In this episode of Strange Horizons @ 25, Kat Kourbeti sits down with SFF critic and writer Bogi Takács for an in-depth conversation about the role of criticism in the SFF space, plus an overall look at their varied career.

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Episode show notes:

• Follow Bogi on Bluesky, and visit their website, BogiReadsTheWorld.com
• Read Bogi's work in our archives, including their reviews, poems, and fiction.
• Buy Bogi's latest collection, Power To Yield and Other Stories
• Find more links to their work and everything else we talked about, as you read this episode's transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello, Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest is Bogi Takács, first published with Strange Horizons in 2012 with their poem, "Torah and Secular Learning", followed by various articles and reviews, more poetry, and has also since gone on to win the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer and the Lambda Award for Transgender Literature, among other nominations.

It's great to have you here, Bogi.

Bogi Takács: Thank you very much for having me, it's a pleasure.

Kat Kourbeti: When this episode goes live, which is next week at the time of recording, it will be our Criticism Special. So you're a very fitting guest, actually, as you're a prolific critic and reviewer with your website, Bogi Reads the World. You've also contributed to several roundtable conversations on criticism on Strange Horizons through the years.

And your voice is, I would argue, one of the most respected in the field. So it's an absolute pleasure to talk to you today about reviewing and criticism and thinking about SFF critically through all the different perspectives. And my first question is, how did you first get into reviewing SFF books?

Bogi Takács: That's a good question. It has been a really long while. I was reviewing first in Hungarian and then I switched to English, I think 2010, when Shweta Narayan organized an initiative to diversify SFF reviewing in English, where there was a group of people who would get people Hugo memberships and encourage them to review, also in the less reviewed categories, like short fiction, novelette, novella, which back then the novella category was, was very different and much smaller. So that was when I started reviewing in English, but I had been reviewing in Hungarian at that point for, I don't even know how long. I started in high school, I was writing reviews for an online magazine called Solaria, in Hungarian. So that was basically how I got started. And then after that, when I switched to English, I think that has been like, probably more known to the audience.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I'm also from a non anglophone country and it's a shame that like, you do limit your audience when you write in your first tongue. Like it just kind of is what it is. And so we're kind of, not forced, but kind of forced to write in our second language, to learn it best as we can, in both our cases to move countries elsewhere to where that's the primary thing and where the jobs are and stuff.

It's frustrating to see that, in Greece it's the same, where I'm from originally, where the audience is like, very, very tiny, so you kind of have to.

Bogi Takács: And also I feel like just writing in different languages just comes with different kinds of tensions. For a while, in Hungary, I also used to be a member of a group blog about video games. And one of the reasons we ended up stopping that is that people would just send us an incredible amount of anti Semitic and racist hate mail. This was before GamerGate in the US. I am sad to say that this type of thing is now also more common in like an anglophone context, but back then there was really a stark difference. So yeah, that's certainly one aspect of it.

But also, I started writing in English when I was still living in Hungary and started reviewing while I was still living in Hungary. I moved to the US I think about four years, five years after that. And since I live in Kansas, it's not like there's a con every day in the backyard. There's sometimes cons in Kansas City. But in Hungary, I used to live in Budapest, everything was close by. It was quite different in that sense. But I actually really like living in Kansas, so.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm glad to hear it. Moving has its challenges and, you know, it's neutral in a sense. There's good things and bad things about it. I've lived in London for 16 years now, which is almost half my life. So at this point, yeah, what is home? And I do enjoy living here. I also get very frustrated with it. So, ehhh, you know. The choices we make kind of shape the journey.

So to talk about your journey as a reviewer, since it's the first thing that you got into, what's your approach when it comes to reviewing? Do you have like a specific set of criteria that you always use when you're looking at a text? Do you let the work itself guide the review with what you notice?

Bogi Takács: I always just read through the whole thing for my first attempt and just note down my thoughts that I have. I often read on Shabbos when I don't use electricity. So I have this amazing thing called Book Darts that I can clip on the side of the page. So I use the Book Darts for Making sure that I'm not missing anything that I specifically want to mention. I always like, when I'm making my points, I always like to quote specifics from the text. Because I just feel like that just makes it more substantial. And more like, okay, I'm not totally off base here. Hopefully. Maybe I am. So that is how I get started.

I feel like I have a lot of criteria in my head, but they are there implicitly, I don't necessarily explicate them. I have been reviewing for a very long time. I have also been editing, especially short fiction and poetry, for a very long time. Of course, those are always in my head. And sometimes I read something that has already been published, it, it gets cross wired in my brain, and I go like, "Well, I would have done something else here, and I would have just gently told the author, and I would have seen what the author does then".

But of course, when something is published, that's not really a possibility. I have edited multiple reprint anthologies, where this was especially tricky, where I was like, "okay I am not going to ask for a rewrite because it has obviously been previously published". But sometimes with reprints, you make those compromises. Or you ask for really, really small line tweaks if you feel like that has to happen. But usually not.

So I have criteria, but I don't have a bullet point list or anything like that that I work through. It's not that structured at all.

