Sue Burke's Blog, page 40

A beer named Sue

I hesitate to say “I like beer” these days, but I do like it. I spotted a beer named “Sue,” and it seemed worth a try. That’s why I bought some Pseudo Sue Pale Ale for a taste test.

The beer, 6.8% ABV, comes from the Toppling Goliath Brewing Co. in Decorah, Iowa, and features striking artwork, as you can see.

One of the brewery’s co-owners, Clark Lewey, said they named the beer in honor of Sue, the T. rex at the Field Museum in Chicago. His family visited the dinosaur’s exhibit several times when his children were young.

The museum wasn’t sure it wanted a beer named after its prized, trademarked Tyrannosaurus rex, but after a heartfelt chat about the brewers’ enthusiasm for history and science, both parties worked out a cross-promotional marketing agreement. You can now buy the beer on tap at the museum’s Bistro and in four-packs of 16-ounce cans at Chicago-area stores. That’s how I got my sample to take home for a taste test.

The carton says: “This single hop pale ale showcases the citra hop for a well-balanced beer that is delicate in body with a mild bitterness in the finish. Ferocious hop aromas of citrus and mango give a refreshing taste that is bright with just enough bite!”

That’s close to my opinion. The hops are as sharp as dinosaur Sue’s teeth: scary big, close to the too-bitter line, almost resiny — but not quite over it. If you like hoppy beer, you’ll love this. It’s a good thing I like hops. My husband, who is sensitive to bitterness, didn’t care for it so much.

I’ll buy this again, but not all the time. I might dull my palate to its roaring ferocity. Besides, sometimes the moment is right for a tamer beer, and there are lots of other fine Midwest brews to sample.

— Sue Burke

P.S. I’ve decided that the T. rex is my spirit animal. Because our times call for ferocity.

Fall is here, and trees will demonstrate their power

Autumn officially began on September 22. For some plants, the angle of the sun tells them what season it is. Others rely on the temperature. In any case, at this time of year, deciduous trees drop their leaves to prepare for winter.

The 2018 Fall Foliage Prediction Map at Smokymountains.com has a week-by-week interactive map showing regional peak colors for the United States. (See photo above, which is for October 8.) The web page also explains the science behind falling leaves and has downloadable coloring sheets for children.

When the time comes, trees cut off the flow of nutrients to leaves, which lose their chlorophyll, and beautiful underlying colors are revealed. (This season is typically called “fall” in the United States versus “autumn” in Britain for historical reasons.)

Years ago, I witnessed something that showed me the power of trees — not their strength but their autonomy.

The air could not have been more still that autumn morning, yet a tree near my back door was losing its leaves. One by one, they fell of their own weight as the tree let go. Leaves dropped steadily and eerily through the becalmed air.

Usually we think the wind sweeps the autumn leaves from the trees, and maybe it provides an extra tug. But trees decide to shed their leaves at the moment they deem best. Though they seem almost inert, buffeted by wind, soaked by rain, baked by sunshine, and parched by drought, they control their fates as much as any of us. We, too, can be uprooted by disasters, attacked by illness, cut down by predators, and suffer wilting thirst. Being mobile does not make us less vulnerable. Or more willful.

So on that cool morning, I watched a tree prove that it was the master of its destiny. One by one, it clipped its bonds to its leaves, and they dropped off. The tree was taking action, and no one and nothing could stop it.

— Sue Burke

International Translation Day: A little poetry to celebrate

Sunday, September 30, is International Translation Day. To celebrate, here are three poems I translated with Christian Law. “Twilight in Poley” is my favorite.

These poems are by Vicente Núñez (1926-2002), one of the most daring and important poets of Andalusia, Spain, in the 20th century. These translations will appear in a bilingual anthology of his work to be published later this year by the Vicente Núñez Foundation.

La Mentira

En la breve estancia
de una melodía,
la sospecha tuve
de que me mentía.

Como ya era tarde
y el ciprés gemía,
salí a la terraza
sola, oscura y fría.

Sonaron las doce...
La música hería
el último adagio.
Pero no venía.

Al besar el mármol
en la celosía
mudéjar el viento,
mentía, mentía.

The Lie

In the time that it took
for a song or a sigh,
I had the suspicion
he had told me a lie.

