A story I translated from Spanish by Ramiro Sanchiz, “Trees at Night” (Árboles en la noche) is in the November 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. A podcast of the story is read by Kate Baker.

Sanchiz is a Uruguayan writer, and this story is part of his literary project that explores permutations of a universe that revolves around a character named Federico Stahl. You can read “Arboles en la noche” in the original Spanish at the magazine Contaminación futura 8.

In the story, a librarian at a hospital-like sanatorium befriends a young patient named Federico for reasons that eventually become clear.

I recommend this story, among other reasons, as a masterful example of in medias res: beginning a story in the middle of the action or plot. Science fiction often does this, and SF readers are used to it, but I’ve seen readers of mainstream and literary fiction sometimes get so flummoxed that they give up because they don’t immediately understand what’s happening. SF readers have learned that a good story in this style will explain all the things in the end, and the fascination of the story is the discovery.

This haunting work offers a distant echo of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (which I recommend): aliens come to Earth, and what they leave behind seems incomprehensible to humans.

I wrote this poem as an homage to John Milton and his lost paradise, and it might be appropriate for Halloween. It appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April/May 2006 issue. Photo: An illustration of our solar system by NASA/JPL-Caltech.

–

Now that the stars have come within your reach

by calculus of heavenly orbit,

comes my chance to flee this gravity pit

and all I had to do for you was teach.

I urged you turn your eyes to scan the sky

and speculate on worlds you might revere.

Soon, you saw it as your next frontier

and took aim for the heavens. None but I,

my thoughts on freedom and your thoughts to stir,

gave apples both to Eve and Newton, bites

as steps to climb back toward infinity.

I am the morning star — Lucifer.

I fell, and now with you found means to flight.

With you, I will escape captivity.

If you haven’t yet read Usurpation, here’s your chance to buy it at a more economical price. The trade paperback will be released on Tuesday, October 21, available from any bookseller.

This is the third book in the Semiosis trilogy. As you may recall, Stevland, an aggressive, intelligent plant on a distant planet, longs to send his seeds to Earth. In the second book of the trilogy, Interference, he finds a way.

Now Stevland’s descendants grow everywhere, but no one on Earth knows they are intelligent, and humans have fallen into a violent crisis. They need help. But how? Stevland sends advice: “Compassion will give you courage. Love will be ferocious.”

Back in my college days, in a Survey of Spanish Literature class, I discovered the Spanish author Azorín, who would become one of my favorite writers. A sentence he wrote about how to write became my watchword:

No basta hacerse entender; es necesario aspirar a no poder dejar de ser entendido.

It is not enough to make yourself understandable, it is necessary to aspire to be unable to be misunderstood.

More recently, I’ve been studying Latin (you never know when you’ll need to summon a demon), and I came upon this quote by Quintilian, a Roman educator whose lessons have never been forgotten:

Quare non, ut intelligere possit, sed, ne omnino possit non intelligere, curandum.

It is not enough to use language that may be understood, but to use language that must be understood.

Down a rabbit hole, I discovered that this sentence comes from Quintilian’s discussion of strategies of persuasion, in particular how to persuade someone who may be distracted while you speak. His advice has been an inspiration to many people right up to our own 21st century. Apparently Azorín came upon it somehow, and it inspired him, too.

However, I later came upon a corollary that has proven to be true uncountable times, sadly — so good luck out there:

Anything that can be misunderstood has been misunderstood.

I’ll be one of the readers at this month’s Gumbo Fiction Salon, 7 p.m. Monday, October 13, upstairs at the Galway Arms Irish Bar and Restaurant, 2442 N. Clark Street, Chicago. Free Admission. This edition is a special goodbye to Tina Jens, founder of the event, who is moving to New Orleans.

As a tribute to Tina’s delight in dogs, I’ll read three pieces about our canine companions: a flash fiction short story called Dogs in Heaven, the poem Sonnet for Six, and a 50-word unpublished story called “Good Boy.”

But I’m only one of many outstanding readers and performers! The Galway Arms also has fine food and drink. If you can come, you’ll have a great time.