zirconium

Art of a woman surrounded by stars

My short story “To Defeat Water” has been translated into Spanish as “Derrotar al agua” and published by Microficciones y Cuentos. Lealo aquí/read it here.

The site is run by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is one of the founding fathers of Spanish-language science fiction, and his novels have won major awards.

I often translate other people’s work from Spanish into English, and it’s an honor to have my work published in Spanish, especially by someone as prominent as Sergio. ¡Gracias!

If you want to read the story in English, it was originally published here by The Lorelei Signal.

New poem out today in Uncanny! I wrote The Truth About Wolves for my beloved younger godchild. I hope you enjoy it too.

I received a preview copy this book in exchange for writing a blurb if I liked it. The description intrigued me: a science fiction story from an outstanding author about translation. A psychic connection allows a linguist to impersonate a species upon whom space travel depends.

But I didn’t get the story I expected. Here’s my blurb:

I felt shattered, betrayed by all my hopes. Everything we believe about linguistics says shared language leads to greater understanding and compassion. This is why I translate. But language is also a technology, and technologies can destroy. S.L. Huang shows how lies using language can create an unthinkable disaster.

I can’t say more without spoilers. The Language of Liars will be published on April 21. You won’t be disappointed

George Abraham and Noor Hindi, eds., Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. Some poets in this new to me, some I'd read in their own collections. I think one of the benefits of a collection like this is that it's much harder for an uncareful reader to think "I guess I don't like Palestinian poetry" because there's so much variety of it, even the stuff that's focused on Being Palestinian as opposed to all the other things Palestinian poets write poems about.

Lloyd Alexander, Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen. Rereads. Ha. "Rereads." Probably the most reread books of my life after the first decade. I was just thinking that maybe this would be the reread when I got nothing new out of them except continued enjoyment and then I came upon the passage that made me cry about living in Minnesota in early 2026, thanks, Lloyd. (Seriously though thanks, sometimes we need the catharsis.)

Rebecca Boyd, Exploring Ireland's Viking-Age Towns: Houses and Homes. Glad that a friend talked about this, because it does exactly the sort of thing I like where it talks about where the interior walls went in a typical building changing over time and what that meant socially and where people stored their hazelnuts and that. Material culture for the win.

Andre M. Carrington, ed., The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories. A book club read, and I feel like reaction was not unified but more unified than a lot of the other books we've discussed--a lot more closer to "we all think this is a very good story," "nobody likes this story but we all respect it," etc. Still a lot that's worth discussing here.

Christopher de Hamel, The Manuscripts Club: The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts. Lavishly illustrated and focused on the people who have been focused on the manuscripts. If you're a person who thinks of yourself as having friends and kindred souls across spacetime, de Hamel is with you, and here is a book about some of his and the (increasingly old) books they loved.

Peter Dickinson, King and Joker. Reread. One of the most coming of age coming of age stories I have ever read in my life, wrapped in a tidy murder mystery, with Dickinson getting to do an alternate history of a type that is often neglected, the fairly minor change type. I still do like this for its complicated relationships that are allowed to stay complicated.

Amal El-Mohtar, Seasons of Glass and Iron. Discussed elsewhere.

Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. Creative nonfiction about the effects of violence at every scale, sweeping where I would have liked it to be specific, readable but not really what I was looking for.

Rokeya Hussain, Sultana's Dream and Padmarag. Mostly historically interesting rather than fun reads for me: this is the work of a very early 20th century Indian feminist writer who used the structure of a dream to talk about the future--popular at the turn of the last millennium, from what I can tell. It was very much a "nuh uh we don't suck, you suck" vision in places, but one can understand that in context. And now I know.

Ange Mlinko, Venice: Poems. Literal and figurative Venice, waters and references. I liked this in a mellow sort of way, even though they aren't all mellow poems.

Jared Poon, City of Others. I'm not sure what's getting us so many good Singaporean authors available in the US in the last decade or so, but I'm for it, I'm absolutely for it. This is in the "weird magical things handled by a specialist in a modern city" subgenre, which I like depending on the skill of the author and the interest of the magical things, and this has both skill and interest.

Anthony Price, The Labyrinth Makers. Reread. Several of the other spy things I had recently revisited from the mid-late twentieth were, frankly, stupid, and I was a bit worried that this, which I remembered as non-stupid, would also be stupid. It was not. Whew. It was clearly a spy novel written both by and about a white British man in 1970, but with less of the attendant gender stuff and a lot less of the attendant race stuff than one might fear in that context. There are several more in this series, which I will also be revisiting as I get around to it, I think. One of the virtues of this series is that I remember them varying considerably; we'll see if and where that also ends up being one of its drawbacks.