Kat Kourbeti: That's very interesting. It's segueing into a future question I had about your editing. Of course, all of that will impact how you read a text because you have experience of like, here's how I would do it. Here's what I would like to see from it. So that's really fascinating.

Let's talk about the editing now and then we'll jump back into a couple of other questions about reviewing again. So with editing especially with the anthologies, how did you get into it? What was the impetus to get into editing in the first place? And was it an easy process for you?

Bogi Takács: Yeah I decided very shortly after starting to review in English that especially since I was reading a heap of short stories, I was like, I really want to do a Year's Best. I even did, I think in 2011, I put a thing like that on my website that I just called "Bogi's Virtual Anthology" because it didn't have a publisher. It just had links to the individual stories. And I was like, well, I put it together like an anthology that you can read, but it's really like, a blog post. And back then I had like no idea how to query publishers, how to do anything like that.

What happened with Transcendent is that the first volume was edited by Kellan Szpara. I sent a reprint, so I am in that book with a story, but then Kellan didn't necessarily want to do another.

I was really interested in doing another. I discussed it with Steve Berman, and that was how that got started. So I did three volumes of that. I am hopefully going to have something soon that I cannot announce yet, because I haven't signed the contract yet, with a different publisher. So I'm teasing a strange and mysterious thing that I cannot mention. So hopefully there's gonna be, not exactly the same thing, but something along these lines.

I actually, the first thing I edited, this is a bit funny, because that was in like sixth grade. We had to do an art project for art class in school. I decided to make a "science fiction magazine". And the way this worked was that I was already reading a lot of science fiction at that point, and I would just photocopy pages from magazines that I liked, especially flash stories, because they were kind of short. And then, I wouldn't say I typeset them, but like I glued them to these sheets of paper. I added little graphic elements that I made. I made a cover that I also drew myself, etc. It had something like three stories, so it wasn't very long. And I was really surprised, not just that my teacher liked it, but it ended up being displayed in like, the school corridor, and people would actually read the stories and come up to me and tell me "I read the stories in the corridor!" Okay, thank you for reading the stories in the corridor.

So I have always been interested in (editing), but for a very long time I had no idea how to even approach a publisher. I feel like I still struggle with that. I often don't know like, who has the resources, who has the willingness, how I find those people. So, here is the place of the advertisement, if anybody wants an anthology edited by me, reach out. I am trying to be more diligent about just talking to publishers.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I mean, the process can be convoluted. Publishing is not easy, but I'm very excited to hear about this mysterious teasing project, so we'll look forward to that when time comes. That's awesome. And it's super cute that at what, 12 years old, you were editing little anthologies. Yeah. Three stories, whatever. That counts, I think.

Bogi Takács: Yep. One of them was about cats.

Kat Kourbeti: Of course, you got to have a story about cats.

Bogi Takács: Yeah, exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, that's brilliant.

So thinking about the anthologies you've put together besides the year's best, especially the themed ones. What is your approach as an editor, when you're looking through the slush, when you're choosing stories to put in the anthologies, like what are you looking for?

And is there a streamlined process for you where you go, I want this, I want this. This ticks it, this doesn't.

Bogi Takács: Yes. So first of all I read everything myself. I don't have slush readers simply because I read really quite fast and I also make up my mind fast. So I think I can do that. This leads to just really high volume of submissions.

I haven't been open for anything recently but I'm a bit concerned, like, what's gonna happen with, especially if I'm editing something with originals, people will send these AI generated things. I already see some of that because I teach in college, and people send me their AI generated homework, and then I'm like, "Uh, you know that the sources you cite don't exist?" So, yes.

Then I feel like I want to have, not so much thematic diversity, but like emotional diversity. I don't want all the stories to be downers and I also don't want the reverse, but I think that's less frequent. I think people mostly write stories which are like downers or scary or evoke some kind of negative emotion, often really well. But stories which evoke positive emotions are harder to find, but I want to make sure that I have kind of a mix of that. I know that people say, "oh, if a story has something very specific, then usually editors don't buy anything else that's very specific in the same way". That has also annoyed me as a writer, but as an editor, I can do something about it.

So for the latest anthology that I edited, which was Rosalind's Siblings, that came out in late 2023, this was an anthology specifically focused on scientists of marginalized genders. So it had a bunch of fiction and poetry that was specifically about scientists. So that already kind of narrows it down.

But then I ended up in the slush having two awesome stories, which were both about trans astronauts exploring Venus. So that's really very specific. And I was like, these are both great. The conventional wisdom would be that I would reject one of them. I was like, "I don't care about the conventional wisdom. I'm going to buy both of these." And I bought both of them, and I put both of them in the anthology, and that just got so much positive feedback from readers. Like, I was surprised. People were like, "whoa, there were two stories on the same topic of trans astronauts exploring Venus, and yet they were both so different and so exciting, and I loved both of them, and I'm so glad that you had both of them." People would literally reach out to me to tell me about that.

