It’s all cancelled: the Deep Dish reading on March 14, the Longwood Gardens Community Read on March 27 and 28, and other events I was planning to attend, from church to cocktails.

Of course, we have to do what we must to keep ourselves and others safe. We’re all in this together. I’m 64 years old, and although I feel well and have no special health problems (that I know of), people my age and older are at a higher risk. But you youngsters aren’t 100% assured of survival, so you should take care, too.

I’m not much of an introvert, as you may know, and this comes at ironic moment for me. I’ve been hunkered down for a while, working hard, staying home, trying to meet a deadline, and now that I’m on track and can go out and enjoy human contact again, suddenly I need to maintain social distance.

On the other hand, I’ve worked from home for decades, and I’m enough of an introvert to enjoy it. I can sit in my nice little home office in splendid seclusion. But soon, I won’t be alone. My husband has been ordered to work from home starting on Monday. My Fortress of Solitude is about to be invaded.

I’m joining an especially exciting lineup for the Spring Deep Dish Reading on Saturday, March 14, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Volumes Bookcafe, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago. It’s organized by the Speculative Literature Foundation.

“Francine (Draft for the September Lecture)” is a short story by Maria Antònia Martí Escayol, a science fiction writer who lives in Barcelona, Spain. My translation of the story appears in World Science Fiction #1: Visions to Preserve the Biodiversity of the Future. This haunting tale investigates the death and posthumous life of Francine, daughter of René Descartes. It’s one of sixteen outstanding works in this anthology by some of the world’s finest authors.

The Deep Dish reading will also feature Dawn Bonanno, Steven H Silver, Evan Steuber, and Laura Kat Young. In addition, it will celebrate the release of Mary Anne Mohanraj’s new book, A Feast of Serendib: Recipes from Sri Lanka. Come and sample some delicious treats from the cookbook! I know Mary Anne, and she’s a great cook and passionate about her family’s homeland. Volumes Bookcafe also sells coffee, beer, wine, and baked goods, and Deep Dish is always a friendly event.

Since I can’t give you some of her chili-mango cashews over the internet, let me give you a taste of “Francine”:

The joy of the house was Francine. She was born in 1635, the same year in which France declared war on Spain, and Japan prohibited its merchants from traveling overseas. Her childhood took place amid the tree-lined streets and lawn-filled parks of the city, and the books and discussion circles of her home. Helena’s hospitality inspired an extensive group of intellectuals to form the Orbis de Deventer (for more information, consult historian Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit’s 2021 book by Goethe publishers).…
… A few months after her visit to the laboratory, the first symptoms of Francine’s illness, scarlet fever, made their appearance. According to the official account, the illness began on August 21st, and the girl died three weeks later on September 7th. According to Helena’s diary, the illness began in April, and the next day the girl lost her ability to speak, a little later consciousness, and she died five months later. Francine herself, in her notes from 1650, described the sensations she recalled of those initial moments:
“The warm glow of consciousness pulled me down into an insupportable interior heat. My body became a glass vial haunted by atoms teeming amid red ashes. Some atoms found a proper place inside myself and squeezed in harmoniously. Others simply remained suspended, colliding from time to time in senseless struggle. Some atoms were terrestrial, flat, and square; others aqueous, round, empty, wet, and spongy; or gaseous, long, and straight; or igneous, acute, and sharp. Their random movements traced out the destiny of my new world. A world where, for a long time, I would be merely a body without a head.”

The March 2020 issue of Locus magazine has interviews with me, Nina Allan, and Gareth L. Powell. The issue also includes the Nebula Awards Ballot, notices of award winners, news, reviews, and columns. The magazine is available for purchase, but it isn’t free online.

However, you can listen for free to a podcast of my interview with Intralingo — many other fascinating interviews about world literature are also at that site. Host Lisa Carter and I talk about writing, science fiction, and my inspiration for Semiosis and Interference. One of the things I say:

“There’s something called ‘plant blindness,’ where you see a tree and every other tree is just the same tree. Well, no, it’s not. [I hope readers] begin to see the individuals that are around them and understand that their lives are difficult for them, but important for them too, because this is our environment. If all the plants die, we’re dead too.”

A Community Read Conversation with Sue Burke: I’ll be at Longwood Gardens as part of its Community Read program on March 27 and 28. Semiosis is one of this year’s books. At the Longwood blog, I answer some questions about the book and my love for plants.

