Short & Sweet: Interview with Bogi Takács
Oct. 29th, 2019 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ladybusinessBogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish disabled agender trans person, currently living in the United States. E has published numerous works of short fiction and poetry as well as being a prolific reviewer with a focus on works by marginalized creators. E has also edited multiple anthologies including the Lambda award winning Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction. Takács has also been a finalist for the Hugo and Locus Awards. E recently published eir first collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation. E can be found online at ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
bogiperson on Twitter, eir review blog Bogi Reads the World, and on Patreon.
forestofglory: I really enjoyed The Trans Space Octopus Congregation. It was fun revisiting some of my favorites of your stories, but there were also quite a few pieces that were new to me. What was it like putting the collection together?
Bogi Takács: It really helped me to edit multiple anthologies before my own collection, because I had a chance to develop my procedures about assembling a table of contents. So it was fairly straightforward (queerforward?). I also asked my Spouseperson R.B. Lemberg for input, and did end up making a major change in story order based on their comments.
My usual procedures involve writing out the titles on pieces of scrap paper and rearranging them on the living room floor. I can save states by taking a photo with my phone.
F: I know you’ve been reading science fiction since childhood, but how did you get started writing SFF yourself?
BT: I wrote all sorts of random unfinished things as a child. I think the first somewhat SFnal one was a choose your adventure gamebook that wasChip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers fanfic. Written on scraps of paper which I arranged on the floor… etc. (Is there a pattern here, I wonder.) I think I was in second grade, and I never actually finished writing the gamebook. It was very ambitious—probably too ambitious!—;you could choose from three different characters at the beginning.
Chip n’ Dale was one of the first Western cartoons I watched, as part of the children’s segment Sunday Disney Movie Afternoon that started airing on state television soon after the collapse of the Communist regime. Practically the entire child population of Hungary was glued to the Movie Afternoon on Sundays. Our generation is not called “Millennials” in Hungary as much as "the Ducktales generation", because Ducktales was responsible for one of our major shared historical memories: the Disney Movie Afternoon was interrupted during an episode of Ducktales with the announcement that PM József Antall had passed away. (As for why a gamebook: I was a huge Fighting Fantasy fan as a kid, and I still enjoy the format.)
I’m a second generation SFF fan, it is something I grew up with and really enjoyed from childhood. But for many years I thought I’d be part of SFF as an illustrator first and foremost: writing was something on the side, and I could never finish a story anyway. I could hardly even finish a poem. By contrast, I illustrated quite a few Hungarian science fiction stories as a high school student, and had my own exhibition at a con. Then I sadly developed severe tendonitis which only improved after I got my own laptop to take notes on, in my second year of undergrad - by which time I’d already had to make a decision not to apply to art school. I also had to massively scale down the amount of drawing I was doing. I do still make visual art on occasion, and even had some of it published, but I’m primarily known as a writer and editor these days.
I started to actually finish stories only in graduate school. I have executive dysfunction related to autism, which is probably why. And at first, the stories I finished were very short. I had to work my way up!
F: I love that so many of your stories have ecological themes, what draws you to these themes?
BT: My parents are both agricultural engineers (they met at uni!), and my dad also worked as a botanist. So that’s probably part of it, though I have never particularly worked with plants.
I also have an interest in the environment, broadly construed - I have done research about the use of built environments. I think that both research and literature have this kind of strong focus on the individual and I’d like to counterbalance that a little bit. Nothing happens in isolation. Even how our cells grow depends on many environmental factors. As a disabled person, I see very acutely every day just how environments support, change and influence everyone.
But rereading what I just wrote, I also kind of feel that to talk about "the environment" is distancing in some ways, as something that is outside us, out there somewhere. I’d rather focus on specific systems… and because this is SFF, that means the systems can be fictional too. I am currently working on something related to a giant magical explosion and its aftereffects. I was a child during the Chernobyl explosion and I wrote about that before (some people still blame my autism on it! I don’t think that’s true...), but this is going to be a lot more speculative.
F: You’ve talked recently about how you use science frequently in your work. What scientific research are you excited about right now?
BT: I find research everywhere I look! We subscribe to cooking magazines, and I was very surprised to see quite detailed coverage of the future of food in Eating Well this month. One of the projects they highlighted was local, which I was very happy to see—the Land Institute is a nonprofit here in Kansas, focusing on developing perennial grains that don’t need to be reseeded every year.
I also read a lot of Hacker News, it is my go-to relaxation website (sometimes this backfires when I read about an exploit in something I use...). The comments are worth reading more often than not, and there’s a lot of recent science news in addition to the tech news. The politics can be more of a mixed bag, but overall the discussions are still often calmer than at general-purpose news websites.
