virtual sci-fi/fantasy/horror convention that will livestream from January 19 to 26. More than 150 authors, podcasters, bloggers, and booktubers will appear on the virtual stage for 25 livestream panels, 5 live podcasts and 2 RPG sessions.
TBRCon2025 is free to watch, available on YouTube, Bluesky, X, and Threads during convention week — or to re-watch on YouTube at your convenience.
I’ll be on the panel “Is Science Catching Up to What Was Once Sci-fi?” on Wednesday, January 22, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. CST, with Mary Robinette Kowal, Malka Older, and Wick Welker, moderated by Neil Williams. A lot has changed in recent years when it comes to technology. But are we at full sci-fi tech level yet?
You can watch it live on YouTube here:
Some other panels I want to see: What Makes a Great Prologue? – Artificial Intelligence in Sci-Fi Over the Years – Space Horror: Monsters in Zero Gravity – How Book Illustrations Come to Life – What Is the Future of Dystopian Sci-Fi? – What Writing Advice Do You Take and What Do You Leave Behind? – Sci-Fi Tropes That Need an Update – How to Market Through Email Newsletters: Do’s and Don’ts.
Written by award-winning author Cristina Jurado, ChloroPhilia tells the story of Kirmen. He’s different from the other inhabitants of the Cloister, whose walls protect them all from the endless storm ravaging Earth. As a result of the Doctor’s cruel experiments, his physical form is gradually evolving into something better fit for survival in the world outside. This singular coming-of-age story addresses life after an environmental disaster and collective madness, and ends with surprising triumph.
As a translator, I faced a particular challenge with the prologue and the closing section. I’ve translated Cristina before, and she writes beautifully. She poured her talent into prose soaring toward poetry that needed to be equally compelling in English. I did my best:
And behind it all was the roar of the swarm that was its body, millions of shrieks drowning in the fleshy throats of minute beings, a beautiful song made from the spark that lit their lives and that, doused forever, wove the music of the dead.
The novela was reviewed by the Fantasy-Hive as “a remarkable, powerful and disturbing novella that confirms Jurado as a key creative voice in speculative fiction.”
ChloroPhilia is on sale here or at your favorite bookseller.
Short stories are one of my favorite art forms, but some readers don’t seem to like them. Perhaps, in school, all the short stories they read were old, depressing, pedantic, and hard to parse. (But new, uplifting, entertaining, unperplexing short stories are written all the time.) Or perhaps, some readers don’t like them because unlike novels, short stories are too fast, too intense, and send readers back into the world a little breathless. (Is that a bad thing?) Or perhaps, readers just don’t hear about them as much as novels. Now hear this: New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention is a great way to start your 2025 reading. It offers two dozen science fiction and fantasy short stories united by the idea of personal change. Themes include time travel, Greek myth, fairy tales, foreseen death, odd dystopias, programmed memory loss, and manufactured life. Many are quite short, and the tone varies from playful to horrific. I enjoyed them all, like eating a box of chocolates or bento box, and was sometimes left a little breathless. The anthology was published by the Viable Paradise writing workshop 2023 cohort as a Kickstarter that was funded in less than 12 hours.
Discover Sci-Fi, which is a site for people who love to read science fiction, is hosting its Reader’s Choice awards. Titles were selected based on nominations from readers, and the winners will be announced on January 9, 2025.
The categories are: Best Sci-Fi Book (overall), Best Sci-Fi Audiobook, Best Debut, Best Space Opera Book, Best Military Sci-Fi Book, Best Alien Sci-Fi (First Contact/Invasion) Book — Usurpationis in this category — and Best LitRPG Book.
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The movie Babygirl with Nicole Kidman, Antonio Banderas, and Harris Dickinson was released in the US this week. My novel, Semiosis, was used as a prop in the movie.
The movie producers asked for permission to use the book in the film a year ago. Only the cover will appear, the agreement stipulated, and “the book will not be read aloud, and no reference would be made to the book or its contents” — although if that happened, or if any of the stars wanted to pretend they were reading it, or if the book were somehow directly involved in the “erotic thriller” nature of the film, I would be fine with that.
But, probably, Semiosis will appear on a bookshelf somewhere in the background, perhaps not legibly, if at all. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but if you’ve seen it and you spotted my book, please let me know!
Every year, I coerce one of my house plants to cosplay the role of Christmas tree.
At the mere thought, my croton,Codiaeum variegatum, was so horrified it dropped almost all its leaves to avoid consideration. Apparently it never heard of a Festivus pole.
Last year’s “tree”I refuseFractal meLiving tinselPrickly
The Pilea peperomioides, who was last year’s imitation tree, complained it was too tired. I didn’t want it to drop its leaves in protest, so I let it rest.
The crown of thorns, Euphorbia milii, volunteered with enthusiasm. “I have needles, just like a pine tree!” No, it has thorns quite unlike a pine tree, and I wear heavy gloves when I need to give it care. Decorating it would not be festive, so I kept looking.
“Pick me!” said the Boston fern, Nephrolepis exalta ‘Fluffy Ruffles’. “Look at my leaves. I’m a fractal Christmas tree!” Well, yes, and the plant is large, too. Although my standards are low, I can’t imagine a fluffy, ferny tree.
The dragon tree, Dracaena reflexa marginata ‘tricolor’, was not enthusiastic. “I am living tinsel,” it said. “My beauty is sufficient unto itself, and ornamentation would obscure my spontaneous splendor.”
That left the lucky bamboo, Dracaena sanderiana, but I’d cut it back to give away stems as gifts to neighbors. However, it has no thorns, no fluff, and it’s the strong, silent, non-complaining type.
So the lucky bamboo is this year’s tree. Happy holidays, and may your home be filled with joy and uncomplicated greenery.
An article by Amanda Gefter in Nautilus, “What Plants Are Saying About Us,” explains that although plants don’t have a brain, they do have autonomy, intelligence, adaptivity, and sense-making — that is, they have cognition. They’re not that different from us. And our cognition is more than our brains, too.
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The photo of jungle plants in the mist is by me, incidentally. I took it this summer in a greenhouse at the Real Jardín Botánico (Royal Botanical Garden) in Madrid, Spain. Plants can dazzle us with their beauty as well as their intellect.
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Meanwhile, Amazon wants me to buy this book. I’ve read it already, however, dozens of times.
Semiosis 