So that made me feel a bit relieved that, okay, the conventional wisdom is there for a reason, but it's okay to push against that. It's okay to be more flexible. If there's literally two amazing stories on the same theme, then I don't think the world will be destroyed if I buy them both. That reassured me. It just made me happy in general, so that was cool.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Yeah, I definitely have heard stories from people who were like, "Oh, there was all of this stuff that was kind of very similar. And we had to, you know, we can't have too many of the same thing." I love hearing that. And yeah, of course they'd be different. It's that whole thing of like, the same idea cannot be executed in the same way by two people. Two different writers will come up with a very different story.

I'm glad you did that, and I'm glad that people responded well to it. Cause I think, rules can be bent, you know, and it's an unofficial rule anyway.

Bogi Takács: Yes, exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: But it's great to see a very specific, "Yeah, you know what? I really like those. I want to put both of those in. You know why? Because I'm the boss."

Bogi Takács: Exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: It's great!

So to jump back a little bit on like reviewing and how that intersects with Strange Horizons. So you have published a couple of review articles with us as well, a few years back. What was your experience pitching these to the reviews team?

Bogi Takács: I think it was a mix. Some of them I reached out that "I have this and this book, I think it would be cool to have a review about it". And sometimes there was a list of books that was being circulated, like, "who wants to review any of these?" So it was kind of a mix of both.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, and because they're both very interesting, and one of them was a self published book as well, which, as you note in your review, doesn't happen very often, reviews of self published books. But, it's really cool to kind of see that mix of approach. I think our reviews team is very varied with that. They've got their little circle of people, and they circulate things. So, yeah.

The articles that you've published with us that are not reviews are also very interesting because they're kind of analysis of various topics related to SFF publishing. In fact, I think the first thing I ever read from you was the Diversity in Editors piece, which is really cool and data driven. What prompted you to dive into that topic and how did you go about collecting all that information and analyzing it and kind of going into the details?

Bogi Takács: Basically I started doing it because people were just starting to discuss—I wouldn't say that, because this discussion has been around since forever—but it finally reached some kind of mainstream threshold where suddenly a lot of people were discussing diversity in SFF, but mostly related to fiction, and even in fiction I think mostly related to novels. And there was very little discussion of other aspects of publishing. And I decided that I would focus on editors. I thought that I would also focus on agents, but at that point there were very few agents who I could include. And I remember I messaged, some of them and they were like, oh, I quit agenting. And I was like, yeah, wow, that's really sad, but also I kind of understand, and I'm also seeing a pattern is that if I ask really just a couple of people and this was one of the predominant sentiments, then that really bothers me actually.

So I decided to narrow it down to specifically editors. And other people did other things later, like for example, specifically focusing on all aspects of publishing, especially in the kid lit space. There were various initiatives. Not just We Need Diverse Books, but for example, Lee and Low was also doing a survey. There were other kinds of surveys and so on.

But the way I started working on it was, I just thought about who are the people who come to mind. And I asked everybody if they wanted to be included. Like, I wouldn't want to include people against their will. And some people said no. Not very many, but, some people said no. Sometimes it was like a situation where they felt that they belong to the majority in their countries of origin or where they were living, but not in like the wider anglophone space. Which, because I focused on English I still reached out to them, but I was like, okay, I understand if you don't feel specifically marginalized. But there weren't very many people who opted out, just a couple.

Most people wanted to be included. Most people wanted to be included so much that this kind of caused problems. I started doing this on social media, and then I started sending out emails. And I was sending out like these dozens of emails, and I was trying to be very clear back on Twitter, I was saying like, "Oh yeah, if I haven't gotten to you yet, it's because I'm literally sending out these endless emails" and all of these are personalized emails. Since I know quite a few of these people, I wouldn't just send them a 'fill out the form' or anything like that. But I also did want them to answer a couple of questions. Like, I wanted them to self define because I didn't want to have to figure out how to categorize each person. I wanted them to go like, okay, this is how I identify, these are the terms that I prefer, et cetera. And some people got upset that I didn't get to them fast enough. So that was a bit stressful for me because I was really trying to do it as fast as I could. In retrospect, I wish that I would have done it differently in the sense that, first build up like a stack of emails and then send them out all at once, instead of just sending it out one at a time.

But I honestly didn't expect how much interest there was, and just how many people reached out, and I think that was awesome. So it was absolutely worth it, but there were times when I was a bit stressed about it. I feel like now there's many more like that, and databases and all sorts of information like that. Often much better made than this, which was basically like an HTML file. It wasn't like anything elaborate.

I have had databases that I made since then that were much more elaborate because now the technology is there. It's super easy to do like, an online spreadsheet or anything like that. But back then it wasn't so much a thing. I was really happy that I did it and I was really happy that Strange Horizons not just published it, but gave me specifically a place to reflect on the process and do a kind of like post mortem of, okay, this is what I did and this is what happened.

Kat Kourbeti: It was really interesting to me as a reader at the time, just seeing what the space looks like and, who is it that's looking at these stories and if I send something somewhere—me as a queer female immigrant, non Anglophone, whatever—how is that reflected in the space? And at the time, I mean, this was what, not 10 years ago, but almost, like 8 years ago. I wanna say 2017?

