Category: anthology

Review of Bogi Takács, “Changing Body Templates”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 79-102. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content note: Occupation, physical pain from medical
procedures. Brief mentions of torture, drugs, warfare, mind control.

This is a long story broken up into short stories — little few-paragraph or few-page vignettes. I loved the way that this format allowed me to get brief glimpses into the family life of the narrator, and of the work life of them and their colleagues. What I liked less was the way I felt like I was constantly trying to fill in holes and gaps; I found myself having to reread too much to figure out what I was missing to be able to enjoy the entire story in a smooth experience — and even then I was still left with questions (such as how is it that the Orosi are the dominant people, when their technology is so far behind that of the Dathran?)

Even so, the ending packs a heart-rending punch which makes up for a lot. If you like your sci fi apolitical, this is not the story for you.

(First published in Strange Bedfellows, ed. Hayden Trenholm, 2014).

Review of Bogi Takács, “Given Sufficient Desperation”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 65-77 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: ableism, occupation and warfare, physical violence, torture.

“We all do what we can to survive” (p. 69).

This is one of those sly sci-fi stories where the aliens and the science and the experiments slide in almost unnoticed, and when you do realise what’s going on, it’s all the more creepily chilling. As in “Forestspirit, Forestspirit”, Takács draws upon actual science for this story, and provides references at the end (always a plus in my book!). This anchoring of fiction in actual fact also contributes to the overall creepiness!

Takács’s prose in this story is spare and sparse, full of incomplete sentences and short, staccato paragraphs. This sharp rhythm combined with the first-person POV results in a very intimate, personal impression of Vera, the narrator, and I loved the lyricism of it all.

Readers who are looking for more disability representation in their SFF will be interested to know that Vera is dyspraxic.

(First published in Defying Doomsday, ed. by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, 2016).

Review of Bogi Takács, “A Superordinate Set of Principles”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 39-52 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: body horror.

Superficially, this is an aliens-in-a-living-spaceship story — but to characterise it as that would miss the deftness with which Takács takes something alien, strange, foreign, and makes it seem utterly normal. Since the story is told in a first-person POV, we only get bits and pieces of what makes the alien alien, all offered up so ordinarily that it takes a question like

“What could conceivably be wrong with humans?” (p. 40)

to jolt me away from a sense of familiarity to a sense of otherness. I tend to be quite picky about aliens in my SF, because so often they are all too human. But Takács’s narrator Ishtirh-Dunan is not human at all, and delightfully so.

The second aspect that I especially liked about this story was the way unfamiliar language was handled — another tricky thing to do well, especially in a written media. How does one represent in language things that one cannot even conceive of? Again, I found Takács’s execution of this [hmmm, I’d like to say “masterful” but that has problematic gender connotations; and “mistressful” is certain no better. Imagine this long excursus as a placeholder for the right non-gendered synonym].

This story was exceptionally well done.

(First published in Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by C. Dombrowski and Scott Gable, Broken Eye Books, 2017.)

Review of Bogi Takács, “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 25-37 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: death, forced labor, oppression, colonialism.

I was wondering when the titular octopuses would come in, especially since the only reference in the first story was to a settlement called Blue-Ringed Octopus Settlement. But I didn’t have to wait long, as the narrator of this story is themself an octopus.

Given that none of us know what the inner mind of an octopus is like, it’s hard to describe a first-octopus POV as full of verisimilitude, but that is what Tackas manages to give us here — it all feels so real and accurate. The way the octopuses interact with each other — not just through changing patterns on their skins and complex motions of their limbs but also through what is describe as only “the field”, the collective knowledge and memory (maybe even ‘consciousness’ is the right word to describe it) that allows short-lived generations of octopuses to pass on their history to the next generation.

But now the octopuses, Scrape, Pebblesmooth, the narrator, others, are faced with an impossible decision: They have discovered an object which if opened could help them understand the furthest reaches of their history, their very origin itself — or it could destroy the field and all their collective memory.

So what about the title? Well, what matters most in reproduction — that we reproduce, or that we pass on a legacy? The entire story offers us two parallel accounts of how such a legacy can be created and maintained, through very different reproduction patterns. Who’s to say which, if either, is better?

(Originally published in Clarkesworld, no. 127, 2017).