Lisa Carter is founder and creative director of Intralingo Inc., and she’s a leading professional in the translation world. She was kind enough to feature me in her Spotlight series, meant to promote authors and translators and their work. In this 22-minute video interview, we talk about language, including the challenges of creating languages for Semiosis and Interference that were alien “enough” but still comprehensible to the reader.

Spain has a tradition of tertulias, which are informal social gatherings, usually in bars, often to discuss art or literature. When I was living in Madrid, Spain, the Tertulia Madrileña de Literatura Fantástica (Madrid Tertulia for Speculative Fiction, called TerMa for short) was meeting, and I had the pleasure to take part. TerMa became an engine for science fiction, fantasy, and horror from its founding in 1991 and for the next two decades. Now a half-hour documentary revisits those exciting times. Available on YouTube, La TerMa, semblanza de una época interviews the people whose literary lives were changed. I say a few words, too. In Spanish.

On YouTube, Linguistics in SFF Recommendations by Kalanadi, a book reviewer, has a v-blog about language, xenolinguistics, interspecies communication. “This is my favorite topic in science fiction by far” she says. “I’ve been asked occasionally for a recommendations video about this, so today I attempt to deliver.” Among the recommendations is Semiosis.

Author Karen Hugg interviews me for her blog.

Steven J. Wright reviews Interference.

The Nerd Cantina interviews me for its podcast.

Finally, on YouTube, you can listen to this Clarkesworld Magazine podcast of my novellette, “Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons?” The story was published in the November 2017 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and is read by Kate Baker.

Gender in language poses problems — but different problems in different languages require different, sometimes creative solutions.

I coordinated the translation team for the anthology Castles in Spain, published in 2016. Its ten stories represent the work of Spain’s most important authors as the genre consolidated around the turn of the millennium and took a leap into vibrant, world-class writing.

One challenge came with “The Star” by Elia Barceló, an award-winning, dream-like story. Its characters include some ethereal beings who have no fixed gender. Elia achieved that indeterminancy using certain grammatical aspects of Spanish. For example, possessive pronouns agree with the thing being possessed, not with the possessor. So “her house” and “his house” would both be su casa. Other kinds of pronoun use likewise doesn’t necessarily identify the gender of the person involved.

Here’s the opening paragraph of the story in Spanish and then an over-literal translation. I’ve used “he,” “him,” and “his” to emphasize the pronouns’ presence, although in Spanish those pronouns do not reveal the gender of the characters.

Estábamos todos allí. Lana, como una muñeca rubia colgada de sus cuerdas, con una incongruente faldita roja y el hilo de saliva brillando en su cara pálida; Lon, sus ojos inmensos y oscuros en un rostro casi inexistente; Sadie, moviendo vertiginosamente sus alas, lo que le hacía oscilar a unos centímetros del suelo, mientras masticaba en un gesto de robótica eficiencia esa sustancia verde que tanto le gusta; Tras, encogiendo hasta casi la desaparición su frágil cuerpecillo, su deseo clavado en el cielo, y yo, número cinco, el cierre de la estrella, temblando como un carámbano de luz, focalizando el anhelo. Todos allí, esperando.

We were all there. Lana, like a blond doll hanging from his strings, with an inconsistent little red skirt and a thread of saliva shining on his pale face; Lon, his immense and dark eyes in a nearly non-existent face; Sadie, dizzily moving his wings, which made him oscillate a few centimeters from the ground, while he chewed in a robot motion that green substance he likes so much; Tras, shrinking almost to disappearance his fragile little body, his desire fixed on the sky; and I, number five, like the close of the star, trembling like an icicle of light, focusing the longing. All of us there, waiting.

Among the problems to solve: how to make it gender-neutral while keeping the beauty of the original prose. (Its beauty is lost in the over-literal translation.) I worked closely with translator Nur-Huda El Masri and copy-editor Charlie Sangster, and this is what we came up with:

We were all there. Lana, like a blond doll hanging from puppet’s strings, with a ridiculous red skirt and a thread of saliva glistening on a pale face; Lon, with eyes huge and dark in a nearly non-existent face; Sadie, fluttering a pair of wings dizzily, hovering a few centimetres off the ground while chewing that beloved green stuff with robotic efficiency; Tras, reduced to a tiny, almost vanishing fragile frame and desire fixed on the sky; and I, the fifth, the brooch that binds the star, atremble like an icicle of light, there to illuminate yearning. All of us, waiting.

Any work can be translated in a wide variety of ways, all of them correct. Often something is lost — but often something is found, too. This was our solution to this gender-free problem, and I think it worked.