Bogi Takács: It was. Oh my God.

Kat Kourbeti: We can look this up.

Bogi Takács: It was a while ago. (laughs)

Kat Kourbeti: It was a while ago. And how do you feel about the space today? Would you say SFF publishing and especially in the short form and the semiprozines and other kind of spaces, has that diversity improved, do you think? You know, is there still work to be done?

Bogi Takács: Oh, there's always work to be done, but I think that it has vastly changed. But also the amount of stuff that is being published has also vastly changed. Like, when I started reviewing in English, Clarkesworld, for example, ran two stories per month, and now they run a lot more than two stories a month and I ended up subscribing to the print magazine, and it's like thick as a book, and it's very fun to read as a magazine issue, but it's also kind of like an anthology. I can see how Neil and his staff are trying to have a thematic through line in various issues.

But yeah, just to go back to author diversity, I think that has really improved. I see different trends in novels where both the barrier for entry is higher, but also I feel like thematic diversity is less encouraged than in the short form. In the short form, you can do really, really unusual and groundbreaking things. Or you can do things that are, for example, in your own culture, in your own traditions, are very, very normal and everyday, but very strange to a different audience. So, there's certainly room for that. And the same is true for poetry as well.

But when it comes to longer form, I think even authors who get published, especially with the big presses and who are marginalized in some way, there's this pressure to have the same kinds of storylines, the same kinds of emotional beats. The same act structure. And now I think there's more awareness of how people should have more room to write what they want, and not be forced into—I feel like the bottleneck is often not necessarily the novel editor, not necessarily the agent, but often it's the acquisitions board with big publishers.

I hear this on a regular basis from writers whose work I love, is that, "oh yes, my editor sent it to the Acquisitions Board and they threw it back". So that is absolutely a thing, and that I personally find frustrating. One thing that I have noticed, though, is that literary fiction publishers have become more open to publishing SFF. And a bunch of the SFF that I have been reading lately, especially translated SFF, often comes from non SFF publishers, period. Like I'm reading the latest César Aira right now, came out from New Directions.

(By the way, I was a bit frustrated because even though the translation is wonderful, they didn't put the translator's name on the cover, only on the back cover, and that is the thing that is always frustrating for me, put the translator on the front cover. If New Directions is listening, then yeah.)

So I think in the short fiction and poetry spaces, I see much more, not just inclusion of people as a headcount, but inclusion of people to say what they want to say, even if it doesn't fit like a template. In novels, I see in some cases even the reverse, where people are encouraged to make their work more formulaic because people want to have a certain good seller, but unfortunately, what becomes a good seller is in very huge measure due to the marketing budget, which is determined in advance.

I used to work for a while in book marketing for a Jewish publisher, so it wasn't directly connected to the SFF space, though they did have some SFF books. I got to see that very much upfront that simply how much visibility a book has and how many sales it has is very much related to just how much marketing resources there are for a book. And this is kind of what I as a reviewer want to counterbalance, and make sure that I read a bunch of small press books, that I read self published books. Because those books might not have people to champion them for money, so here I am, I'm gonna do it for free.

Kat Kourbeti: Disheartening to hear about all the hurdles that people have to jump through to get something published, especially in novels. Yeah, I think at every level, there's one more hoop to jump through and just hope for the best.

So in terms of your own writing, you know, you're a poet. You're a fiction writer. With Strange Horizons, you've published four poems, which is quite a lot. The first one in 2012, which was your first piece with us. I want to hear a little bit about your poems because they're all very different. Very unique. A couple of them are mind blowing, but let's start with the first one. So "Torah and Secular Learning". How did that come about for you, and the speculative elements and stuff? Tell us a little bit about it.

Bogi Takács: Yeah, yeah, so this is a Jewish themed poem, and I have quite a few Jewish themed poems. I feel like maybe even the very first poem I published was Jewish themed. But most of these have been published outside Jewish spaces, which is interesting. I mean, that might change but I have primarily sent them to speculative venues because they have SFF elements, everything from like angels to demons to things that go bump in the night, and all sorts of those aspects.

So I always based them on something specific that struck me. As of relatively recently, I have also been employed as an assistant teaching professor of Jewish studies, and also Slavic, German, and Eurasian studies, which is a mouthful, but it has been created from three departments that have merged, so I have the longest title ever. So now it's also part of my day job to read a bunch of Jewish things. Before that, I just did it because I wanted to.

So I always come across really interesting little tidbits that I feel like, "Oh, this sounds really speculative". I feel like there's even more of them than I can actually include, there's always these gems. I remember quite a while ago I was studying Talmud, and there was this passage about going past the Shabbat boundary that you're not supposed to cross on Shabbat, and can you do it if you fly under your own power? So that's essentially Superman. And I was like, I can't believe they sat there in the ancient era and were discussing Superman, just like that. So there's a lot of cool tidbits that I always want to write about, and of course there's like the biblically accurate angels and things like that.

