 and one neutrino will interact. When the neutrino goes through the column of water, it will encounter many electrons, and each time, there's a chance it will scatter. You need to sum the probabilities of all those encounters to find the total probability of scattering within the detector.

Yeah, that's what I thought, but I am confused about how to find the total probability.
An integral or what?

vela
Staff EmeritusBogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish agender intersex author, critic, and scholar. Bogi lives in Kansas with eir spouse RB Lemberg and their kid Mati. Bogi has won the Lambda and Hugo awards, and has been a finalist for other SFF awards, including the Hexa award for advocates of Hungarian SFF. Bogi has academic book chapters forthcoming about Hungarian SFF in Lingua Cosmica II and in an anthology on SF in translation edited by Ian Campbell. Bogi’s debut short story collection, The Trans Space Octopus Congregation, was published by Lethe.
Guest Editors Vera Benczik and Beata Gubacsi: You won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer category in 2020, and have been nominated several times. Your reviews, essays, and critical work are undoubtedly contributing to shaping the reception of the fantastic within and across borders. How do you see the development of Hungarian fantastic over the past ten years? What aspects do you consider the strengths of the fantastic in Hungarian literature and culture?
Bogi Takács: I’ve seen a lot of growth in Hungarian SFF in the past decade, across all aspects of community development. There are more publications, more conversations; speculative short stories are having a revival too… I think part of it is that social media has both allowed fans to organize better, and publishers to get the word out about their offerings—not just current and upcoming titles, but also opportunities like calls for submissions. SFF is also becoming more integrated into general discourse about literature.
I think SFF allows a unique way of commenting on, and engaging with, Hungarian culture. This was true before the fall of the Iron Curtain, when speculative works were less likely to be censored and/or banned due to the strong Communist Party connections of Péter Kuczka, chief editor of multiple SFF venues; and I think it remains true now, in other ways. The speculative readership in Hungary appreciates and rewards an engagement with current issues, and at the same time, there are probably different expectations placed upon SFF writers compared to non-genre writers; the entire structure of genre publishing is different from non-genre. I’m not saying one is better than the other, just pointing out that these aspects lead to varying outcomes.
Guest editors: How does the Hungarian fantastic incorporate and/or subvert the themes and tropes of Anglo-American fantastic tradition? How does uniquely Hungarian storytelling appear in the Hungarian fantastic, and how does the fantastic as a mode itself aid and amplify the Hungarian perspective? How does writing in both English and Hungarian and for different audiences affect your own writing and take on the fantastic?
Bogi Takács: I think Hungary is in a unique situation where Hungarian literature has both been affected by Euro-Western (more than Anglo-Western) traditions and Russian-Slavic ones, while being conducted in a language that is not Slavic or indeed Indo-European at all. So, there is this tension between being exposed to multiple different traditions and yet being in a somewhat insular position, having fewer opportunities to influence other literatures. Further, Hungarian has no mutual intelligibility with any other language, even with languages related to it. None of this is specific to SFF, but these aspects of Hungarian literature definitely affect SFF, too.
As for the second set of questions, I actually haven’t written any original speculative work in Hungarian for over a decade; I translated some of my English-language stories (one of them I also lightly revised), and Csilla Kleinheincz also translated one. I really enjoy her writing—I think her recently concluded fantasy trilogy Ólomerdő [Leaden Forest] was spectacular—and it’s been an honor to be translated by her. I also translated one of her stories from Hungarian to English this year, and it’s forthcoming in mermaids monthly edited by Julia Rios. Back to Hungarian: I wrote a non-speculative flash piece commissioned by a newspaper last year, but I wouldn’t say I write a lot in Hungarian these days. I do try to read widely both in Hungarian and in English.
I generally write for marginalized people even if audience specifics differ in each and every case. This means I also write for myself!
Guest Editors: In the field of Anglo-American SFF generic boundaries have become increasingly porous, and experimenting with different genre-bending practices has been encouraged and celebrated. How do you think fantastic genres appear in Hungarian fantastic literature and culture? How do you think this might affect your own writing?
