Wizards Vs. Lesbians

Lee joins us to discuss the latest Raadchaii book. (Our policy remains: if there are Raadchaii, there are lesbians.) This is a hearty meal (ironically) if you're interested in religion, colonialism and/or political power - and, of course, there's cannibalism.

We were promised Moby Dick in space with lesbians, and that's what we got. It's kind of a thankless task, being Moby DIck in space with lesbians - particularly if you're not playing it for laughs, which this book isn't - because the best you're ever going to do is "better than expected." On the plus side, this one is better than expected.   HELL'S HEART - ALEXIS HALL

This book is about struggling with your terrible family while eating lots of lovingly-described food, which means it's the kind of thing we're supposed to like. This episode is mostly dedicated to figuring out why we don't.     The Subtle Art of Folding Space - John Chu

Lee joins us to talk about a book which is difficult to boil down to a paragraph - it's about power, and the means by which power is acquired and lost, and it examines this on a multitude of scales, from the granular to the metaphysical.  Also it's set in a world where every inch of available territory is covered by a city which generates its own geomantic power and humans (and mutants) are barred from space travel by a giant atmospheric shield. Fundamentally, though, it asks the question: what if there was a hot guy who sucked?   City On Fire - Walter Jon Williams

A cyberpunk colonial parable from one of our favorite authors - or, at least, the author of one of our favorite books. This one is not quite Divine Endurance, but it's certainly something. It's not a pleasant read but it sure is full of historical interest.   ESCAPE PLANS - GWYNETH JONES

A book about drugs that make you see god. It's day-after-tomorrow SF from the day before yesterday, and it gets all of its predictions so catastrophically wrong that its primary use case is as a time capsule from the war on terror. Also preserved: jokes we thought were funny ten years ago.   Afterparty - Daryl Gregory

It's Little Shop of Horrors but with lesbian Irish millennials! That's the whole pitch.  It fulfills the brief, and arguably overdelivers.   Eat The Ones You Love - Sarah Maria Griffin    

It's gay, it's magic, it's a literary classic. Featuring our old books correspondent Kat Weaver!   Orlando - Virginia Woolf

A charming little novel from 1926. We're normally pretty relaxed when it comes to spoilers, particularly for a book that's a century old, but we think the less you know about this one going in the better.   Lolly Willowes; or The Loving Huntsman - Sylvia Townsend Warner

A familiar setup - a misogynist demon who possesses girls and infects them with its predatory desires - executed in a way which is, yes, bad, admittedly very bad, but also very funny.   Sawkill Girls (2018) - Claire Legrand    

A debilitating novel - simultaneously enormous and petty, tragic and hilarious, insightful and insular. It wrecked us down the stretch but left us unmoved at the end. We think it's great but we're not sure if you should read it.

We return to Nghi Vo's Singing Hills series and discuss the three next most wizlez-adjacent books in it (to date.) Covered in this episode: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, The Brides of High Hill, and A Mouthful of Dust.

This week we're talking about a classic webcomic in both senses of the word, as it feels like it comes from a departed era of the internet despite being barely a decade old.  Part of that vibe stems from the fact that you can still read it, in its entirety and ad-free, on its own dedicated website - an unimaginable luxury these days. Check it out (it's a classic for a reason) and then join us for a discussion of what's aged well and what hasn't. 

It's a Cinderella retelling! But it's Freya Marsk, so it's better than it needs to be, and stranger.

Anthropological SF in the mold of Cherryh or Le Guin, updated for our era and its preoccupations - funny, surprising, and smart.  We have a lot of fun discussing the return of Cameron Reed. Our guest Louis Evans has a new story out! Find it here.

This is that good, chunky, deeply strange fairy tale stuff. You don't have to settle for Gaiman - you never did, honestly. Plus it's Italian and there are cats.

A particularly silly one.

