Autistic Reader Interview: Bogi Takács
Everything Is True
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Bogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person and an immigrant to the US. E is a winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, the Hugo award for Best Fan Writer, and a finalist for other awards. Eir debut poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting and eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation were both released in 2019. You can find Bogi on various social media like Patreon, Goodreads, Instagram and Twitter as bogiperson, and on Mastodon as @bogiperson@wandering.shop.
Tell me a little bit about yourself. Is there anything you've written or made recently that you'd like other readers to know about? Other than what's in your bio, is there anything about your connection to autism, books, and reading that you'd like to share?
I write, review and edit speculative fiction and poetry; I love to talk about books. I’m autistic and also otherwise neurodivergent in multiple ways. I enjoy making lists of books, for example I have a database of all the intersex #ownvoices books (ever, in any language), a timeline of neopronouns in English-language fiction, and a lot more.
What are some of the characters in fiction that you find most relatable? Some autistic readers love autistic representation, and others prefer aliens, robots, or characters who they relate to in a subtler way; do you notice any patterns in the kinds of characters that resonate for you?
I actually like a combination of both, where there are both humans and aliens, humans and robots, etc. and they can all have different kinds of neurotypes. I don’t frequently find this in fiction, sadly! You are one of the few people who have this subtlety to their work, so maybe it is unsurprising that you are asking me a question about it. Recently I also really liked what Andi C. Buchanan did with neurodivergence, humans, and ghosts in Sanctuary. Akwaeke Emezi’s work also has this kind of approach, and they’ve talked about how their work has different ontological underpinnings compared to Western fiction, and how this affects their depictions of spiritual beings, that I personally found resonant.
In my own fiction I sometimes use the word “cognotype” because when it comes to extraterrestrials, robots etc., not everyone might have neurons; so “neurotype” would be less than ideal a term. But ostensibly all sentient beings have some form of cognition, and I’d imagine there can be unexpected similarities across species. Though now I wonder – is it possible to have sentience without cognition? (Please check back in in a few months for the story about this :D )
Are there any tropes you really, especially love?
Do these have to be autism-related, or... if these are my special interests, then are they autism-related by default? I don’t know if there are tropes directly related to autism that I especially love, but there are some which are indirectly related, if not to autism per se, then at least to neurodivergence.
I really love both the angry, out of control psychic kids/teens trope and its subversions. I say kids/teens, but the classic examples are “poltergeist girls” like Carrie, or women like Jean Grey, the Dark Phoenix; it’s highly gendered. (I am frustrated with many of these classic examples, but still read them because this is a special interest of mine.) I’ve actually gone back a bit and taken a look at where this trope comes from – and as best I could trace it, it seems to originate in early 20th century spiritualism and parapsychology. The original theorizing was specifically Freudian and tied uncontrolled psychic power to female puberty. Many of the early discussions actually centered on specific real-life people, like Eleonore Zugun, a girl from rural Romania. In parallel, skeptics made similar claims that girls were more prone to producing fraudulent phenomena, because they were more attention-seeking than boys. But there actually doesn’t seem to be such a strong gender imbalance in poltergeist cases both historically and in the present day; regardless of what we assume about their veracity. Interestingly, in fiction it’s also starting to balance out, and many traditions of non-Western SFF have often had less of this highly particular form of gender bias to begin with.
There’s always more room for angry nonbinary psychic teens though! I wish people wrote more stories about angry nonbinary psychic teens so that I could read them all. Or commissioned me to write them. Both options are great :) Or as a third possibility, maybe I should pitch this as an anthology, and then people would send me all those stories that I could read. (*Begins working feverously*)
Are there any tropes you really, especially hate?
I don’t necessarily hate it, but there is kind of an opposite-gender version of the angry psychic girl, and this is the masculine, often abusive and creepy, perfectly in control magical mentor figure. Svengali is probably the classic exemplar and trope namer; it’s interesting that he’s also an antisemitic caricature. (OK, I get to hate that.) These two tropes are often paired up, and the abusive magical dude tries to control the chaotic magical girl, with shades of Pygmalion. Then of course magic can be tied to neurodivergence as well, especially the out of control variant.
What is very frustrating for me is when this pairing appears without any deconstruction or subversion of it. I’ve had this issue with multiple books in the past few years; I don’t want this to turn into a name-and-shame, so I’m not going to name them. A book where I felt a similar setup was deconstructed was Vita Nostra by Marina and Serhiy Dyachenko; there the obviously abusive situation was portrayed as abusive, and not in a positive or romanticized fashion. Reading that book – in Hungarian translation by Györgyi Weisz – made me understand a lot explicitly that previously had been implicit in my mind.
On a further note – not as a trope I hate, but as something I liked in this book – Vita Nostra also discussed adverse neurological side effects of magic, especially of overdoing it. I also don’t see this much in fantasy fiction and I’d like to see it more often, with a neurodivergence-informed perspective. This also has a real-life parallel in conditions like qigong deviation or Kundalini syndrome; it’s probably known to every traditional culture and their forms of spirituality (certainly both of mine), though it doesn’t necessarily have a name to it. The DSM either files it under “Cultural concepts of distress” or under “Religious or spiritual problem” – which is probably problematic in itself, but this is a massive tangent to our topic at hand.
Have you ever had a special interest in a fiction series or genre of fiction? What makes a work of fiction special-interest-worthy for you - or do the interests seem to descend at random?
I usually develop special interests on specific topics, not necessarily series or genres – though one could consider these topics as extremely tiny subgenres. For example, I’m always here for magical spaceship pilots. Please add books about magical spaceship pilots to my Goodreads list! :)
I’m not sure how my interests are chosen by my brain, it’s not a very rational process and sometimes I end up with interests that aren’t very… helpful. In undergrad I went through a period of finding and reading every single memoir of Hungarian state security officers in the Rákosi and Kádár eras. Why did I do that? Who knows? Like why people are said to climb a mountain, “it was there”?
Maybe this example also shows that I can develop a special interest in reading things which aren’t positive, good, or enjoyable. I recently wrote an academic book chapter about how telepathy is portrayed with the vocabulary of sexual assault in Asimov’s Second Foundation, and how this aspect was removed in Hungarian translations of the novel. This had far-reaching consequences, because the book was just as influential in Hungarian as it was in English. I ended up reading several editions and translations of Second Foundation, which is a book I find frustrating to say the least! But this project was deeply interesting and meaningful to me.
I also wrote a novella where one of the themes is someone developing a special interest that is not very comfortable to have. While the actual interest is fictional, this is an experience I know! It’s something I’ve been thinking about both related to my reading and my writing.
Thank you for the highly thought-provoking questions, and the opportunity to answer them :)
This month at Everything Is True, we’re interviewing a wide variety of autistic readers with questions like these! You can find a schedule with the rest of the interviews here.