T.K. Rex, The Wildcraft Drones. Discussed elsewhere.

John Sayles, Crucible. This is exactly what I wanted out of a John Sayles novel. I'm pretty sure he didn't write it just for me, but he could have. (This was also true of A Moment in the Sun and Yellow Earth.) This one is centered on Detroit in the Great Depression, with tentacles as far north as the UP and as far south as Brazil. It has Sayles's use of multiple perspectives that are genuinely different to make for a richer story of its placetimes and their people. Love it. I did notice that his rather too frequent habit of italicizing the single syllable of a word that would make the sentence sound like it would if David Strathairn was saying it, but you know, we all have our quirks.

Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped. I had enjoyed the others of Sebastian's things I'd read, two mysteries and an historical novel, all with a m/m love story in them, so I thought, hey, maybe I will like a genuine romance by this author, maybe we have found the place where my taste and genre romance overlaps. Answer: not quite. I read the whole thing, and it was fine, it's a nice book with nice people in it, but all the questions I had for the narrative were not the ones it was interested in answering. I can easily imagine describing a book the same way--"two actors who have been on the same science fiction TV series for years fall in love and have to navigate their personal, professional, and public selves"--and having it be focused on the questions that interest me...and that would not be this novel, which was largely interested in their relationship. Which is exactly what its genre claims it will do, and the people who are looking for that will likely find it very satisfying. Ah well, it's good to explore these things to find out.

Una L. Silberrad, Success. Kindle. I spent a lot of my college years and just beyond thinking and talking about the way that the image and self-image of physics and chemistry changed after each of the two World Wars, but it's still fascinating to stumble upon something like this, a pre-Great War book that lionizes its engineer hero to a degree that's been impossible since my grandparents came of age, that seems to take as its thesis that brilliant engineers gotta brilliant engineer, that assumes as obvious that of course a British engineer has the right to sell his weapon plans to France and Germany...in a novel that came out in 1912.... I continue to enjoy the places Silberrad actively rejected some of the standard romance plots that don't fit her characters. This is a book that also has places where I'm not sure whether she's actually neutral on there being background Jewish characters, but there's room for that reading, so I went with it. (Narrative: so lots of this guy's friends were Jewish; me: same, buddy, same; narrative: now on to the plot that has nothing to do with his pals; me: sure, okay.)

Rebecca Solnit, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Another essay collection, about building the new in a time of turmoil, not one of her more outstanding books but still worth a read.

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn (The Irish Member). Kindle. Is it Trollope's fault? the thing where people want to tell the stories of the emotional and professional lives of politicians without being, you know, political? Because I hate that thing, and here's a bunch of it--quite a large bunch--he is no more committed to brevity here than he ever was. The ending only makes sense structurally: you can see that's what he's working towards, but not because he's making anything make it satisfying, just because that's what this shape of thing is going to do and by God it does it. The thing is, it's Trollope, so this is not his least satisfying book, not by a long shot, because he manages not to make Finn a cartoon Irishman, thank God, except that it makes me say, okay, look, you could see some of the trouble of being a shunned ethnic minority in this context? yes? and yet when it came to Jewish people in your other books? yes? no, apparently no? But also it is not nearly one of the most satisfying Trollope books, because the tropes don't play well with the actual characters he's written. I see that there's a sequel, so I looked up a synopsis, and I think he saw that he'd done the same thing, but it doesn't make me want to read the sequel really, because I will get even angrier at the treatment of at least two characters as tools of the titular character's arc, I think.

Olivia Waite, Nobody's Baby. A novella with an unusual shape of mystery enabled specifically by the science fiction setting, which is much more satisfying to me than having science fiction upholstery and mystery engine. There were a few bits that were more mannered than I'd like, but I'd just been reading Trollope and may have gotten oversensitized.

Lesley Wheeler, Mycocosmic. Poems both metaphorically and literally about fungi, definitely right up my alley and I bet right up the alley of several other people around here too.

Darcie Wilde, The Matter of the Secret Bride. Another of the Rosalind Thorne mysteries--one of the two my library didn't have, so I read it a bit out of order. It's the kind of mystery series where that doesn't matter greatly, and the places where it touches on actual history were entertaining as hoped.

Yoojin Grace Wuertz, Everything Belongs to Us. I felt like the ending of this book did not really come together at all. The things Wuertz was trying to do with class at the beginning just fell apart, and especially how they tied in with the title mostly fell apart, and the bit where people actually overcame their obstacles to reach their goals mostly happened off the page between the last proper chapter and the epilogue. I hate to spoiler something like this, but I know that infant death and particularly infant death for plot convenience are very, very bad things for some of my friends to encounter unawares, so I'm going to say right out: there is a baby who is on the page for a large chunk of the novel and whose presence is not convenient, and then he just dies off the page and no one has to have any emotional reaction to it. Which is too bad, because the beginning was very promising, and we don't get a lot of novels in English about Seoul in the late 1970s. Endings are hard, I'll tell you that for free.

