writing

The novel that changed Spanish science fiction

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

I was thrilled when I learned that Rafael Marín would translate my novel Semiosis into Spanish. I think he’s one of the finest stylists in genre writing in Spain. But he’s more than that. He’s an award-winning novelist, comic book writer, essayist, critic, screenwriter — and a pioneer in the genre.

His first novel, Lágrimas de luz [Tears of Light], is often called the “before and after” novel in Spanish science fiction. Published in 1984 and written when Marín was only 22 years old, it proved that a Spanish author could write an ambitious literary work of science fiction.

This might sound odd. Of course Spanish authors could — but they had to believe that themselves, and they had reason to doubt it. For the previous two centuries, realism and naturalism had reigned supreme in Spanish literature. Despite “futurist” authors like Nilo María Fabra, science fiction (and fantasy and horror) didn’t exist in Spain and wasn’t possible.

In the English-speaking world, science fiction set down its roots in the early 20th century, first as pulp and then as more serious works. Spain had its pulp too, starting in the 1950s, although its authors usually wrote under Anglo-Saxon pseudonyms like Louis G. Milk or George H. White at the behest of publishers, who did not think openly Spanish authors, pulp or serious, would sell. Top English-language authors like Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny were available in translation, though, and they made their mark.

From 1968 to 1982, a fanzine with a professional attitude, Nueva Dimensión, edited by Domingo Santos, provided budding authors with a chance to grow, and some solid works began to appear. But nothing caught readers’ attention like Lágrimas de luz.

The novel’s plot

The novel is set during the Third Middle Ages. A young man named Hamlet Evans, living in a small town that manufactures food, aspires to more in life than toiling in a factory, numbed by drugs and sex. He wants to be a poet, specifically one of the bards whose songs celebrate the Corporation, which expands the human empire and protects it from its enemies. He is accepted for training at the bards’ monastery and is assigned his first military ship.

Soon he learns that the glorious triumphs of the empire are anything but: Indigenous life forms are cruelly wiped out and the planets’ resources are stripped as the Corporation expands its iron grasp. Disillusioned, Hamlet can no longer compose acceptable epic poems.

He resigns and is set down on the first available planet, which turns out to be under punishment for a rebellion against the Corporation. He barely survives, eventually escaping to join a small theater group and then a circus. The Corporation, meanwhile, decides that no entertainment that fails to extol its greatness can continue to exist, and sends troops to wipe them out.

Hamlet escapes again, and he decides to continue an outlaw artistic existence to defy the Corporation.

Ambitious and Spanish

Marín himself has called the novel an “ambitious space opera” — which it is, offering careful characterization and thematic development. Hamlet matures as a man and an artist in a fully-imagined universe.

The novel also makes a clean break from pulp. It features a protagonist who is hardly a hero, and its themes include the search for beauty as well as the crisis and alienation of youth. Rather than save the universe, Hamlet can barely save himself, and the universe might not even merit saving: no lightweight escapism here.

The story also draws on Spain’s own medieval past and brings it into the future. The bards’ songs echo works like El Cid that had once been sung throughout the land — a past oral culture updated for the novel’s present. The novel also responds in its own way to Robert Heinlein’s Space Troopers and openly draws on themes from Moby Dick and other classics.

The surprise of Lágrimas de luz didn’t usher in a sudden boom in Spanish science fiction. That came in the 1990s with works by authors like Juan Miguel Aguilera, Elia Barceló, Javier Negrete, and Rodolfo Martínez, among many others, but the door had been opened.

Lágrimas de Luz, by the way, is still in print after all these years and is available from Spain’s Apache Libros.

How I got the idea for the novel “Semiosis”

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

“Where do you get your ideas?”

If you’re a writer, you may have been asked that. Here’s how I got the idea behind Semiosis and turned it into a novel. Exactly how it happened isn’t typical, but it’s not unusual, either — there are a lot of paths to a novel, and they’re all good — but I think this story illustrates an essential and sometimes overlooked aspect of writing.

