Sue Burke's Blog, page 47

Windycon 44 review

I attended Windycon 44 in November, 2017, and wrote a review for Alexiad fanzine. You can read it at my professional writing website, sueburke.site.

— Sue Burke

Listen up: Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons?

If you haven’t had a chance to read my novelette “Who Won the Battle of Arsia Mons?” at Clarksworld magazine, you can listen to the podcast, ably read by Kate Baker.

You can get it at Clarkesworld or at Player.fm.

— Sue Burke

Reading December 7 in Chicago

I’ll be reading from the novel Semiosis at Deep Dish: a science fiction and fantasy reading series on Thursday, December 7, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., at Volumes Bookcafe, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago.

Featured novelist: Ada Palmer
Debut novelists: Michael Moreci and Sue Burke
Rapid-fire readers: Angeli Primlani, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Stephen Segal, and Dan Gonzalez

Deep Dish (a reference to telescopes and to Chicago pizza) is sponsored by the Speculative Literature Foundation, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), and Chicago Nerd Social Club.

— Sue Burke

Review: "The World of Null-A"

The World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This novel, written in 1945, shows its age. This goes beyond imagining Venus as a damp forest of huge trees, or that people in the year 2650 will still be placing personal ads in paper newspapers. The world itself is smaller, pretty much all white men, in a conformist society. The science itself, such as what can be done with atomic power or plastics, gets stretched beyond all possibility.

Still, A.E. van Vogt is famous for ideas, and he has one that powers this novel: What if a highly rational non-Aristotelian philosophy guided the behavior of the best men and women of their time? Unfortunately, van Vogt doesn’t explain this philosophy in great depth. It seems to compel the protagonist to act without a lot of forethought or with long-term goals.

Van Voght has more ideas: a computer game that decides the participants’ futures, a “legal holiday” during which no laws are enforced, a minor kind of immortality, a huge galactic war that aims to conquer Venus and Earth....

The plot involves a man trying to find out who he is. Eventually he finds out. In the process a lot of people die.

This book is considered a classic, possibly one of van Vogt’s best, and it’s worth reading if only to watch ideas whiz past like scenery on a highway. There’s nice countryside out there, but the man at the wheel of the car isn’t about to slow down. He also won’t ask for directions, so the trip gets a bit lost toward the end. This is how we used to travel in science fiction. Serious fans will find the trip worth their while, but if you’re new to the genre, don’t start here.

By the way, how about the cover art on the 1948 edition? Wow.


From Goodreads. View all my reviews

Paper Into Planes

The Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Paper airplanes appeared in history several years later.

And yet, any child can make a paper airplane. The Chinese invented paper 2000 years ago and had kites. Birds have been flying since dinosaur times, and humanity has dreamed of flying since the stone age. Paper models of sailing ships, hot air balloons, and dirigibles were available before 1903. Japanese origami had already reached wonderful sophistication. Nothing was stopping anyone from making a paper airplane.

Except one thing: no one knew what an airplane looked like or how it would work. No one could imagine it. Orville and Wilbur had to develop an accurate understanding of how wing shape affected air pressure and created lift in order to make a real airplane, and by 1899 they had built intricate gliders and harnessed wind power. Their discoveries would soon be transferred to a simplified three-dimensional paper model. The rest is history.

This leaves me sitting here staring at a sheet of paper, wondering what unprecedented things it could do, things that would delight any child, if I could only imagine them.

— Sue Burke

Interrobang

Fun fact: according to Merriam-Webster, the word interrobang for “a punctuation mark designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question,” was coined a half-century ago.

Despite all the ensuing exclamatory rhetoric still awaiting proper punctuation, the mark has yet to catch on.

— Sue Burke

Translating Poetry: A thorny problem

How do you translate words that exist in one language but not in another? Or ideas and animals specific to one culture or location? And what about puns?

In this article, I use some of my haiku to illustrate four strategies – compensation, paraphrase, adaptation, and wordplay – that sometimes work and sometimes fail more or less utterly. Read “Translating Poetry: A thorny problem” at Book Machine.

— Sue Burke

My review of "Too Like the Lighting" by Ada Palmer (via Goodreads)

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First off: this book gets four stars because it ends on a cliffhanger. You have to read the sequel to find out what happens. I wish books would be more upfront about how long they really are so I can decide if I have enough time to invest in them. I feel misled.

If this book were stand-alone, it would get five stars for originality and plot twists. In a far future, in what soon proves to be a deeply flawed society that thinks it’s a utopia, the main point of view character, Mycroft Canner, has secrets. You learn some of them right away, and they’re bad enough, but about halfway through you discover just how much he’s been lying to you. And you learn how much everyone has been lying to each other, and how this world is led by a morally repugnant elite, which includes Mycroft.

The story-telling style could be called “baroque”: ornate, extravagant, complex, and irregular. At times Mycroft will even debate with you, the reader. Be prepared for a large cast of characters and long-winded philosophical discussions, both of which sometimes tested my patience or attention span. But I really enjoyed the novel. I just wish I knew how it ended.

View all my reviews

(Goodreads makes it easy to cut and paste reviews. I suppose this is a good thing.)

-- Sue Burke

How to avoid me at Windycon 44

I’ll be attending Chicagoland’s oldest science fiction convention, Windycon, at the Westin Lombard Yorktown Center in Lombard, Illinois, November 10 to 12. This year’s theme is “Dystopia!”

I’ll be on some fun panels, too:

• Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Friday, 8:00 p.m.
• VillainCon Submissions – What if writers of dystopian stories are really submitting their world domination plans for peer review? Saturday, 1:00 p.m.
• Developing a Language, Saturday, 2 p.m.
• Dystopian Recipes – alternative proteins and how to cook them, Saturday, 9:00 p.m.

— Sue Burke

A poetry translation at Surreal Poetics

My translation of “El Talego” (Duffel) by Fernando Cuartas, a poet from Medellín, Columbia, is in the current issue of Surreal Poetics.

This issue of the online zine is devoted to surrealism as social critique, lived experience, and marvelous nature. The poem “El Talego” deals with urban poverty.

Read it here:
http://surrealpoetics.weebly.com/issue03-cuartas-2eltalego.html

— Sue Burke