Lately I have been working on a series that also has some poems that are specifically Jewish related, but some that are not super explicitly. I guess all of my poems are Jewish related because I write them. But this is a series that specifically focuses on, it's called 'Jobs For Magical People That Don't Involve The Military'. I specifically started working on this in relation to the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which I think is horrible. And I'm very glad that there's at least a temporary ceasefire now and of course, always hoping for not just a permanent ceasefire, but an end to occupation and things like that.

When the whole thing started going down, both with Hamas taking hostages and then the absolutely disproportionate response to that from the Israeli government, for a long while I was just so upset I couldn't even write about anything. But then I also thought about how, especially here in the US with the military industrial complex, they often find themselves inspired specifically by fantasy, like if we think about things like Palantir, or all of these various military and surveillance and all of these projects that are specifically suppressive in nature and are named after these fantasy things. And a lot of what happens with magic in fantasy is like that, like, "what do you use magic for? You shoot a fireball." So I wanted to just have a bunch of alternatives to shooting a fireball, even though shooting a fireball is pretty cool, and I'm sure it has peacetime uses. But that in itself is also something that can be explored.

So I have been writing a bunch of these, and now a bunch of these have already been published. Most recently, specifically in Strange Horizons, I think exactly a month ago.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. December of 2024. It's 'The Person Who Reminds The Other Person To Cast a Spell'.

Bogi Takács: Yes, exactly. I feel like that's a very essential job, by the way.

So there's a whole bunch of them and they're all different. Some of them have more Jewish elements, others have fewer. But always I'm trying to emphasize that this magic and sense of wonder and things like that, do not necessarily have to be associated with violently subjugating other people, which is bad. Even if this seems really naive or something, it's certainly one thing I can do.

And of course I'm doing various other things. One thing that I have been also focusing on as a reviewer is to not just read a lot of Palestinian books, but also tell people about them. Sonia Sulaiman has this wonderful reading list where she's trying to have a bibliography of all the Palestinian SFF published in English, and I really recommend that. And not just to read, but also to talk about, because that is how people experience things through word of mouth, even today on social media.

I think that is true of all the present marginalized peoples. Like when we think about also the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there also people wanted to read books. This has led to a very cool anthology, Embroidered Worlds, that is an anthology of Ukrainian SFF in English. I think it was also reviewed in Strange Horizons. I have two translations in it, which I was very happy about because they were specifically translations of Hungarian authors who are Ukrainian, like ethnic minority Hungarians who are Ukrainian also. I was just very happy that when the anthology was put together, they thought about that and they reached out to me to ask if I know any authors, and I found two authors and translated work from them from Hungarian.

Because I often feel like when something has a focus on one marginalization, then if there's any additional ones on top, then that just has an even huger barrier. Like, one of my examples that I still keep on reusing is that trans authors in translation are really hard to find. Simply because what gets translated is often very much like the hegemonic, mainstream bestseller type of literature, because translation is already a risk. People don't want to take on another risk. So I like doing that and I like seeking out books like that both to read and to review.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I mean, we at Strange Horizons, you know, we did the Palestinian special a few years back. This was even before, you know, the last couple of years. And Sonia in particular, she also worked on editing that with us, and it's tremendous work, and I really admire and value the people who do that kind of work, where it's like, "let me highlight what's out there," because, like you say, it's hard to find. For the mainstream to seek those things out. So voices like yourself or like Sonia and others who gather all the things together and they're like, "here you go. Here's a list of all the things." It's tremendously valuable, both for diversifying your reading, but just also for archiving, to just have a record of all of these things.

Cause gosh, I mean, especially in the last little bit, with the internet imploding, it's been just really on my mind. Like, how do we keep records of all of these things, especially things that were online, perhaps in defunct spaces now, communities that used to gather someplace that now are no longer there and have to put all their work somewhere else. It's all really fascinating, and sad at the same time. Just how much we're losing with all of this AI stuff, the dead internet thing where it's all just robots talking to each other. And meanwhile, us humans are like, hello.

Bogi Takács: Exactly. I see that very acutely. I really appreciated recently the work that Bethany of Transfeminine Review has been doing. She doesn't necessarily focus specifically on SFF, but she does mention SFF as well. And she has these great, not just lists, but also like articles about preservation and things like that. And this is also one of the motivations when I started making a list of intersex books by intersex people a few years back, because I just felt that for me as an intersex person, it has been just prohibitively difficult to find those books. Especially when I started out. Now people know that they need to tell me because I have a list, and I'm maintaining the list.

Even still, I constantly find books that came out like a year ago, two years ago, and nobody told me about it. I couldn't find out about it, didn't hear about it. And now, if you look on like Amazon in new releases, it's completely flooded with like, AI sticker books and things like that, that nobody buys, nobody reads, but if you look at the recent releases, that's what comes up.