Bogi Takács: I think this is also true of Hungarian SFF, and one trend that’s even more marked compared to Anglo SFF is the newfound popularity of weird fiction. There’s also been a similar tendency in Finnish SFF, and quite a few of those works are in fact available in Hungarian translation, but mostly published in non-SFF contexts; Hungarian and Finnish weird have developed in parallel and haven’t interacted all that much (yet?).
Cosmic horror is enjoying a newfound popularity in Hungary, intertwined with the new weird; as a reader I especially appreciate the work of Balázs Farkas and Attila Veres.
Guest editors: Anglo-American SFF has become the site and source of exploring the lived experiences of gender fluidity and neurodiversity—themes your own writing engages with sensitively and imaginatively. These conversations seem to have been lacking or entirely missing in the context of Hungarian SFF. How do you think different gendered and disabled identities appear in more recent Hungarian fantastic literature and culture, and how the fantastic can facilitate inclusive representation?
Just a few recent examples I enjoyed reading: Anita Moskát’s novel Irha és bőr [Hide and Skin] deals with intersex themes among others, a rarity even in English-language SFF, especially when it comes to thoughtful portrayals; Tamás Rojik’s ongoing YA postapocalyptic/climate fiction series Szárazság [Drought] has a protagonist with developmental language disorder, again a topic I haven’t seen all that much in English either. The long-running Csodaidők [Times of Wonder] far-future science fiction series by Etelka Görgey, writing as Raana Raas (with four volumes, and so far three volumes in a followup series Időcsodák, [Wonders of Time] has been the first time many Hungarian readers saw queer themes and heterosexist discrimination appear in fiction altogether, at least if the online reviews are any indication! This same series also deals with themes of physical and mental illness, especially as a consequence of military conflict, in depth. I’m just scraping the surface here and mentioning some of my favorites, but I could go on for a while.
This relative responsiveness doesn’t necessarily mean increased inclusion, both on the level of narratives and on the level of actual people; I’d discuss the two separately. It seems to me that people are often allowed and even expected to explore LGBTQIA+ topics as something of political interest, but queer writers are not necessarily welcome in the field.
I do need to note something else as well. I think that themes related to ethnic and/or racial minority groups are in fact much less common in current Hungarian SFF than either gender or disability themes; with the possible exception of migration. I often get the impression that majority, ethnic Hungarian authors deliberately avoid saying anything about these groups; this is not specific to SFF. Something that endlessly frustrates me is when a writer sets a work in inner-city Budapest, but there are somehow no Romani or Jewish characters. Autochthonous minority groups are especially avoided, doubly so if racialized; it is probably easier to come across American racialized characters in Hungarian narratives than Hungarian racialized characters. (While noting that racialized autochthonous minorities do not even tend to appear in a ‘safely foreign’ context in Hungarian stories. I’d also note here that the targets of racialization are sometimes different in Hungary than in Anglo-Western settings, though the mechanisms are remarkably similar.) I get an impression that authors often make these choices out of a desire to avoid causing offense locally, while still projecting some form of inclusion; but erasure is also a choice. These kinds of obvious lacunae also create an impression of an unspoken genocide—where did the people go in this and that particular fictional continuity? I’m going to be extremely blunt: these works always make me think, did my former neighborhood end up gentrifying in this setting, or were the people straight-up murdered; it clearly wouldn’t be the first time in living memory. These scars carry across generations, and SFF tends to shy away from tackling them. To be honest, English-language SFF does too; when I wrote a story in English about third-generation Jewish Holocaust survivors in Budapest, it was the hardest sale of my entire writing career.
The flipside of the coin of these themes that are relatively—though not entirely—absent from Hungarian SFF is that ethnic and/or racial minority authors are not exactly welcomed in Hungarian SFF either, though there are some (I mentioned Csilla Kleinheincz above