The whole thing started with the houseplants on my dining room table in the late 1990s. (The photo is from this decade: different house, different plants, but just as many of them.) One day, I discovered that the little pothos in a mixed planter had wrapped itself around another plant and killed it. At first, I blamed myself for not having noticed earlier and intervened. Then a philodendron on a bookshelf tried to sink roots into another plant. I became suspicious and did some research.

What I learned was disturbing. According to botanist Augustine Pyrame de Candolle, “All plants of a given place are in a state of war with respect to each other.” They compete for light and nutrients, and they use ingenious tactics to abuse and even kill each other. For example, roses have thorns so they can impale their prickles into other plants and climb over them. In the process, they might kill the other plants — but this is war. Roses don’t care as long as they’re victorious.

Even more disturbing, I learned, are the ways that plants use animals for a variety of tasks. They grow flowers to attract pollinators, as we all know, and they’re sometimes very unkind to hard-working insects. Plants also grow fruit so that we’ll eat it and spread their seeds. When a tomato (tomatoes are technically fruit) turns red, the tomato plant is sending you a message: Eat me now! We think we grow crops to feed ourselves, when from the point of view of many plants, they reward us with food to manipulate us into helping them survive. We serve the plants.

I wrote and sold a non-fiction article to a magazine about the viciousness of the vegetable kingdom, and as a science fiction writer, I thought I ought to do something more with the idea. But what was the story?

Then, at a science fiction writing workshop, the instructor posed a writing prompt about a special kind of wall that suddenly appears in a war zone. War? That might work. What if, on a distant planet, a human colony suddenly appeared like a wall between warring plant factions? (Two classmates also got good ideas from that prompt. One wrote a tender steampunk love story, and another an epic fantasy novel.)

Soon enough, my short story was written and published, dramatizing the dangers of setting up a colony between warring plants. A couple of years later, I came back to the story and thought about expanding it into a novel — so I began more research. Even a fairly Earthlike planet needs a carefully designed ecology.

A few unexpected details that I discovered during that research became critical. On Earth, most iron has sunk to the planet’s core, but a lot remains mixed in the crust, so iron is common. However, if a planet happens to have a lot of carbon as it is formed, almost all the iron sinks down to the core, and the crust becomes iron-poor. Plants need iron to create chlorophyll. Your blood is red from hemoglobin, which contains iron. You have what plants want. Stories need conflict. This one could be life-or-death.

I also realized that no matter how I tweaked the plants, they’d respond slowly. They’re simply low-energy beings. I needed to slow down the story but still keep it compelling. I decided to jump in time between chapters by skipping from one generation of the human colonists to the next, a kind of story called a roman-fleuve.

By then, I had finally developed the idea enough to begin writing — after spending a few years researching all the details.

Story ideas come from many sources: sometimes from a conversation, a news report, an old memory, an episode from history, a reaction to another story, a compelling prompt, or a random observation as you’re walking down the street. I believe that ideas are as easy to encounter as snowflakes in winter. What’s hard are stories. Ideas need to be dramatized. It may take time, observation, research — and possibly a little luck — to discover the drama behind the idea.

There’s no right or wrong way to find the drama. I can only offer one piece of advice: Be patient with the process.

***

(This article originally appeared in the Chicago Review of Books in February 2018.)

“When Star-Stuff Tells Stories” – now on sale

/ Sue Burke / 2 Comments

“If and when aliens make first contact, who should answer? Maybe humankind should turn to people like me, translators of science fiction. We’ve already thought through this kind of problem.”

That’s the opening sentences of my essay When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder. Calque Press has just published a limited edition of it as a 24-page pamphlet, and you can learn more and buy it here.

It’s one of a series of essays and other short works published by Calque. They’re meant to provide an opportunity for writers to think aloud about their own experiences and knowledge — and they are beautifully printed on high-quality paper. The publisher is fussy about the look and feel.

Here’s Calque’s description of When Star-Stuff Tells Stories:

Starting from the very earliest forms of human communication, the ways in which language developed into languages, and created the role of the translator, Sue Burke offers an invaluable guide to the importance and difficulties of translation on Earth, and gives us fascinating speculation about what might happen if we ever do come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. This pamphlet addresses questions of what communication is, and how the translator is uniquely positioned to work at escaping the bounds of the medium and bringing pure meaning into an intelligible form.

