Tender, intricate, and alive with possibility, Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács is a luminous meditation on cognition, communication, and the radical multiplicities of being. Through shimmering, speculative worlds, Takács invites readers to imagine forms of connection that resist dominance, binary thinking, and easy legibility.

Across this collection, minds bloom differently: some communicate through emotional calibration, some through tendrils and cracked flowerpots, some through networks of consent and shared pain. Takács’s deep fascination with neurobiology and neurodivergence thrums underneath every story, refusing to flatten difference into deficit. In “Four Point Affective Calibration,” the assumption that the narrator’s desire to engage with aliens stems from autism is deftly interrogated—opening up questions about the presumptions embedded in so-called “universal” emotions.

Throughout, bodies and gender shift fluidly, refusing tidy classification. In "Folded Into Tendril And Leaf," survival and transformation are intimately entwined, as a once-transfigured student must rescue the very teacher who once made them a plant. The throughline of bodily autonomy, especially in the face of institutional abandonment or violence, pulses urgently. Even the smallest acts—growing roots into a cracked pot, offering blood to a housebeast—become acts of resistance and intimacy.

The titular novella is perhaps the collection’s most searing achievement: a story of obsession, power, and chosen suffering in the service of collective survival. Oyārun’s fixation on Aramin is uncomfortable, raw, and ultimately reshaped into something transformative—an act of yielding not to another’s will, but to communal need. In Takács’s deft hands, consent is not a formality but a living, breathing practice of freedom.

At every turn, Power to Yield and Other Stories reminds us that connection across difference is not simple, but it is sacred. This is eco-science fiction at its most tenderly defiant: a collection that cracks open the binaries of body and mind, self and other, and plants something gorgeously unruly in their place.

I finished these stories feeling a little stranger, a little softer, and a lot more hopeful. I cannot wait to read more from Takács.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of eco-speculative fiction, neurodivergent narratives, and expansive worldbuilding; readers drawn to the intersections of cognition, embodiment, and solidarity; admirers of Nnedi Okorafor or Becky Chambers.

🔑 Key Themes: Neurodiversity and Communication, Bodily Autonomy and Transformation, Power and Consent, Queer and Nonbinary Futures, Collective Survival.