So it's just another barrier of discoverability. Even though I personally think that computers can be great for discoverability, like similarity algorithms that find you something that might be similar to the things you like, but more obscure. This could absolutely be leveraged in a cool way, but that's unfortunately not what's happening. So yeah, one of the reasons why I make lists, I feel like some of the reasons are just completely egocentric. I like making lists. So then I just make them. I would make them even if it didn't have any further motive, but I like making lists and trying to find books that are hard to find, so that other people have some success in trying to find them.

There's so many gaps. I remember maybe three, four years ago, I was trying to find specifically SFF by authors from Afghanistan. I found three books, and I posted about these three books. And also there's just entire regions I feel like are still missing from the discourse. Central Asia, good chunks of Oceania. There's just a lot of stuff that's like still not discussed. So, I am like, trying my hardest, but also I'm one person and I have my own biases and my own desires of what I want to read. For example, I read a lot of poetry and then sometimes people go like, why are you always recommending poetry?

And I'm like, I like poetry. Yeah, not everybody likes poetry, apparently.

Kat Kourbeti: Go figure on that.

Bogi Takács: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Over here at Strange Horizons, we love poetry, and as is evident we keep publishing both you and just a variety of like really cool people.

I want to ask about a particular poem we published of yours that I was looking at again today and I was like, this is so cool.

So it's called You Are Here.

I guess I'm going to spoil it a little bit, you know, for the listeners who haven't seen it, but you read half of it and then there's a link that says "proceed", and then you click that and something magical happens, that I was delighted by. How did that happen?

Did you have that specific idea? And how did you get that to work? Who did the programming for the really special thing that happens?

Bogi Takács: Oh my god, I did the programming. It was bad. So, yeah, I had the idea first. Then I was like, okay, sure, I can program this. That didn't go as planned. First of all, it was super difficult to make the function words all match up. I didn't want any words leftover or left hanging. Then I had this huge issue with the syntax where it just didn't want to do a for loop no matter what I did. That's such a basic thing. So, I ended up literally doing the loop in a different programming language and I generated the code for that. And then just, the original code was a mess. I think after it was accepted in Strange Horizons, they recoded some of it, because it was just ugly.

I think I put as a Patreon bonus the original source code a while back, so it's somewhere on my Patreon. It was very difficult both just to make the words count, like fit in both halves, and then to actually make it display the way I wanted. At one point I was just like crying at my desk. I was like, Oh my God, I really want to make this work. It's like almost working, but it's not.

Kat Kourbeti: That blows my mind even more, cause I know very little code, and so this is witchcraft to me. So well done.

How did you submit this? How does that work in terms of like, "hey guys, I have this poem and it's really weird. And it requires some special coding stuff." Yeah. How'd you do that?

Bogi Takács: I made just a zip file. It had in it the actual code. I made a little frame for it just so that, this is how it would look like in a website. I had some instructions where I also explained why some of the code is so messy. And I also had an accessible version where it was just like a description of what it does if you can't physically see the visual aspect of it. And I don't think that that ran with it. I'm not sure, but I did put it on my website, and it was also published in my first poetry collection, that was Algorithmic Shapeshifting, that came out from Aqueduct. So that version has also been published, and it does exist.

Kat Kourbeti: Fascinating. I'm always fascinated with strange formatting, and what we can do online versus print. So out of interest, how does that poem translate to a print version? How did you make that display in a way that perhaps evokes a similar feeling?

Bogi Takács: Yeah, it's kind of just like a verbal explanation of what happens, because obviously you can't animate it on the page. I mean, you could have like a flip book. I never tried that. I could do it like a one off, like a little limited edition thing. That's a fun idea, now I'm like thinking.

I like doing strange things with computers and sometimes it translates to print, sometimes it doesn't. Also, I am really frustrated with large language models for multiple reasons. Okay, you trained it on other people's work that they didn't give permission, and you didn't pay attention to resource use and things like that, etc., etc. So I have many issues with large language models. But I actually did something like that, so to say, on the kitchen table where I took my own manuscripts and also some of my unpublished stuff, and I ran an algorithm on it that was a purely like stochastic process. Like it didn't learn anything. It just like, tried to find regularities in my own work, and it created an output which was a humongous mess, and then I handpicked the best lines from that, and I put that together and wrote a little foreword for it that this was like a collaboration between me and statistics. And I thought that was really fun, but now I think everybody would assume that I did it with an LLM, which is extremely not what I did.

This is also frustrating for me because I like generative art where you do something with a computer, but this has been completely impossible to find because if you search for generative art, of course what comes up is this AI art, which is really awful. And I finally found a subreddit called Generative, where people post actual generative art that you program yourself, and it can take many different forms. And they ban AI art, which is really funny, but that makes perfect sense to me.

Kat Kourbeti: No, for sure. In the same way that machine learning and stuff, before this boom, this—what I consider a bubble personally—like, I really think that we're hopefully close to it bursting, because it's not working.

Bogi Takács: Exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: It's not doing what they're promising. It's not doing what we want, and it's taking away from what I think has been really interesting machine learning research that was happening before all of these models started becoming popular, and taking away resources and brainpower from areas where algorithmic power would be helpful. It's like there's places and spaces where there is use for these tools, and instead of using it for that, we're using it to, like, write emails, or make it tell us a birth chart, or, you know, in the case of your students, write crappy homework.