I’ve discovered that there’s an entry about me in Grokipedia, and since I am the world’s leading expert in all things regarding Sue Burke, I took a look. Wow, 4,500 words, more than I think I’m worth. I don’t recommend you check it out, though. Let me explain why.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Grokipedia describes itself as “an AI-generated online encyclopedia operated by the American company xAI.” Elon Musk created the project because he believed Wikipedia had been influenced by the “woke mind virus.” Grokipedia asserts a commitment to neutrality in its AI-curated outputs, claiming to deliver “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” through an automated synthesis aligned with objective knowledge representation.

But it’s an AI, so it possesses only an illusion of understanding — and a recognized tendency for overstatement. I have “growing recognition,” “earned accolades” and “professional accolades” as well as “significant recognition” and a “growing reputation in the field.” Such flattery!

But there are errors. Here are a few.

It says I won the American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Prize in 2010. I did not. I checked the footnote, and what I think happened is that my name and the prize were both mentioned on the same page of an ATA magazine (see photo). Proximity amounts to correlation for an AI.

The entry says, “In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Burke relocated briefly to Austin, Texas.” During those “brief” years — actually, during all the years from 1955 to 1998 — I lived in Milwaukee. I lived in Austin from 1998 to 1999.

Since there was no internet until the 1990s, Grokipedia has little to say about the first four decades of my life, although I assure you I was busy.

It says I published either “more than 40 short stories” (correct) or “about 25.”

It also slightly misstates a whole lot of things, and it invents causal connections that don’t exist. For example, it says that certain freelance jobs “significantly refined Burke’s stylistic precision and narrative voice.” Not true. I got those jobs because I already had the skills.

The AI tries very hard to create a narrative, so it adds cause and effect everywhere it can. In reality, my life has had a somewhat random quality to it. Things happened, and then I tried to make the best of the changed circumstances. There was no masterplan.

Grokipedia’s AI also tries to draw unwarranted conclusions. It says, “Burke keeps her family life private” and “no children are mentioned in available biographical accounts,” suggesting that I do have children, I just don’t tell anyone about them. Most people have children, so statistically I do too, right? In fact, I have talked about my family life, although there’s not always much to say. Children are one of life’s great adventures, and if I had them, they would be the smartest, best, most talented children in the world, and I would never tire of telling you about them.

My husband read my Grokipedia entry, and he had one good thing to say about it: “Now you don’t have to create a fake resume. The AI made one for you.”

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The line between mosaic novel and themed short story collection is a very blurry one, but I spent 99% of this book fairly sure that it was in the latter category. And then I got to the end and I don't know any more. These stories are linked thematically and by their science fictional world conceit. There's not an overarching character arc for any characters told in these tales.

...unless, as I was carefully taught as a high school sophomore, the setting can be a character, in which case there absolutely is character arc here, and a very settling/satisfying one too. These science fiction stories have a consistent thread of using technology to reach out to the natural world and to heal the things that are already broken in our time. There's a wide range of characters--dolphins, robots, cats! humans I guess if you need those!--and they are generally not perfect but doing their best, which is basically my favorite kind of characters.

I am not the target audience for the type of mini-comic that appears in a few places throughout the book, but these particular examples of the form are charming and fit well with the stories around them. I feel like "now, more than ever" is one of those cliches I don't want to lean too hard on in 2026, but also now, more than ever, we really do need stories about doing the best we can with what we've got, and these are that, and I'm so glad they're all in one place to lean on.

I bought my yarn today for my upcoming sweater class. I really didn't know what color I wanted, I just knew I didn't want it to be blue because everything I wear lately is that cool-toned medium blue I call denim and clothing designers call something much more poetic like Mountain Spring. Anyway, I knew from the last project that a mottled/marled yarn would test me more than I cared for on a big project and I also knew I would need something made of or partially with either merino or alpaca in order to not cause my skin to react to it. I looked at greens, I looked at pinks, and then I saw this thistle purple 100% NSW (Australia) merino and I knew I would use it.

I left it to be turned into cakes for tomorrow night's class, so I don't have my own photo of it, but the one above is very close. It's tonal, which means it has some variation to the darkness of dye, but it's subtle. I can see what I'm doing with a color this light, too. Now I'm excited to knit.

We arrived home today after 13 hours of flights and 7 hours in transit between Queenstown, Auckland and San Francisco. It was all very easy and so was the trip. I have five loads of laundry to do, so let me give you a report while that gets done.

