Wizards Vs. Lesbians

A lazy, racist, sexist, ahistorical wankfest of a novel. At least we got a podcast out of it.

Come with us to fantasy Liechtenstein for some feel-good classic yuri. The society is high, the stakes are low and the names are terrible.

After Ann Leckie brought us Foreigner we decided to invite some other authors whose work we've enjoyed to bring us books to talk about. Jenna Moran has elected to bring us the Scholomance, which is highly entertaining, and silly, and incidentally a highly detailed study on the phenomenon of the tsundere.

You already know we love Zen Cho, so we decided to do an easy breezy runthrough of the gayer stories in her ever-expanding short story collection. 

It's another short story roundup!  Featuring: Miss Bulletproof Comes Out of Retirement: https://podcastle.org/2022/03/08/podcastle-725-miss-bulletproof-comes-out-of-retirement/ (or https://giganotosaurus.org/2020/08/01/miss-bulletproof-comes-out-of-retirement/ )    Selkie Stories are for Losers: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/selkie-stories-are-for-losers/ Nuca: http://strangehorizons.com/fict...

The Space Between Worlds got itself a darker, angrier sequel.  It has a really strong character study at its heart, but the further afield you go from that anchor point the fuzzier it gets.

This one got away from us - with returning champion Leora in tow we spend a good two hours mostly gushing. You should play this game if you haven't.

You are a horrible man-eating goo monster. You grew up alone, with nobody there to teach you right from wrong. But somewhere deep in your ooze there slumbers an entire tumblr-approved lexicon of therapy speak, consent theory and minute identity parsing which allows you to become the ethical human chaser.  This is thankfully funny on purpose - at least initially.

It's witches versus gay boys this time around! It's a richly-textured epic journey through fantasy Southeast Asia and there's a whole metatextual second-person out of time narrative framework and it all adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

A 150-year-old sexy vampire story, re-released and given a kinda-sorta makeover by Carmen Maria Machado. None of it feels particularly necessary, but the illustrations are cool!

A debut novel from a short fiction specialist. How'd it go? The review writes itself, unfortunately.

So, the horrible vulture monsters have emerged from hiding deep within the earth, and they have read Nietszche, but good news: the US Government has figured out the most efficient way to appease them! It involves summer camp.

Kiana joins us to discuss one of Isaac's favorite games.  We talk about furries, murder and a decidedly pre-Trump vision of rural Pennsylvania.

It's Chuck Tingle's debut novel! It's not great!

We discuss a series which is arguably foundational to the wizards vs lesbians microgenre (despite a distinct lack of lesbianism) with special guest Ann Leckie. 

Bad news: you've gone to heaven, but it's a terrible English country village in space and your neighbors are not respecting your neurodivergence. Better climb the mountain that is God!

We answer questions about stuff we've read, and also stuff we haven't.  Is the author still dead? 

Could small-town football hero Coach Bakula not be what he seems??  A campy clusterfuck, three teen movies at once, and very enjoyable. 

A support group for failed messiahs, a device to torture grad students by making them look at a door, the world's funniest surface to air missile - all this and more in a first novel that has no business being this good.

There's a good book in here! A real noir psychodrama in space. Unfortunately there's also a lot of stuff about space jews.

Two books starring a sexy supersoldier and her hot girlfriend.  The first one is a melodrama with Politics, and the second is a teen movie that might actually achieve Minus Politics.

In which Angrboða and Loki get Extremely Divorced. Featuring the most canonically monstrous children of narcissistic parents yet - but despite all this, nobody gets monstered by the narrative, not even the world's most useless excuse for a husband. 

Our shameless self-celebration returns once again, with full panel of judges in tow. But there's a twist!

P.H. Lee joins us to discuss  another  masterpiece.  Read it if you haven't, it's short.

We continue our three-part series on books inspired by Norse mythology with The Valkyrie. This one wonders what would happen in Fafnir teamed up with Attila the Hun but is mostly about what a schmuck Siegfried was.