Bogi Takács: Yeah, exactly, like, I will make you redo it. It's not gonna help.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's so frustrating, especially with how it's been affecting our industry. Writing, art, everything that's SFF, there's all of this malicious flooding of submissions of bad stuff that's, first of all, not art. So, I don't know what you're hoping to do.

Bogi Takács: Get the money for the acceptance. That's what they are aiming to do.

Kat Kourbeti: But the thing is, they're not even aware how difficult it is to get accepted, and what it takes to write a good story. It's not just like, "oh, hey, give me, I don't know, 500 words of whatever". Speak to your soul and see what comes out, which especially is what we do at Strange Horizons. We want things to resonate emotionally. What do you think is going to happen if you ask one of these things to do that for you? It's not going to do what you think.

So when it comes to your own writing now, the fiction side, right? We've talked a little bit about poetry, about your reviews, about your editing. You are also a prolific short fiction author. I'm sure that by now you have your own robust methods of sitting down to write a new story. I want to pick your brains. I want to find out how it all works for Bogi.

How do you tackle a new short story idea and get it through to the finish line? What's your method, if you have one?

Bogi Takács: I am very much an ideas based writer. If I don't have an idea that I feel is unique enough, then I'm not gonna write. I know many wonderful, awesome writers who are like, "okay, let's focus on these characters and their interactions". I always feel like when I myself do that, it doesn't necessarily work out the way I want it, unless I also have separately an idea that drives the story. This is also why I go through periods of not writing much poetry, because with poetry I feel this especially acutely, that I want to have a specific idea for a poem and if I don't have that, then I will just not.

Kat Kourbeti: When you say an idea, does that mean a concept? A world? What's the level that's acceptable to you?

Bogi Takács: In other people's writing, everything is acceptable to me, but with my own writing I want some kind of conceptual uniqueness. I also like to have, especially in poetry, some kind of structural uniqueness, or if I don't have a huge amount of structural uniqueness, then the concept. For example, when I came up on this idea of, "I'm going to examine different potential jobs that use magic, but don't involve the military", then that was an idea that's not structural but it can be combined with further structural ideas. This kind of became a mess because some of the structural ideas went so far away from poetry that now I'm shopping them around as flash fiction, so that also happens. Sometimes have these pieces where they are impossible to tell if it's fiction or poetry.

Along this military line, I had flash story a while back that was called the Oracle of Darpa, which is funny because it was reprinted both as fiction and as poetry. I just decided to send it to every call that seemed vaguely similar and took reprints. So obviously for some people it's fiction, for others it's poetry.

So I like to have that structural uniqueness. Sometimes I have an idea and then it goes for over a decade without it being written. For example, I had like a D&D idea that was my pet peeve about D&D. Generally people don't want to publish D&D stories unless it's very specifically a D&D venue, and I had no in to that type of thing. And then I was approached by a publisher creating specifically a D&D themed anthology. And then I was like, yes, I have this idea, I've had it for a decade. Now I can do it.

Sometimes I have an idea and I spend many years just trying to write it and failing, and having ten versions of that was bad. And then maybe the eleventh, I'm like, okay, I'm comfortable sending this out. I'm not a super prolific writer on the writing, I think I just have a reasonably good success at placing what I write. So I don't have a huge backlog, which is sometimes a problem because people reach out and go, like, "Oh, do you have something for this, in the following week?" And I'm, like, well, if it's in the following two weeks, then I can write it from scratch, but I don't have anything that I can take off the shelf and go like, "okay, I have this that might be a fit". In fact, I'm trying to figure out how to counteract this, because sometimes people really want something right away, and I don't always have something right away.

Kat Kourbeti: That's really interesting. I saw in another interview, you mentioned that you were drawn to writing longer and longer pieces. So is that still the case? And are you maybe thinking of a novel? Are you working on something long like that?

Bogi Takács: Yeah, I have two novel manuscripts that I have like 25k of each. So I need to actually finish them and decide which one to finish first. They're very, very, very different. One is a space opera political intrigue type of stuff, and the other is an urban fantasy subversion type of thing. So they are really, really very different.

I also wrote a YA science fiction novel that I haven't found a publisher for. Everybody was like, we don't do YA science fiction anymore. And this is true. Like, Alex Brown made like a database. And there's just incredibly few titles. Everything is fantasy in the YA space right now. Or horror. But this was a straight up space opera type of thing, so that wouldn't have worked.

I actually had the publisher tell me to revise it as adult and just send it to them. But I haven't had a chance to actually revise it as adult. It has quite an amount of political intrigue, so it could, in principle, work as an adult book. But teenage self discovery was an important aspect, and I wouldn't want to lose that. So I'm actually not sure what to do with this manuscript. I will figure it out. It's not very long, and I feel like it probably needs more length also.

