If you or someone you know and love hasn’t read the novel Semiosis yet, the ebook will be on sale throughout the month of September for only $2.99 for Kindle. This promotion will include an excerpt from the third book in the Semiosis trilogy, Usurpation, which will be released on October 29.
Besides that, from September 4 to 6, Barnes & Noble is dropping the preorder price for Usurpation, as well as other preorders. B&N Members get 25% off, and Premium members get an additional 10% off. This is good for print, ebook, and audiobook editions.
Meanwhile, I’ll be at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest on Saturday morning, September 7, at the Speculative Literature Foundation table. Come say hi!
This is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Semiosis. Octavo, the botanist, explains what plants tell us about the overall ecology:
“But the presence of the wheat worried me. The wheat was a lot like Earth grass, and if there was grass, then there were grazers, maybe animals like gazelle, moose, or elephant. And if there were grazers, then something hunted them. So far we had seen only small browsers and predators like little land crabs with trilateral symmetry, but we had found bits of big crab shells — and of big stone-shelled land corals with stinging tentacles. None of us went barefoot anywhere.”
Usurpation will have an audiobook, and Daniel Thomas May and Caitlin Davies will be narrating it. They narrated the first two novels in the trilogy, Semiosis and Interference — and they did a fabulous job! I’m delighted to have them back.
Here’s an excerpt from the novel Usurpation, which will be published in October in hardback, ebook, and audiobook (in preparation). You can preorder your copy now.
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CHAPTER 3 – Year 2885 CE – Pax Institute, Bayonne, France – LEVANTER
She has arrived, the new director of the Pax Institute, and I will be destroyed. She confirms her credentials with the building and walks through the front door.
She is going to take my place. She will find out that I, Levanter, am not a human being. Foolishly, I used my real name to declare myself director, the name Mirlo gave me three centuries ago. He planted seeds he brought from the planet Pax, and I and my two sisters now grow here at the institute’s garden. My name is in the record’s big clumsy library in too many places to erase before she accesses the system. It is even on a sign in the garden in front of my main stalks. She will discover that Levanter is a rainbow bamboo.
No one knows we are intelligent. No one can know. Bamboo grow all over the Earth, and humans would kill us all if they knew. Not all humans are killers, but some are, and they have proven themselves efficient.
“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.”
That’s the opening sentences of my essay When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder. Calque Press has just published a limited edition of it as a 24-page pamphlet, and you can learn more and buy it here.
It’s one of a series of essays and other short works published by Calque. They’re meant to provide an opportunity for writers to think aloud about their own experiences and knowledge — and they are beautifully printed on high-quality paper. The publisher is fussy about the look and feel.
Here’s Calque’s description of When Star-Stuff Tells Stories:
Starting from the very earliest forms of human communication, the ways in which language developed into languages, and created the role of the translator, Sue Burke offers an invaluable guide to the importance and difficulties of translation on Earth, and gives us fascinating speculation about what might happen if we ever do come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. This pamphlet addresses questions of what communication is, and how the translator is uniquely positioned to work at escaping the bounds of the medium and bringing pure meaning into an intelligible form.
For technical reasons related to my webhosting service, I’ve had to update the website for the Semiosis trilogy, https://semiosispax.com. I tried to keep it mostly the same.
But I’ve been able to add something new. It’s a menu of “Stories and Articles” that contains short stories related to the novels Semiosis, Interference, and Usurpation, background information, bits cut from the novels, and inspirations for the series. I hope you enjoy them!
On the Worth a Read podcast, Sasha Portelli and I discuss the horror and wonders of plants, my thoughts about AIs (there’s an AI in my novel Dual Memory, and it’s a lot more fun than any of today’s chatbots) and the path to getting the novel Semiosisinto print, which was long and twisting.
You can listen to it here:
P.S. In case you like listening to things, do you know that all my novels are available as audiobooks, read for you by amazingly talented narrators?
I’ll be on the online panel “Religion as Worldbuilding” at the Nebula Conference on Friday, June 7, at 3 p.m. PDT.
Since you probably won’t be attending, here’s a little religious worldbuilding for you instead, a section that was cut from the novel Semiosis. It’s about what the rainbow bamboo Stevland believes: Water is life.
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Human meteorologists tell me 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 the heat from sunshine powers these movements. But the meteorologists are Sun worshipers, 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 unsophisticated plants hold large, intelligent animals in a certain appreciation that points toward 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 not as a causative agent. Animals irrigate their favored plants, so animals do control water to an extent, yet the idea that currying favor with those animals brings the blessing of water is true only in its most mundane sense. Human meteorologists can predict 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 that 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 been encouragement, 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.
Because this novel won’t be available in the United States until September, a fan of Adrian Tchaikovsky in Britain sent me a copy of the book, knowing that I’m a fan, too.
In Alien Clay, Tchaikovsky creates a world so hostile and hungry that no one wants to explore it. Instead, Earth sends convicts to work as forced prison labor, including Arton Daghdev, a scientist who has no use for orthodoxy. At some point, a life-form on the planet had created buildings and writing. Where did those intelligent beings go?
The story moves fast and in a direction that allows for exploration of the philosophy of life and life forms, which Tchaikovsky does especially well. Answers emerge as to what kind of life could thrive in the planet’s continual chaos, and what that kind of life will do to humans if it gets the chance. In the last two pages, the book takes a turn that is logical, reasonable, and very creepy.
Thank you to the mutual fan who sent this! I enjoyed it immensely and now find myself asking a lot of “what if” questions: What if this kind of biology worked with the life-forms I encounter here on Earth?
Semiosis 