This is what we've come to call an Area Studies Fantasy, except the area in this case is suburban Atlanta. (You could say it's science fiction because it's meant to be set in the future, but in my book a post-apocalypse that sets everything back to 19th century technology and conveniently erases all world religions is a fantasy.) It's possible that familiarity breeds contempt, and we're more likely to object to the moral underpinnings of a book based on the mores of southern Protestants than we are on Buddhists or what have you, but even given that the execution here is a little shaky.    

I just think silly podcast award shows are neat.

As we embark on Year 5 of Wizards vs Lesbians we are relaxing our entry requirements even further - we're covering this classic little novel about grief and cooking because we wanted to, and that's about it. No wizards to be seen, but there is at least one queer woman involved.

As we enter our fifth year we are giving ourselves permission to get a little weird with our selections. This isn't SF, but it is full of metatextual trickery, so we say close enough; and there are lesbians. A historical novel masquerading as a contemporary travelogue, translated fictionally from Japanese to Mandarin and then genuinely from Mandarin to English.  It's about food and empire and Taiwan, which has had a lot of both.

Layer upon layer of nested mysteries are waiting to be unpeeled at tu reviens, a bafflingly enormous mansion full of/made of more or less stolen art on an island off the New York coast. This book is a really impressive technical achievement and also a lot of fun.

A particularly good crop of stories. The theme linking these is betrayal - of a lover, of one's family, of one's culture - and the part that desire, queer or not, plays in it. Read them here: Another Girl Under the Iron Bell Abstraction Is When I Design Giant Death Creatures And Attraction Is When I Do It For You The Name Ziya

Jake Casella Brookins of the Ancillary Review of Books and A Meal of Thorns joins us to discuss a novel by Nick Harkaway. We last encountered Harkaway carrying on his father's spy novel franchise, and this isn't that - it's more Neverwhere as directed by Guy Ritchie - but there's still a lot in there about legacies and dads. 

A cyberpunk novel about animal masks.  This is a potently fertile symbol combo, a blend of metaphor-rich soils, so the only question is what conceptual seeds are being planted here.  Look forward to a bumper crop of gender come harvest time, with a scattering of disability discourse (and the odd cracked egg.)  

What have we here? A weird little gay novel from the late 70s, too full of energy to take itself seriously but too emotionally resonant to be dismissed, and it's an early work by one of our favorite authors? Absolute catnip.

For our 125th episode we discuss a foundational text in yuri manga in which an exclusive private girl's school is as byzantine and treacherous as the court of Versailles. Would you like to fall in love with the beautiful tortured poet or the noble revolutionary hero with a hidden hurt? They both play basketball.  We're joined in our discussion by yuri experts Katherine and Amy.

Rachel Swirsky joins us to discuss a book about a post-scarcity psychedelic utopia in which you remain a young hippie for centuries until you finally become complacent enough to be allowed the privilege of being Old. It's a book about a very specific place and time, but it's beautiful and weird enough that its poetry compels even when its satire doesn't.  

We have here a bit of cozy horror set in a small town in Ontario - the reader can choose to focus on the cozy or on the horror, as they like, making it a versatile bit of kit. Unfortunately, the central romance is a bit of a clunker, and it's hard to read around that.

It's magical gang warfare in Singapore, circa 1972. All the politics, history and gender you could ask for but folded into a plot that moves at breakneck speed and never lets you lose interest. We really liked this one.

We bring you a pair of novellas, both of which are about living in a  big creepy house which is haunted by an ancient woman. They go on to have very different opinions about how cool that would be, even though the underlying metaphors are largely the same. You can read Radcliffe Hall here: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/radcliffe-hall/  

Kerstin Hall of Asunder fame joins us to discuss a book about aging and the end of the world. (It turns out aging isn't the end of the world, but the end of the world isn't the end of the world either.) There's also a lot of stuff about the internet, autism and knowing the names of plants, but more importantly it's a beautiful little book that is absolutely not afraid to get weird with it.

Cannibalism season continues on Wizards vs. Lesbians, as this one's a story about how all of us would probably eat some human meat the second things get difficult, and how on a metaphorical level we definitely already have.  It's not without its problems but it does a good job of capturing how we all felt during lockdown and drawing a line between that feeling and our current predicament(s).  