We spent four days in Auckland where we did wine tastings on Waiheke Island, visited a nature reserve, and walked on a beautiful beach on the west coast as well as generally enjoying city entertainments. On the fifth day we went to Hobbiton and on to Rotorua. Hobbiton was amazing! The area is beautiful, the recreated film set is gorgeous, the tours are well-organized, and it's a lovely place to spend some time especially if you're a fan of the movies as we are. I saw one young lady dressed as a sort of elf-hobbit cross; when asked, she said her outfit was from Hot Topic. I confess I never knew Hot Topic, a mall store that catered to the gothy-emo-punky-playful young twenties aesthetic in my day, was a source of Middle Earth gear, but apparently so!

We spent two days in Rotorua and I'm not sure why I was told by friends and travel sources that there's not much to do there as there is a huge amount of natural beauty to explore. We did a full day of geothermal walks (and one bus ride) and made a visit to a Maori cultural center. I regret I did not bring my swimsuit, I really wanted to do a mud bath followed by a hot tub overlooking Lake Rotorua. We had excellent ice cream at Lady Jane's Ice Cream Parlour. We saw three fairly big geysers and many smaller ones venting steam all over the place.

On we went to Christchurch, a large city of 420K spread out mostly in leafy suburban splendor with the city center still visibly recovering from the huge 2011 earthquake. We made use of the Hop On Hop Off Tram pass, did a day trip to the Southern alps via train, went on a bush walk, had a fancy lunch, checked out the city center's many highlights, and met up with friends from home who arranged their trip to be there at the same time. We also joined friends from Minneapolis whom I'd never met other than on Zoom, but everyone else knew from way back so that was fun; the six of us had dinner together every night.

Our last stop was Queenstown which was by far my favorite place we visited. It is spectacular, there's no other superlative I can think of. A huge lake, vast mountains, access to fjords only a four hour bus ride or 30 minute flight away, and everywhere looked like a Lord of the Rings movie backdrop because it was. We saw Milford Sound on a gorgeously sunny day. We bounced our way around gravel roads in the Misty Mountains and saw many other recognizable LotR film sites. We made the most of our two weeks and are now thoroughly worn out from having fun. What a good vacation!

The New Zealand accent was occasionally hard to follow. New Zealanders themselves were friendly, casual, helpful, almost insanely cheerful at times, and the tourist industry is top notch. We caught some stray flack from other tourists who were not fans of Americans or the current war which was fucking up flights back to Europe and causing rising prices even as we toured. March is the end of high season so we dodged some of the crowds, but it was still bustling everywhere.

I bought many chocolates as souvenirs, plus one t-shirt at Hobbiton because it was much warmer than expected throughout the trip, and a plush coffee bean keychain because my online user name is fully caffeinated and you know how much I love coffee. Speaking of which, although the pervasiveness and availability of coffee was much appreciated I really didn't think most of it was very good. It wasn't undrinkable, but I only enjoyed two of my many cups of coffee on the trip and one was made by an actual Italian who understood beans and brewing. Oh well, you can't have everything. As in Europe, Coke Zero is widely available and my preferred Diet Coke was not.

New Zealand wines are excellent and I tried quite a few of them with meals. I enjoyed the craft brews as well, but there are far too many lagers and hazy IPAs for my taste (this is true at home as well, it is just my bad luck no one makes bitters or red ales much these days). All of our meals were excellent. I tried lamb twice just to be a good sport, but I don't like it. The fish was outstanding, I enjoyed that several times. The salads tended to be of the wispy, slightly bitter, awkward to eat type of lettuce and the dressing flavors were great. I somehow ate a lot of chips (french fries, of course) as they were part of many meals I ordered even if the menu didn't say so. Beef tallow fried chips are the best, yum yum.

Would I go back? Well, probably not because there are so many places left on my wish list and I have only 30 years before I turn 100 and stop traveling (probably). But do I recommend it? Yes indeed! Great value, beautiful country, easy to be a tourist there, so much to see and do and eat and drink that two weeks is almost a criminally short visit for both islands.

Some photos! First row is Hobbiton, of course, left to right: a view of Bag End on top of the hill, the famous note on Bilbo's gate, the Party Tree in the Party Field, and ourselves as hobbits peeking out from a fake hobbit hole (it was just 2x4s behind the opening on all the houses on the hill, though there are now two purpose-built houses you can walk through which were constructed in 2024).

Second row, left to right: a rainforest bush walk near Arthur's Pass, John at a stream near the Dart River with the Misty Mountains in the background, a surrealist pose on Knobs Flat in the Eglinton Valley, and Milford Sound in the sunshine.