I’m also following the progress on the construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; this seems less reported on in US media, but e.g., Index.hu in Hungarian has had a lot of detailed coverage. They just ran a photo special that is probably very enjoyable even if you don’t speak any Hungarian!
F: You do amazing work promoting works by margized authors so what works are you excited about right now? I’d especially like to hear about some older works that you think deserve more attention.
BT: Some classics:
I think that Nalo Hopkinson has been doing a lot of the things that are now heralded as very new, for decades, and yet she’s not as discussed as many other writers. I wrote about her collection Skin Folk and her novel Brown Girl in the Ring—she was the first author I featured twice in my QUILTBAG+ SFF Classics column.
Daniel Heath Justice is better known as an academic, but he wrote The Way of Thorn and Thunder, an Indigenous answer to Lord of the Rings, and a trilogy with one of the most epic finales I’ve ever read. He is also still writing fiction, he had a beautiful story in Love Beyond Body, Space and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology (edited by Hope Nicholson).
Some recent books:
From the border regions of SFF, Akwaeke Emezi’s autobiographic novel Freshwater is not speculative per se, but definitely has that kind of sensibility—and it tackles the topic of gender and non-Western spiritualities, which is incredibly important to me personally and I am so glad to see writers of many different traditions doing it too. This type of work makes me feel seen even when the specific details are very different from my own cultures.
A book that hid from many people: The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya and translated by Asa Yoneda is a short story collection with many SFnal themes, but it was promoted and marketed entirely as a literary book and I don’t think many people who read SFF know about it. It has couples who change into each other! And a lot of high weirdness.
And even newer, forthcoming work I’m looking forward to:
I just got an ARC of Kacen Callender’s adult debut Queen of the Conquered—I absolutely loved their middle grade book Hurricane Child, and I’m very much looking forward to reading this one as well. Thank you to Rivers Solomon who told me to go read Hurricane Child—and I’m also very eagerly awaiting The Deep, the upcoming novella from Rivers written to a theme by one of the best bands working with SFnal themes right now, clipping.
If I’m not mistaken, Infomocracy author Malka Older’s first collection ...And Other Disasters releases tomorrow! (By the time this interview is online, that will probably be a few days in the past.) I already had the opportunity to read it! I enjoyed it and I’m about to review it.
Finally, please allow me to squee that my Spouseperson R.B. Lemberg’s novella The Four Profound Weaves is coming next year, as a standalone book release. I was a first reader for it and I will cheerlead for it endlessly. Epic fantasy, hope in desperation, transness and everything. It is so good and soon you’ll get to read it too!!
forestofglory: I really enjoyed The Trans Space Octopus Congregation. It was fun revisiting some of my favorites of your stories, but there were also quite a few pieces that were new to me. What was it like putting the collection together?Bogi Takács: It really helped me to edit multiple anthologies before my own collection, because I had a chance to develop my procedures about assembling a table of contents. So it was fairly straightforward (queerforward?). I also asked my Spouseperson R.B. Lemberg for input, and did end up making a major change in story order based on their comments.
My usual procedures involve writing out the titles on pieces of scrap paper and rearranging them on the living room floor. I can save states by taking a photo with my phone.
F: I know you’ve been reading science fiction since childhood, but how did you get started writing SFF yourself?
BT: I wrote all sorts of random unfinished things as a child. I think the first somewhat SFnal one was a choose your adventure gamebook that was
Chip n’ Dale was one of the first Western cartoons I watched, as part of the children’s segment Sunday Disney Movie Afternoon that started airing on state television soon after the collapse of the Communist regime. Practically the entire child population of Hungary was glued to the Movie Afternoon on Sundays. Our generation is not called “Millennials” in Hungary as much as "the Ducktales generation", because Ducktales was responsible for one of our major shared historical memories: the Disney Movie Afternoon was interrupted during an episode of Ducktales with the announcement that PM József Antall had passed away. (As for why a gamebook: I was a huge Fighting Fantasy fan as a kid, and I still enjoy the format.)
I’m a second generation SFF fan, it is something I grew up with and really enjoyed from childhood. But for many years I thought I’d be part of SFF as an illustrator first and foremost: writing was something on the side, and I could never finish a story anyway. I could hardly even finish a poem. By contrast, I illustrated quite a few Hungarian science fiction stories as a high school student, and had my own exhibition at a con. Then I sadly developed severe tendonitis which only improved after I got my own laptop to take notes on, in my second year of undergrad - by which time I’d already had to make a decision not to apply to art school. I also had to massively scale down the amount of drawing I was doing. I do still make visual art on occasion, and even had some of it published, but I’m primarily known as a writer and editor these days.
