REVIEW: “Forestspirit, Forestspirit” by Bogi Takács

Review of Bogi Takács, “Forestspirit, Forestspirit”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 53-64 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: racism, warfare.

The first thing I noticed about this story (since I had to scroll to the end to find the ending page) was it has notes! Regular readers of this blog know my love of an informative footnote (I’ll even forgive that these were endnotes rather than footnotes). They simple note that the story was inspired by two arXiv papers on neural networks, which made me super excited to read the story itself.

You might think, given the notes, that this is a science fiction story, and perhaps it is that, but it’s also a ghost story. You might also think, given the title, that the ghost in the story is the titular Forestspirit, and perhaps it is that, but they are not the only ghost, the only unseen, incorporeal mechanism that is wreaking havoc on those who have been left behind living after the great human-alien war.

(If you want to know more about how bad neural nets can be at classification tasks, check out Janelle C Shane on twitter, who pranked her neural nets with sheep.)

(First appeared in Clarkesworld 105, 2015).