Author offers hope in ‘mushroomy’ sci-fi novel ‘Song of Spores’
LAWRENCE — The novel “Song of Spores” (Broken Eye Books) by Bogi Takács Perelmutter starts off as an interstellar, intersex detective procedural involving shape-shifting characters on the hunt for one another. And then it gets weird.
Sure, it’s leavened with the sly Jewish humor (there are Chasidim on Mars!) that marks previous works by the University of Kansas assistant teaching professor of Jewish studies and of Slavic, German & Eurasian Studies, who is a Hungarian-U.S. dual citizen.
But it also addresses questions like the persistence of prejudice, the possibilities of international cooperation and what happens when reality doesn’t match the high-minded slogans you’ve been taught to uphold.
Moreover, Takács said, it taps into a growing literary realm of “mushroomy stuff” that seems to resonate in a post-pandemic world, even if they began writing it (and Broken Eye began publishing it in serialized form) before the COVID-19 lockdown.
“I wanted to write something that is kind of a mushroom — that has a fungal quality of spreading — and also being kind of alien, like neither a plant nor an animal,” Takács said. “But also, here, they're obviously sentient. So the characters have to figure out how to communicate. And it's really hard going. Like, you can't just talk to an exploding space mushroom.”
It’s no spoiler for Takács to say they wanted the characters, who are not actually detectives but counterintelligence officers, “to go through some rough things. I also wanted to subvert the framing of a procedural so they start investigating something, and they rapidly start to question whether this is even the right thing to do and where to go from there. I also have a kind of upbeat ending while acknowledging that so many difficulties still exist.
“I'm actually happy I did that. Because, with the cycles of time, we are kind of in a similar moment as we were when I was finishing it in late 2020 into 2021. Back then, people ... really wanted hope.”
Takács said the book has been edited from the web-based, original version. But it maintains the original conceit in that the protagonist — and thus the narrator’s viewpoint — changes from chapter to chapter, following each team member in turn.
The characters in “Song of Spores” overlap with peoples and events portrayed in other things Takács has written, such as their last short-story collection, “The Power to Yield, and Other Stories” (Broken Eye Books, 2024).
With Takács’s vivid writing about insectoid detectives and sentient spaceships, it’s easy to imagine “Song of Spores” as the basis for a film.
“I kind of finished it in a way that ... it's possible to continue it further,” the author said. “So who knows? There might be more down the line.”
The novel is currently on the Locus Recommended list for science fiction novels, and it has also been included in the top 10 fiction books of Scientific American for 2025.