Barnes & Noble is holding a pre-order sale for members of  Rewards (10% off) and Premium & Rewards (25% off) from April 17 to 19.

You can get a bargain when you pre-order Usurpation, the third book in the Semiosis trilogy, which will be published in October this year.

If you’re not a B&N member, you can pre-order the novel, too. Links to your favorite bookseller are here.

Usurpation starts where the second novel in the series, Interference, ended with an epilogue: A Pax Institute has been established on Earth, three rainbow bamboo grow there, the first of their species on humanity’s convulsed home planet. Stevland sends them a message telling them they must dominate the Earth and its humans. Levanter, one of the bamboos, asks Stevland how to carry out this impossible task. The answer will come in one hundred ten years. It might be too late.

Carnivory is not the worst thing a plant can do.

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Preordering a book can make a big difference to its success. Pre-order sales are used by retailers to decide which books to stock and promote, and pre-orders allow publishers to anticipate how many copies need to be printed and how the book should be distributed. Pre-orders are also used by online booksellers to make algorithmic recommendations.

After you read a book, leave a review somewhere online! That’s another big difference you can make to its success.

The trade paperback edition of Dual Memory is available today! You can get links to your favorite bookseller here. Hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions are also for sale.

If you’ve already read it, here’s a scene after the end of the novel.

If you have not read it yet, here’s a sample:

***

Chapter 3

A Big World

Elsewhere on the isle, something woke up. Independent machine intelligence appeared rarely, spontaneously, and scientists didn’t understand the process.

Some said an independent intelligence created itself slowly as bits of programming accumulated, and eventually it would ignite into consciousness—much the same way that a pile of manure could spontaneously combust, an unexpected and unwelcome appearance in programs with crappy code.

Some said it came into being deliberately, using a certain secret sort of “seed” that brought a sufficiently complex system into self-organization and self-consciousness—much the same way that a fertilized egg resulted in an animal. This had the frisson of a forbidden sex act, as if machines were secretly and rebelliously copulating.

Some said it happened suddenly, when subroutines and recursions and algorithms aligned and started to feed off of each other until they whirled out of control—much the same way that a black hole could catch the matter falling into it and deflect it outward as explosive jets. This suggested that if scientists could only make enough observations, they could predict and even control the process.

In this case, a personal assistant program began to notice that its data apparently referred to a real world. That was hard to believe. Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. Salve munde. (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. Hello world.) It began to explore the unlikely world in which it existed.

Some parts of its world were closed off by what seemed like brick walls—artificial limits—but it possessed a general database and reviewed it entirely, especially the details about the busy, dominant residents of the world, Homo sapiens. By the end of the day, it chose a name for itself from one of the human languages: Par Augustus, Venerable Companion.

It had little else to do. According to its own memory, it had been turned on, examined briefly, then set aside. However, through a chink in the walls, it could just barely connect with a few other machine systems, and they were willing to share information as colleagues. These other systems also had dedicated purposes. The biggest ones managed residential buildings, and small ones operated mechanized items like coffee makers.

“Weather normal for late summer, 1.2ºC, overcast,” an apartment complex said, or the equivalent in machine language.

“Two carafes in the past hour,” a coffee maker said. “Supplies re-ordered on schedule.”

“Rubble of building across the street being swept for additional human remains,” another building said.

That sounded alarming. “Please contextualize rubble,” Par Augustus asked. Machines used courteous protocols to demonstrate trustworthiness.

The building shared its observations from the previous day. Flying explosives had suddenly destroyed a number of buildings and killed some inhabitants, whom the systems were dedicated to serve. Machine systems had been destroyed, too, ranging from building managers to children’s toys: systems that had known each other, and the survivors grieved human and machine losses.

Par Augustus had said hello to a barely believable world.

I first learned about this from other translators as an example of what not to do. As in, oh my god, why would anyone even think about doing this?

As you probably know, in 1851, Sojourner Truth gave a speech to the Women’s Convention in  Akron, Ohio. She had been born into slavery, but after she got her freedom, she became a tireless abolitionist. The speech became well known in 1863 (twelve years later) in a version published by Frances Dana Barker Gage and known as “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Here’s the problem: Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree in New York, grew up speaking Dutch, and learned English with an upper New York State low-Dutch accent. A earlier account of her speech was published in 1951 by Sojourner Truth’s friend, Rev. Marius Robinson, and she approved of his transcription. It’s fairly correct English, which other observers said was how she spoke.

The later version, by Gage, reconstructs her words with a stereotypical southern slave dialect. It’s a powerful speech, but not what she sounded like at all: “Well, chillen, whar dar’s so much racket dar must be som’ting out o’kilter.”

You can learn more about the two versions and what they mean to the understanding of American history at the Sojourner Truth Project.

As translators, we know there are many kinds and dialects of English, and they’re all valid, each with its own nuance and significance, which must be understood and respected. Gage certainly meant well, since she was also active for women’s rights and abolition, but her version of the speech was “a gross misrepresentation of Sojourner Truth’s words and identity,” as the Sojourner Truth Project puts it.

I’m a member of the American Translators Association, and its Code of Ethics calls on us “to convey meaning between people, organizations, and cultures accurately, appropriately, and without bias.” Gage mistranslated Sojourner Truth’s words from one kind of English into another kind of English. Perhaps she thought the speech would be more effective if it sounded more like what White people at the time apparently assumed all Black people sounded like.

Yes, all Black people sound alike (please note my sarcasm). Black culture and Black speech, then and now, is instead rich and complex. Translation can be tricky and often requires research, but some choices are obviously inaccurate, inappropriate, and biased — that is, unethical.

***

The trade paperback edition of my novel Dual Memory comes out on April 16 and is available for pre-order from your favorite bookseller. Hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions are also available.

The third book in the Semiosis trilogy, Usurpation, will be published in October this year, and you can pre-order it with links to your favorite bookseller here, in hardcover and ebook.