Burke, Sue
Entry updated 2 September 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1955- ) US journalist, editor, translator and author; resident in Spain for at least seventeen years, until 2017. She began publishing work of genre interest with "Poet for Hire" in The Czamina Kid and Other Weird Tales: Mr Mike's First Milwaukee Omnibus (anth 1995) edited by Michael G Corenthal, though she had already worked for some time as a journalist and editor. The Semiosis sequence opening with her first novel, Semiosis (2018) – with its sequels Interference (2019) and Usurpation (2024) – ambitiously interfuses speculations in molecular Biology with elements of the Planetary Romance as human settlers on the planet Pax, which is already transfigured by marks of some form of sentience (see Gaia; Colonization of Other Worlds; Life on Other Worlds), learn over seven generations how to become commensal with beings initially misapprehended as vegetable. The native sentient plants similarly must learn to cope with insanely accelerated animal entities. Immunity Index (2021) understands Near Future America, riven by Pandemic and governed irresponsibly (see Politics), as having plunged into Dystopia.
Burke has for many years been active as a translator of sf and other forms of Fantastika from the Spanish, including Angélica Gorodischer's Prodigies (1994; trans 2015) [for details see Checklist below], and many individual stories by various authors. [JC]
Susan Carol Burke
born Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 21 June 1955
works
series
Semiosis
- Semiosis (New York: Tor, 2018) [Semiosis: hb/Jamie Stafford-Hill and Nigel Cattlin]
- Interference (New York: Tor, 2019) [Semiosis: hb/]
- Usurpation (New York: Tor, 2024) [Semiosis: hb/]
individual titles
- Immunity Index (New York: Tor, 2021) [hb/]
- Dual Memory (New York: Tor, 2023) [hb/]
works as translator
- Angélica Gorodischer. Prodigies (Easthampton, Massachusetts: Small Beer Press, 2015) [trans of Prodigios (1994): pb/Elisabeth Alba]
links
previous versions of this entry