I started to actually finish stories only in graduate school. I have executive dysfunction related to autism, which is probably why. And at first, the stories I finished were very short. I had to work my way up!
F: I love that so many of your stories have ecological themes, what draws you to these themes?
BT: My parents are both agricultural engineers (they met at uni!), and my dad also worked as a botanist. So that’s probably part of it, though I have never particularly worked with plants.
I also have an interest in the environment, broadly construed - I have done research about the use of built environments. I think that both research and literature have this kind of strong focus on the individual and I’d like to counterbalance that a little bit. Nothing happens in isolation. Even how our cells grow depends on many environmental factors. As a disabled person, I see very acutely every day just how environments support, change and influence everyone.
But rereading what I just wrote, I also kind of feel that to talk about "the environment" is distancing in some ways, as something that is outside us, out there somewhere. I’d rather focus on specific systems… and because this is SFF, that means the systems can be fictional too. I am currently working on something related to a giant magical explosion and its aftereffects. I was a child during the Chernobyl explosion and I wrote about that before (some people still blame my autism on it! I don’t think that’s true...), but this is going to be a lot more speculative.
F: You’ve talked recently about how you use science frequently in your work. What scientific research are you excited about right now?
BT: I find research everywhere I look! We subscribe to cooking magazines, and I was very surprised to see quite detailed coverage of the future of food in Eating Well this month. One of the projects they highlighted was local, which I was very happy to see—the Land Institute is a nonprofit here in Kansas, focusing on developing perennial grains that don’t need to be reseeded every year.
I also read a lot of Hacker News, it is my go-to relaxation website (sometimes this backfires when I read about an exploit in something I use...). The comments are worth reading more often than not, and there’s a lot of recent science news in addition to the tech news. The politics can be more of a mixed bag, but overall the discussions are still often calmer than at general-purpose news websites.
I’m also following the progress on the construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor; this seems less reported on in US media, but e.g., Index.hu in Hungarian has had a lot of detailed coverage. They just ran a photo special that is probably very enjoyable even if you don’t speak any Hungarian!
F: You do amazing work promoting works by margized authors so what works are you excited about right now? I’d especially like to hear about some older works that you think deserve more attention.
BT: Some classics:
I think that Nalo Hopkinson has been doing a lot of the things that are now heralded as very new, for decades, and yet she’s not as discussed as many other writers. I wrote about her collection Skin Folk and her novel Brown Girl in the Ring—she was the first author I featured twice in my QUILTBAG+ SFF Classics column.
Daniel Heath Justice is better known as an academic, but he wrote The Way of Thorn and Thunder, an Indigenous answer to Lord of the Rings, and a trilogy with one of the most epic finales I’ve ever read. He is also still writing fiction, he had a beautiful story in Love Beyond Body, Space and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology (edited by Hope Nicholson).
Some recent books:
From the border regions of SFF, Akwaeke Emezi’s autobiographic novel Freshwater is not speculative per se, but definitely has that kind of sensibility—and it tackles the topic of gender and non-Western spiritualities, which is incredibly important to me personally and I am so glad to see writers of many different traditions doing it too. This type of work makes me feel seen even when the specific details are very different from my own cultures.
A book that hid from many people: The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya and translated by Asa Yoneda is a short story collection with many SFnal themes, but it was promoted and marketed entirely as a literary book and I don’t think many people who read SFF know about it. It has couples who change into each other! And a lot of high weirdness.
And even newer, forthcoming work I’m looking forward to:
I just got an ARC of Kacen Callender’s adult debut Queen of the Conquered—I absolutely loved their middle grade book Hurricane Child, and I’m very much looking forward to reading this one as well. Thank you to Rivers Solomon who told me to go read Hurricane Child—and I’m also very eagerly awaiting The Deep, the upcoming novella from Rivers written to a theme by one of the best bands working with SFnal themes right now, clipping.
If I’m not mistaken, Infomocracy author Malka Older’s first collection ...And Other Disasters releases tomorrow! (By the time this interview is online, that will probably be a few days in the past.) I already had the opportunity to read it! I enjoyed it and I’m about to review it.
Finally, please allow me to squee that my Spouseperson R.B. Lemberg’s novella The Four Profound Weaves is coming next year, as a standalone book release. I was a first reader for it and I will cheerlead for it endlessly. Epic fantasy, hope in desperation, transness and everything. It is so good and soon you’ll get to read it too!!
★
