This year the Worldcon will be held in Chengdu, China, and the 2023 Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award, and the Astounding Award will be presented on Saturday evening, October 21, at a formal ceremony at the Chengdu Worldcon.

Although I won’t be attending in person, I’m a Worldcon member and get to vote for the awards. Members also make the nominations, and the works or individuals with the most nominations become the finalists.

While all these works are solid and any one of them deserves to win, I was disappointed that no Chinese novellas were finalists.

The voting is by ranked choice, and here’s my ranking:

6. Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom) – Cora, a girl who has gone through a portal, faces bullying and institutional abuse as she tries to adjust to our world. This is part of the Wayward Children series. It’s a heart-wrenching story, but not quite a stand-alone.

5. Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom) – This story is part of the Singing Hills Cycle. A wandering cleric joins a group of travelers, and they share stories between episodes of epic martial arts in which they battle notorious bandits. Clever and consistently interesting.

4. A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow (Tordotcom) – Fairy tales are filled with problematical characters and situations, and they get their comeuppance. The various versions of Snow White all lead to trouble, told by a witty but anguished would-be rescuer. A fun examination of metastory.

3. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Tor Nightfire) – A very creepy retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, with an engaging voice and outstanding characters. Simply well done.

2. Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris) – What seems like a fantasy story at first turns into a dystopia. Nothing more can be said without spoilers. The choice of second-person narration turns out to be important.

1. Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk (Tordotcom) – In Chicago in the 1930s, the “White City Vampire” seems to be an ordinary serial killer, but a private detective knows that a lot more is at stake — more than she thinks, in fact. Can she protect her beloved? Demons, warlocks, and angels keep the plot twisting and turning. This novella won the Nebula Award.

I’ll be giving a Zoom talk on Thursday, November 9, from 6 to 7 p.m. CST for the Audubon Society of Northern Virginia about plant blindness, the inability to see or notice plants in everyday life. It also refers to failing to recognize the role of plants on Earth and believing that plants are somehow inferior to animals.

When I wrote Semiosis, one of my secret goals was to make my readers afraid of their gardens and afraid for plants in general. I’ll speak on how plant blindness affects our environment and what can be done to be more aware of the foundation of our ecosystems. Plants, like birds, connect us to the Earth.

You can join us. Sign up here.

This year the Worldcon will be held in Chengdu, China, and the 2023 Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award, and the Astounding Award will be presented on Saturday evening, October 21, at a formal ceremony at the Chengdu Worldcon.

Although I won’t be attending in person, I’m a Worldcon member and get to vote for the awards. Members also make the nominations, and the works or individuals with the most nominations become the finalists.

The voting is by ranked choice, and here’s my ranking — of course, your opinion may differ:

6. “The Space-Time Painter” by Hai Ya (Galaxy’s Edge, April 2022) – Alas, no translation from Chinese is available. Given the quality of the Chinese works in the short story category, I was looking forward to reading this.

5. “We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert (Clarkesworld, June 2022) – Workers maintaining the dome over a city on Venus fight for their right to do their job in reasonable working conditions. Science fiction is always about the present.

4. “The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente (Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance, Solaris) – An extended metaphor eventually leads to an understanding of the difference between love and time, stylishly told with an uplifting ending.

3. “A Dream of Electric Mothers”, by Wole Talabi (Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, Tordotcom) – Technology manages to make tradition come true: ancestors can be consulted. But should their messages be trusted? Time and place, character and theme mesh to bring the answer.

2. “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” by John Chu (Uncanny Magazine, July-August 2022) – Can you be friends with a superhero? Can a superhero solve one of today’s ugliest problems? John Chu explores these questions with a tender, breakable heart, and emotional honesty suffuses every sentence.

1. “Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” by S.L. Huang (Clarkesworld, December 2022) – Can an AI unintentionally become a killer? Using the format of a magazine article, this story has the creepy feel of our present-day reality rather than science fiction. It even has footnotes.

Marty Kurylowicz and Holly Carson invited me to join them on their podcast, The Science in Fiction — and it’s now available for your listening pleasure.

We talked about the science of botany in my science fiction novel Semiosis and its sequel Interference. Plants have a lot of surprising behaviors, and the hosts learned things they didn’t know about tulips, apples, osage oranges, and giant ground sloths.

We also discussed my novels Immunity Index about a coronavirus pandemic — which I wrote before the covid-19 pandemic — and Dual Memory, which has recently arrived on bookstore shelves. I’ve just turned in the manuscript for the third installation of the Semiosis trilogy, Usurpation, due to be published in October 2024.

The Science in Fiction podcast will follow up this episode with an interview next week with Paco Calvo, professor of the philosophy of science and principal investigator at the University of Murcia’s Minimal Intelligence Lab in Spain, and author of Planta Sapiens.

Here are all the places you can listen to Ep 12: Sue Burke on Intelligent Plants in Semiosis.

Buzzsprout

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Audible.ca

Amazon Music

As you may recall, back on September 14 I read a short story called “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” at an event here in Chicago, the Deep Dish reading series, organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation. I was one of eight readers that evening.

If you couldn’t attend, you can watch videos of us. Here’s the link to the YouTube playlist.

The piece I read will be published this fall inThe Best of NewMyths Anthology Volume 4: The Cosmic Muse. Due to time constraints, the version I performed of “The Virgin Who Rescues Dragons” is abridged. The full version has a lot more jokes, so buy the book!

Watch my video here.