Because my problem is always that I under explain things, so that is part of my process. After I have written the story, I show it to either my spouse, RB, who has also been published copiously in Strange Horizons, or my friends, and then they tell me, "okay, that's super underexplained, Bogi", or "Bogi, I have no idea what's happening there". Then I explain that and hope for that.

I also have two novellas that I'm currently shopping around. These are also very different. They're both at various publishers right now. One is like a post apocalyptic Hungary that's inspired by things like the Talmud, and other things that have nothing to do with post apocalyptic Hungary.

Kat Kourbeti: Sounds amazing, and I want to read it right now. I was raised Christian Orthodox, and so a lot of that imagery is really baked into my cultural experience, and so anything that's zingy, that's taking that but doing something interesting with it, I'm so sold. I'm so here for it. So, yes please. One reader right here.

Bogi Takács: Yes, that's great, thank you so much. The other one I have that is also quite different, that is about first contact with aliens, secondary world, and also shows a situation where somebody doesn't want to go into the military and goes through various things. A diasporic story very much, where the person is in diaspora and is given an opportunity to go to like the source land, and then serve in the military and fight people. And she doesn't want to do that. Which is similar to, I think, many people's diasporic Jewish experience, where you don't necessarily want to go to Israel and fight in the military, and then fight against Palestinians. Just this whole situation is awful. So I wanted to write something about that.

Also having like that bit of distance from it to put it in a secondary world setting, where I can examine various different aspects of it that I can adjust in the way I want. And I'm not bound to, "okay, here's this inspired by culture A, culture B, and culture C". But rather, this is what was the original inspiration, but I can put my own spin on it and examine different aspects of it. And also aliens, because I like aliens.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I'm always fascinated with what SFF immigrant and diaspora authors do with regards to examining that experience culturally, both of the process of leaving, but also the mutated relationship that they have with home, which is something that I really enjoy whenever I read anything in khoreo, for example, who make that their mission. But then also things in Strange Horizons and elsewhere, where that's highlighted. I love that the genre can give us that freedom—

Bogi Takács: Yes.

Kat Kourbeti: —to have that room to play around with those concepts and not have to make them literal or grounded. You know, as I always say, SFF is always about something else. It's not about space. It's not about aliens. It's about X, Y, and Z, but the packaging is fun. It's fun. We like to have fun here.

Bogi Takács: Yep.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I'm very excited to hear about all those ideas. I do hope that you can place them because I want to read them.

Bogi Takács: Yep. But for like really shorter work, I'm always trying to put the latest things out there. Sometimes I really don't have time for it. I feel like now it's a bit different, because previously I used to have like three different part time jobs, and now I have one, so that's a bit easier when it comes to scheduling, but it's a busy, busy full time job so, um...

Kat Kourbeti: Academia's not easy.

Bogi Takács: Yeah, I am having these spreadsheets and things where I'm trying to manage my time and then trying to make sure that, I sent this out, I finished this. I literally just missed this deadline I wanted to do, so I'm maybe not the best person to talk about spreadsheets, because I literally just missed something I really wanted to do, so.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh no!

Bogi Takács: I will probably still write the story, it will just be for something else.

Kat Kourbeti: Is there anything that is recent or that's coming out soon that you want to plug or promote?

Bogi Takács: Yeah. I have more poems coming out in this series. One that I just placed is coming from Utopia SF, who is going to have a xenolinguistic special issue. And I didn't actually write this for the xenolinguistic special issue, but I'm a linguist, so it probably shows. And then they had this call. I was like, yes, yes, let's do this.

And I just had a short story collection that was called Power to Yield And Other Stories that came out in 2024, with a cover art that I love by Galen Dara. I actually don't have a copy here. I didn't prepare for the physical aspect of holding up the book. But please, everyone, search for this book because it has a very cool cover that I did not make and I have nothing to do with.

Kat Kourbeti: No art in the corridors this time.

Bogi Takács: Yeah, so the cover is amazing and I'm really grateful to my publisher Broken Eye, for asking Galen Dara to do it. It has a novella that originally appeared in Clarkesworld, and a bunch of other stories. Interestingly, a bunch of them have to do with plants. I am not sure how that exactly came to be. I mean, I like plants, but I'm not an expert on plants or anything. But I seem to have a bunch of ideas about plants. And that went into the story.

It also has a bunch of intersex stories, because I started doing when people reach out that they want a story, then I'm like, okay, now I will do an intersex story because they're harder to place otherwise. But if somebody already wants something from me, then I'm going like, 'okay, I hope that you are prepared for this'. Though I just placed an intersex story, I don't know if I can say because I haven't gotten the contract yet, but completely from slush for an anthology where I don't even know the editor. So there is hope for placing intersex stories, even if people don't ask for them.

So I'm very happy about that.

Kat Kourbeti: That's great. Yeah, just write what you know, and what you want. And it's on the editors and the readers to open up their scope and kind of widen that. So that's so cool. I'm looking forward to reading that.

And thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you.

Bogi Takács: Thank you. It has been a delight and also it's just really cool to talk to another diasporic person who understands those specific aspects and, and also asks about them. So thank you very much for having me.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, my pleasure.

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