This is an exciting, smart and overwhelmingly creative collection of speculative fiction stories! I loved reading this book, and was swept away time and again by Takács’ thoughtful and exhilarating writing. Eir stories have such range I’m struggling to integrate it all in a sentence - science fiction, powerful but difficult to control magic, Jewish faith, Hungarian culture, humans both now and in the far flung future, the octopi suggested by the title, magic meets BDSM, warfare and the psychological results of being used as a weapon, the uncomprehending gaze of outsiders on queer relationships, love and devotion. Occasionally the stories were a little underspecified, and I struggled to fully grasp the worldbuilding and follow the plot, but the ideas were exciting nonetheless, and I greatly look forward to reading more of eir work in the future!
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Some of my favorite stories were ‘Given Sufficient Desperation’, which builds on the idea of human-aided computing in image recognition and tells a story of a person held captive to identify items after an alien invasion; ‘Recordings of a More Personal Nature’, which grapples with the aftermath of the Archive used to maintain knowledge becoming difficult to reach; and ‘This Secular Technology’ and ‘Three Partitions,’ which both imagine Jewish people in new parts of the cosmos. ⁣
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Would recommend this one, especially to fans of any flavor of SFF, or if anyone looking for something pretty different from the usual.