But by then it was late
and the cypresses whined.
On the balcony cold
and abandoned stood I.

“It’s midnight,” the bells tolled,
and the sad lullaby
reached its final strain.
But he did not arrive.

The wind brushed the marble
with a whispered reply
on old ornate carvings.
He did lie, he did lie.


A Santaella

Como en un mar de pájaros reales
tras la ventana de una antigua estrella,
sueña en su torre eterna Santaella,
canta, suspira y vaga en medievales

noches como rubíes. ¿De qué males
de amor se duele la gentil doncella
si ella es la bella porque sólo es Ella
junto a los muros de su casa, iguales

a quien sostiene ausencia y ronda y gime
sumiso al seno que en el Valle mora?
¿Qué llamarada te derrama en ala?

¿Qué vuela en ti, desnuda y alta, dime?
¿Donde me has puesto el corazón, señora?
Campo, capilla, esquila, cumbre, escala.

To Santaella [a village near Córdoba, Spain]

As if in a sea of birdsong, regal
flight through the window of an ancient star,
Santaella dreams in her eternal tower,
sings, sighs, and wanders in medieval

nights like rubies. Of what infirmity
of love does the gentle damsel sustain
if hers is beauty that can only reign
standing at the walls of her home as she

suffers along with song and laments there,
subject to her dwelling in the valley?
What impassioned flame spills you to take wing?

Tell me, what flies up in you, tall and bare?
Where have you put my heart, my lady?
Field, chapel, belfry, summit, quartering.


Ocaso en Poley

Si la tarde no altera la divina hermosura
de tus oscuros ojos fijos en el declive
de la luz que sucumbe. Si no empaña mi alma
la secreta delicia de tus rocas hundidas.
Si nadie nos advierte. Si en nosotros se apaga
toda estéril memoria que amengüe o que diluya
este amor que nos salva más allá de los astros,
no hablemos ya, bien mío. Y arrástrame hacia el hondo
corazón de tus brazos latiendo bajo el cielo.

Twilight in Poley

If evening has not touched the divine grace
of your dark eyes gazing at the fading
yielding light. If my soul has not sullied
your delightful solid sunken secret.
If no one has seen us. If we can quench
those sterile memories that might abate
this saving love from far beyond the stars,
now not a word, my love. Let your arms and
pulsing heart pull me deep beneath the sky.

Reading recommendation: “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory

I just read the novelette “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” by Daryl Gregory, and I loved it. If you liked my novel Semiosis, you might like this story, too.

You can read it for free at the Tor.com site, or buy it for your e-reader for only 99¢. Purchase links are at the end of the story.

It tells what happens to a boy when seeds from outer space land on Earth. Are the seeds a disaster? How do they change people’s lives? How do they change the Earth? Why were they sent? None of the answers come easy for the boy in the story, and some of the answers might surprise you, especially in the last few paragraphs when he finally understands.

— Sue Burke

Words born in 1968

The year 1968 is getting some half-centennial fame these days. It’s being remembered, rightly, as a difficult time.

The Vietnam War was at its peak, Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the Black Panthers and Oakland police had a deadly shoot-out, students rioted in Paris, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, the Prague Spring was put down by an invasion, the Democratic National Convention was marked by riots, Richard Nixon won the presidential election — and, in rare good news, Apollo 8 made the first manned-flight orbits of the Moon.

I was thirteen years old.

Some of the unrest and technological change became reflected in the English language. Here are a few of the words and expressions that according to Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler 1968 page made their first appearances in print that year.

The expression gavel-to-gavel probably reflects coverage of the Democratic National Convention. The hippie counterculture had also reached a high point, with new expressions like love beads and peace sign. The Youth International Party also got its start, resulting in the word yippie. A related development was the new acronym SWAT, meaning a police Special Weapons And Tactics unit.

Meanwhile, NASA was busy with the Apollo missions and other space exploration. This gave rise to the words Earthrise, geosynchronous, and pulsar.

The computer mouse debuted in 1968. So did some new computer expressions: alt key, bit rate, word processing, and data mining.

Finally, the expression cash bar first appeared, although the activity it described probably existed before we had a name for it. I was too young to know.

— Sue Burke

Hurricane Florence: sights from the Midwest

I’ve been traveling.

