Wizards Vs. Lesbians

Searching for a more grounded take on gender and trauma than we're used to getting from our adult science fiction we turn, inevitability, to a non-speculative YA thriller. Let's all agree that charisma is a kind of magic and call this a book about wizard battles.   THE GIRLS I'VE BEEN - TESS SHARPE

It's a girls' boarding school in the 1920s - a time and a place that might cause a reader to indulge in flights of romantic fantasy, which this book first indulges and then dismantles. Whenever and wherever we are, the question remains: who gets to be final girl?

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...

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...

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 likel...

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 Taiw...

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