My Hugo Award votes for Best Short Story

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

I’m an attending member of this year’s Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, in August, so I get to read and vote for the Hugo Awards. They’ll be presented at a formal ceremony on Sunday evening, August 11, and I’ll be there.

As often happens, the short story finalists overlapped with the Nebula Awards. I was pleased to see some Chinese finalists. The voting is ranked-choice, and here are my choices, but you may have different opinions — my husband doesn’t agree with me. It’s a solid ballot, and I congratulate the winner, whoever it is.

6. “Answerless Journey” by Han Song, translated by Alex Woodend (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers) — Two people alone on a space journey seek answers and, instead, find something worse. A parable for our times. It’s a fine story but with a remote storytelling style.

5. “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” by P. Djèlé Clark (Uncanny Magazine, January-February 2023) — No matter what they tell you, do not raise a kraken in your bathtub. Read the entire owner’s manual first, or else the result will be the basis of a cute old-timey story, perhaps a bit predictable but lots of fun.

4. “The Mausoleum’s Children” by Aliette de Bodard (Uncanny Magazine, May-June 2023) — An escapee from a space disaster goes back on a rescue mission. The story is told with the skill typical of Aliette de Bodard.

3. “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld May 2023) — A new app seems suspiciously and very specifically helpful. I laughed out loud. It ends with an obvious solution to app culture.

2. “The Sound of Children Screaming” by Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare Magazine, October 2023) — Not even a portal into fantasyland can save school children from an active shooter. A gut-wrenching story about our reality — the kind of story that fantasy is uniquely well-equipped to tell. It won my vote for the Nebula for being the most risk-taking among an excellent field of Nebula finalists.

1. “Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times” by Baoshu (Galaxy’s Edge Vol. 13: Secret Room in the Black Domain) — What if technology could allow us to access the feelings of other people as they eat? Baoshu takes this idea to its logical extremes three times. You know it’s going to be bad, but how bad? Original and well-done. In the end, the originality won me over, edging out Jones’ story, but not by much.

My choice for the Nebula Award for Novelette

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

Each year, the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association choose the winners of the Nebula Awards in seven categories, including novelette (7,500 to 17,500 words). As a member, I get to read them and vote for the one I consider most deserving. Voting is closed, and the awards will be presented June 8.

Two of the six novelettes are full-on dystopias and one is a catastrophe, which may speak to our times, alas. The other three could not be more different from each other. As with the short stories, I think all are worthy of nomination, and the variety speaks well to the strength of imagination within the genre.

“A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair” by Renan Bernardo (Samovar 2/23 in English – in Portuguese)  — A chair, infused with sentience, witnesses a family drama, first with anxiety and confusion, then with a broken heart, and finally with joy.

I Am AI by Ai Jiang (Shortwave)— A gig cyborg worker, a writer, struggles to survive at the edge of an inhumane, predatory city. Could her life be better if she shed her humanity and became a true AI? This grim dystopia feels inspired by the way we treat creative work today.

“The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11–12/23) — A catastrophe fills the air with ash and causes major societal breakdown, and a Minneapolis neighborhood comes together to help everyone living there survive. More seems to be happening beyond the neighborhood, but like the cause of the catastrophe itself, no one in the neighborhood seems to talk about it. This is a cozy catastrophe and a paean to good will.

“Saturday’s Song” by Wole Talabi (Lightspeed 5/23) — Cosmic storytellers share a story and learn from it. The complex layers of the story add to its power.

“Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 9–10/23) — A teenage girl makes a deal with the devil, or she thinks she might have, but things go wrong and then wronger. Tense, complex, symbolic, and almost a horror story until the end.

My vote:

“Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon” by Angela Liu (Clarkesworld 6/23) — An artist tries to survive in a relentless dystopia that seems to have a rule against every means of survival. “Life is an ugly ride that turns everyone into a monster eventually,” the artist concludes. She might not live long enough to become a monster. A fully-imagined story, but not for the faint-hearted.