QSFer Bogi Takács has a new queer sci fi collection out: “The Trans Space Octopus Congregation.”
This new collection from the Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of Transcendent 2 2 offers plenty of thrills – and bonus tentacles – for readers of LGBTQ-focused speculative literature.
The stories range from magical space opera to cheerful body horror and historical fantasy, always with a sense of hope amid adversity. The mystical and magical merge with the scientific and technological: sacred texts gain new interpretations in the light of nuclear physics, and people save a forest with computer science. Cephalopods build alliances and research their past, Jewish shapeshifters speak to extraterrestrial planetminds, and Hungarian horse archers summon ancient terrors.
“Takács uses magic, technology, and the otherworldliness of space to explore the horrors of humans’ worst impulses…people and societies surviving at great cost to themselves in the face of war, apocalypse, and death.” – Publishers Weekly
Features:
- “This Shall Serve as a Demarcation”
- “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus”
- “A Superordinate Set of Principles”
- “Forestspirit, Forestspirit”
- “Given Sufficient Desperation”
- “Changing Body Templates”
- “For Your Optimal Hookboarding Experience”
- “Increasing Police Visibility”
- “Good People in a Small Space”
- “Recordings of a More Personal Nature”
- “This Secular Technology”
- “Three Partitions”
- “The Size of a Barleycorn, Encased in Lead”
- “Shovelware”
- “The Oracle of DARPA”
- “Toward the Luminous Towers”
- “Wind-Lashed Vehicles of Bone”
- “The Need for Overwhelming Sensation”
- “Spirit Forms of the Sea”
- “All Talk of Common Sense”
- “Standing on the Floodbanks”
Author Bio
Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (Spivak pronouns – e/em/eir/emself – or singular they). Bogi is married to R. Lemberg, and has a cheerful neuroatypical family which also includes my stepchild. E is autistic and physically disabled, but e can walk unassisted most of the time. E edits – and has won the Lambda Literary Award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction – and writes fiction and poetry.
This article was originally posted on Queer SF