This morning I was driving north on I-75 in Ohio. Going the other way was a convoy of cherry-picker cranes, the kind crews use to repair damaged electrical lines. I think they were being positioned for recovery efforts after Florence hits the East Coast.

On Tuesday morning I was in Michigan eating breakfast at a Best Western motel. I was up very early, and everyone else in the breakfast room was obviously a tradesman: construction site workers and truck drivers, strong men used to going from job to job and working with their hands.

Television screens on the walls played the CNN morning news, and when it ran a segment on Hurricane Florence, the room went silent and every man watched somberly. These men, or their friends and coworkers, might be called on to haul supplies and repair or rebuild the storm’s damage as their next job. They looked grim, not joyful, at the prospect of plentiful work. Those jobs would bring them face to face with loss and grief, and the future might be hard on their hearts as well as their hands.

-- Sue Burke

Where to find me in early September

I’ll make three public appearances in the first two weeks of September.

On Tuesday, September 4, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., I’ll be at the American Writers Museum in Chicago. I’m part of the Fearless Women in Science Fiction panel with Mary Robinette Kowal, whose latest book is The Fated Sky, and with Tessa Gratton, author of The Queens of Innis Lear. I’ve met them both before, and they and their books are amazing. You can find out more about the panel here at the tickets page and at the Facebook event page.

On Sunday, September 9, I’ll be at the Kerrytown Book Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ll appear on a panel with Mary Robinette Kowal again and with Jacqueline Carey. Our panel is from 3 to 3:45 p.m., with a book signing from 3:45 to 4 p.m. You can find out more about the festival at its website and Facebook event page.

Finally, on Monday, September 10, at 7 p.m., I’ll be at the Cromaine Library in Hartland, Michigan, as part of a series called Sallie’s Author Visit. I’ll talk about my novel and getting published. Here’s the library’s webpage and details about the visit.

If you’re in Chicago or Michigan, I hope I get to meet you.

— Sue Burke

My Goodreads review: "Yaqteenya"

Yaqteenya: The Old World by Yasser Bahjatt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I picked up this book at the freebie table at Worldcon 76 in San Jose and read it on the airplane home. The author was on a panel I moderated, “Exploring a Wider Universe: Beyond the world of Anglophone SF/F,” where he represented the history of Saudi Arabian science fiction and its hopes for the future with deep knowledge and entertaining anecdotes.

When I paged through it, I decided to take it home because I was intrigued by its references to Andalusia, since I lived in Spain for 17 years, and by the story-telling style of discovered documents. Yaqteenya is alternate history, with dashes of science fiction and fantasy. After Granada falls to the Spaniards in 1492 and the Muslims are betrayed and expelled (which really happened), some of them sail west and create an Islamic settlement in the New World. Many of the indigenous tribes there convert. But problems develop that can best be solved by finding out what has happened in the Old World. A young man rises to the challenge. First, though, he must help bring peace to Yaqteenya.

The adventure is fast-paced, carefully structured, and rich with details. Arabic culture permeates the characters’ actions and attitudes. I give it four stars for that – but not five. It could have benefitted from a more professional translation (“brake” and “break” are different words), and the author falls into common cliches, especially the false idea that if someone is bonked on the head, they conveniently black out and later wake up and are just fine besides a bruise. In reality that person has suffered serious brain damage.

Still, the scope of the story is exhilarating, and Islamic alternate history adds an enriching perspective to the question of “what if” that underlays the genre. What if events in 1492 had gone differently? The whole world would have a new trajectory.

-- Sue Burke


View all my reviews

Sue Burke's review of Children of Time

Sue Burke's review of Children of Time

5/5: People who had read my novel, Semiosis, recommended this book to me, so I bought it, and they were right, it’s a good book. Later I learned that Adrian Tchaikovsky had provided the extremely favorable cover blurb for the British edition of my novel. I owe him one for that. There’s a lot to ...

Posted by Sue Burke on 28 Aug 2018, 19:55

Sue Burke's review of Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

Sue Burke's review of Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

5/5: “They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.” That sort of observation is why I love Murderbot. I expected to enjoy this novella and I did, even more than the first two in the series. Murderbot is a clever, part-organic robot ...

Posted by Sue Burke on 29 Aug 2018, 20:31