Bogi Takács's Blog

Hi everyone,

Sorry I’ve been away!

SFRA 2024 was a great conference and we had a wonderful time in Tartu and Tallinn – I’m really grateful for the invitation and everyone’s kindness.

Unfortunately we had a rather rough time traveling back – we got stranded in Dallas due to the weather. So it took me a while to recover and I’m still not back to my usual. Please be patient if you are waiting on a response from me!

I’m attaching the slides of my keynote for your enjoyment My talk was a...

(Crossposted from my Patreon)

I’m overjoyed to say that my new collection Power to Yield and Other Stories is now available from all major retailers!

It includes 10 stories + the title novella, with themes from turning into a water plant to being attacked by angry clothing. It’s released by Broken Eye Books, with wonderful cover art by World Fantasy Award winning artist Galen Dara!

This is what my publisher says about the book:

Power to Yield is a collection of speculative tales e...

My daily speculative story/poem recommendations that used to be on Twitter are now an email newsletter! You can find it on Buttondown. There is RSS, web archives, and it’s all very clean, tidy and text-oriented. I’m excited about it

At the moment it is pay what you want (including zero), but the longer recommendation for the weekend is on the paid tier only.

You get a recommendation and my usual explanation of why I recommend this particular piece

The first recommendation is going out...

This is my big birthday post! Also merry Christmas to those celebrating.

(In many timezones inc. in Hungary it’s already my birthday and people are beginning to congratulate me on Facebook, so I’m posting it now instead of tomorrow morning.)

I was really hoping that for my birthday there’d be a ceasefire in Gaza and exchange of hostages. This did not happen, so please keep advocating for it.

Here are some charities / NGOs I recommend for your donations:

* (Palestine) The Palestinian ...

I posted this piece of news on social media, but not here – I have honestly been too shaken by current events to post much (do please check out my personal recommendations of Palestinian books where I talk more about this).

I’m going to be one of the keynote speakers at the next yearly conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, this time themed after Transitions – held in Estonia at the University of Tartu. I’m going to be talking about finding hidden classics of queer and tr...

I have a new review in Reckoning, a magazine focusing on writing about environmental justice: I’m discussing B. Pladek’s debut novel DRY LAND.

This is a thinky, reflective novel, with plenty of interiority and an avoidance of common fantasy plot beats. You won’t necessarily know where the plot will go, and it’s not the “hero’s journey” omnipresent in present-day Anglo-American storytelling. For all his magic, Rand isn’t a hero and the plot isn’t an extended training montage. It is someth...

Happy Intersex Awareness Day!

I made this list originally on Twitter, but now I’m trying to move resources to here in light of recent changes. I had originally spent a long time looking for a list of books by Black intersex authors, and couldn’t find one, so I ended up making it myself.

I have read most of these books. (The original version said “all”, but I need to catch up on some of the more recent books.) I do not want to pick and choose, as a non-Black person, to tell you which ones a...

Book bloggers, reviewers, critics!

Who would like ebook reviewer copies of my new short story collection POWER TO YIELD AND OTHER STORIES; and/or the latest anthology I edited, ROSALIND’S SIBLINGS?

I made a request form! (Pls don’t self-reject from requesting, you don’t need to have a huge platform!)

Or if you’d rather buy them:

I’ll just put this awesome book cover here…

The situation in Palestine fills me with despair, but I’m trying to overcome that and act. A ceasefire needs to happen, and I’ve been advocating for that with the small tools at my disposal, both on social media and in person. I’ve talked a lot about how the Israeli government needs to stop attacking the Gaza strip – these actions cause massive indiscriminate harm to every single inhabitant of the Gaza strip and will not bring the people taken hostage back either. (Yes, I care about them. War cr...

With a whole bunch of new titles! Now we’re over 50 books total! Check it out.

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In other news, I think I’ve gotten through the most difficult parts of changing my job, thank G-d and I even have more reviews to post, but I’ve just been struggling with WordPress. In fact this is the second version of this blog post, as short as it is. I just feel like I’m bumping into endless bugs and odd behavior, maybe because my site has been around since forever and something went askew after so many u...