Bogi Takács – Grey Patterson

Bogi Takács

As with every anthology I read, my thoughts are a little mixed. Some of the stories I love, one or two I may hate, and everything in between. This one was net positive, I think. And, being by a single author instead of a mix, there’s more of a sense of ordering to the whole thing.

I absolutely loved Volatile Patterns. I’m always a fan of good worldbuilding, and this was a tour de force, a short story giving me so many fascinating glimpses into what feels like a very full world.

And here’s where the sequencing hits: part of what makes it a very full world is that it’s one entry in a larger collection about this shared world. So some of the details being hinted at are there to uncover, in other stories.

Power to Yield expands on that world. And while it left me some hope that, in the years after Power to Yield and before Volatile Patterns, the situation improved, it has a very… Omelas quality to it. That the utopian society I saw first was built upon something much darker.

Which is an effective arc, but I don’t think that I actually like it. There’s a pattern in our culture, thinking that for something to be “realistic” it has to be dark, grim, depressing. Treating those qualities as a necessary component of a story, rather than simply qualities that can be present or not, without that valence. A story can just be happy; fiction can give us utopian societies without necessitating that there be a twist, a darkness hidden beneath the candy-shell exterior. We can be hopeful. That’s allowed.

I did enjoy reading this collection, though, so I’ll have my usual Bookshop link here.¹

This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩

ed. A.C. Buchanan

Like I mentioned in my most recent read of an anthology, I’m used to them being centered around a specific theme. In this case, the theme is pretty easy to see, and also pretty vague, overall—I think the core concept was “at least one person in the story uses pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers.”

Which gave the authors a lot of room to play around, and it wound up being a really cool variety of stories! From distant-future sci-fi to swords and sorcery, there’s some interesting things that happened in here.

The one that stands out the most, that I feel I’m going to have to go back and reread once or twice more to really wrap my mind around it, is the story of someone moving to a new country and learning the new language. At first, the pronoun bit is easy to miss, until it becomes important to the story: their home country—and, more importantly, their native language—doesn’t have gender as a concept. The character mentions a total of 9 pronouns in their language, which I believe are I/me/mine, you/you(?)/yours, and they/them/theirs. Which is, itself, already an interesting concept, but to make it even more so, the new country they’ve come to has at least three genders, and a gendered language to boot, bringing them to a total of 45 pronouns. (I didn’t count all of them, but think of things like, several different versions of the second person!)

It’s a really effective story; none of the three genders aligns with the masculine/feminine that we’re used to, and so, as the reader, I wound up latching on to the protagonist’s genderless way of speaking, because it’s more familiar. And we get to be confused and frustrated with them, because what the hell are these three genders? Why are there so many pronouns? Why does this language gender the word “you,” for crying out loud, obviously the second-person pronoun refers to the person you are speaking to… and, hey, actually, now that we’re thinking about this… why do we apply gender to things it doesn’t need to be applied to? Why is it so important to us?

That’s what made that story, to me, the best out of the anthology. It gave me a new way to look at an issue that, frankly, I thought I already had a reasonable grasp on. There’s absolutely value to that.

And hey, there’s a bunch of other stories in there too! Some of them thought-provoking, some of them fun, some of them heartwarming; as I said, a very impressive variety. I heartily recommend it. Check it out.¹

This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