A novel about being in an MFA (but not necessarily an MFA novel) with all the horror that implies.  What if your creative process involved doing unethical things to dumb animals, and what if you have a hard time separating your creative process from your sex life?

A book about messianic communism, and also about obsessive childhood love, and also about microplastics. Inspirations cited by the author include Disco Elysium and End of Evangelion. Hang onto your hats.

Life is complicated for a Chinese-Canadian lesbian college kid with PTSD who is also half tiger - complicated enough, you would think, but complication invites complication, and soon she has to ask herself like questions like "is this the apocalypse" and "am I partially responsible for it."  Those are pretty standard questions these days, admittedly, and that core of relatability is what keeps a rangy, stressful, fascinating book mostly on the rails.

Arkady Martine joins us to discuss a new spy novel written by Nick Harkaway and starring a bunch of beloved characters created by his father, John le Carré. In doing this, Harkaway has set out what is essentially an impossible task for himself; how does he manage?

Today we cover Closer Than Your Kidneys by Ursula Whitcher, BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE by Lowry Poletti, and There's a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead by Sarah Pinsker.

Our classic literature correspondent Kat Weaver joins us for a look at George Eliot's masterpiece about small towns and bad marriages. We find some wizards in it.

It's very easy to get caught up in the titular metaphor, here - this brief, gauzy cyberpunk novel, written in Taiwan in 1995 and only recently available in translation, peels itself back slowly, revealing layer upon layer, until one can almost see the whole genome of the next thirty years of queer speculative fiction, wrapped up tight inside its core.   That being said, please pay particular attention to the content warnings.

Our adventure correspondent Isaac Fellman joins us once again, this time to talk about Patrick O'Brien and the age of sail through the lens of the seventeenth book in the Aubrey/Maturin series. We chose to do it this way a) because we thought it would be funny and b) because this book features a small autistic girl healed through the power of Irishness, which opens an interesting line of inquiry about both the author and the project generally.

What if the Scholomance was a British boarding school, and therefore had funding, prestige and a competent professional faculty that cared about its students? And what if we told the story from the point of view of the Director of Magic, an extremely sensible woman who has devoted herself to a life of public service?  And then, finally, what if it turns out that none of that is enough?

At long last we contend with Mercedes Lackey. We are deep in the ancestry of books about girls with swords; so deep that they're not even gay for each other, even though they're married. 

The titular manor is lavishly, extravagantly haunted - there are layers upon layers of haunting, over a century's worth, and we get to peel them back one by one. Some of the haunting is inspired by Dream of the Red Chamber, which makes Alexis very happy.

Heather Rose Jones joins us to discuss a delightfully strange book - hell is real, and it's a giant monster that lives underground, and the devil's wife tricked him and took his keys, so she's in charge of it, and she's trying to form a strategic alliance with the king of France, which sucks for you because you're Belgian.  Also it's 1328. Fans of Wizards vs Lesbians may enjoy Heather's Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, for obvious reasons.

This is a historical novel about life in a small fishing village in Nova Scotia in the 1830s, the options available to women at the time and what happens when a man takes an unwilling bride.  In that capacity, it succeeds; as a fairy-tale deconstruction, which it's also trying to be, it doesn't.

A young adult novel about a trans girl who wants to be a witch. Witches in this world are feminist/anarcho-primitivist forest mercenaries, though, which doesn't complicate matters for our hero but does for a reader trying to make sense of what's happening.

This one's about a guy who gets stuck in a labyrinth. Lee joins us to discuss why the guy is there and what, if anything, it all means. We all agree it's a very good book but past that point things get a little contentious.

A synaesthete vagabond who wants to live like the Bright Young People accidentally goes to grad school instead. It's like if Foucault's Pendulum was funny. 

What if the dude who is possessing you is actually a nice guy? And what if you're the kind of gremlin who can only be fixed by a live-in boyfriend, and by "live-in" I mean in your actual brain?