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.

You can read an interview with the author at The Madrid Review: New Book From The Queen Of Spanish Sci Fi in English.

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.

If you or someone you know can nominate or vote for writing awards, please consider these works by me that were published last year:

Usurpation: final novel in a trilogy (novel or series) Semiosis. The first novel in the series, Semiosis, is one of the top ten genre books of the first quarter of the millennium, according to Joe Walton.

AI is fueling a science fiction scam: magazine article (related work)

“The Coffee Machine”: translation from Spanish of a work by Celia Corral-Vázquez (short story or translation)

When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: essay about first contact (related work)

Eligible in Spain:

Semiosis: novela extranjera

¿Quién ganó la batalla de Arsia Mons?: novela corta extranjera

Not eligible for a prize, but you might enjoy it:

“Life from the Sky”: republished novelette

My sister, Beth, died in January 2014 of cancer. Her last Christmas was one of her happiest.

In December, Beth’s son and his wife came to visit, and they set up and decorated the tree. Beth had inherited the Christmas tree ornaments from my parents and grandparents, and although she was too ill to do more than watch them work, she was entranced. It was, my sister said, the best tree ever.

She described it to me over the phone (I had visited at Thanksgiving), and I could see it as she spoke because I knew so many of the ornaments.

My mother had made a canvas-work embroidery angel for the top of the tree. In keeping with family tradition, a little electric candle had been placed in her hands.

Some old, fancy glass ornaments had originally been bought by my grandparents, lovingly cared for by my parents and then by Beth. They were fragile and worn but exceptionally ornate. One had gold stripes edged with glitter and little holiday scenes hand-painted between the stripes.

My sister especially loved the ornament her son had made in grade school, a white paper bird with a long tinsel tail. There was also my ornament from kindergarten, green and red metallic disks glued together around a length of yarn. Other children’s artwork was hung up, too, chronicling a family that grew larger, and boys and girls who grew up. Some ornaments were gifts or careful purchases — each color, each sparkle, each light a story.

“It’s beautiful,” she told me. “I can stare at it for hours.”

It held happy memories from her whole life, as merry as a Christmas tree could be — the best gift, the best tree ever.

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship of words and sentences to the environment in which they occur. We might also call this context. Machines can’t grasp pragmatics and context — not Google Translate, not ChatGPT, or anything like them. Machines and artificial intelligences don’t interact with the real world. Nothing means anything to them.

I recently made the mistake of reading the text on a sprayer bottle as I was misting a few of my house plants. The text came in English and Spanish. I understand both languages, and I saw errors. Worst of all, this error, which no human would make:

Weed Killers (Deshierbe a Asesinos)

The Spanish version does, in fact, mean “Weed Killers” in the sense of “Go weed the killers” or “You must pull out the weeds on assassins.”

It should say:

Weed Killers (Herbicidas)

As a human being, I can only laugh. Or weep. When the robots take over, they’re going to make so many mistakes…