Tag: Q

Review of Bogi Takács, “Toward the Luminous Towers” in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 221-233 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: Warfare, combat, drug use, death, murder, injury, amputation, ableism, dehumanization, suicide.

Sometimes, reading a story, I can’t help but think what a mystery the human mind is, that it can come up with such things. Takács takes the reader into a pretty dark place in this story — all the content warnings above are necessary in this one, and even for someone who does not particularly struggle with any of these topics, I found this an unsettling and distressing story.

(Originally published in Clarkesworld #120, 2016).

Review of Bogi Takács, “To Rebalance the Body” in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 199-212 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I was a bit surprised that this story didn’t come with a content note, so I’ll add one of my own — if body-modification or vampirism isn’t your thing, avoid this story.

Ordinary vampires are generally neither my thing nor not my thing, but Master Viiren in this story is no ordinary vampire. With all their usual skill, Takács takes a character type and turns it into something on the border between creepy and unsettling. Master Viiren has an illness for which they take medicine, a medicine which they receive from vesicles on the skin of their servant, Biruyan. There is a deep physical intimacy between the two, and the narrators obsequiousness to their master makes it almost uncomfortable to witness.

What was not so uncomfortable, for me at least, was the direct way in which both Biruyan and Master Viiren confront the problematic consequences of adherence to a gender binary and a sex binary. While issues of gender and sex are threaded throughout the stories in this volume, only a few of the stories explicitly revolve around the topic, and its strongest in this one. It’s one of the thins that I’ve loved about this collection as a whole: How much gender matters, but how much also it doesn’t have to be central, but (on the third hand) how much it also can be the central guiding force of a story, and also how gender and sex are intertwined.

(First published in Nerve Endings, ed. T. Hill-Meyer, 2017).

Review of Bogi Takács, “Increasing Police Visibility”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 111-115 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content note: Policing.

In this story, Takács plays on the different ways “alien” can be interpreted in a way that chills this immigrant’s heart. Although first published in 2015, the story holds even more resonance now, given the increasing hatred and xenopobia of countries like the USA and the UK.

(Originally published in Lightspeed June 2015.)

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).

Review of Bogi Takács, “This Shall Serve as a Demarcation”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 15-23 — Purchase hereReviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: warfare, injury, colonialism, suicide, blood.

In the opening story of the anthology, we are dumped immediately into a chaotic world of struggle between land settlements and sea settlements. Î-surun, the narrator, is in the captivity? care? it’s not clear of Enhyoron, and they themself are like a microcosmic reflection of the external struggle between land and sea. Just as land converts to sea and sea converts to land, so has the narrator’s own body been first opened at the veins and filled with metal, and then had that metal removed, carefully, by Enhyoron.

This is a story of the horrors of colonialisation, patriotism and a desire to serve, and coercion, but also a story of redemption, escape, and how to make decisions.

(Originally published in Glittership no. 3, 2015).