Wizards Vs. Lesbians

This was going to be a bonus episode but it turns out this is perfect wizards vs lesbians, so it's our first mainline episode with a guest! Joelle guides us through this extremely gay visual novel and we talk about the 90s a lot.

A late entry in our anglophilia arc.  A sneaky smart regency romance involving curses, fourth wall jokes and a mysterious lesbian aristocrat known as The Duke.

A delightfully weird book about tracking a cybernetically enhanced doggie through an interdimensional transit hub.  The first properly grungy modern cyberpunk we've read so far, and very satisfying.

A limp Sherlock Holmes pastiche on Victorian English Jupiter. The plot is nonsensical, the setting is impossible, but the lesbians certainly are lesbians.

Isaac, Alexis and Lee discuss a masterpiece. 

Mountaineering, colonialism, survivor's guilt, toxic relationships, the world's worst technopriest, and Literary Techniques - this is a very good book with a lot going on in it.

It's a sprawling space opera about being a child soldier (an emerging WL theme!)  It also feels like it wants to be a movie, with all that that entails.  An ambitious failure. 

We conclude our anglophilia arc (for now) with this weird little book about fairies, Brexit, drugs and the power of interpretive dance.

The anglophilia arc continues! This one's on a boat. A silly gay murder mystery featuring a parrot and a suitcase of porn which is better than it needs to be.

Full disclosure: the author is Alexis' former housemate.  That being said, even those of us who do not have a personal stake think you should read this book if you have an interest in fairy tales, existentialism or the drama of the gifted child. 

It's the anglophilia arc!  We're starting on a series of books which are fantasy British - we set out initially to critique teaboo tendencies in sf but we accidentally picked a bunch of good and fun books, of which this is one.  Or maybe we're both just weak to this stuff, having been raised on a diet of Terry Pratchett. This specific example involves charming old ladies, Victorian drug labs and t...

The theme of today's episode is supernatural short fiction from Southeast Asia: " The Terracotta Bride " by Zen Cho " Lay My Stomach On Your Scales ," by Wen-yi Lee   "Margo Lai's Guide to Dueling Unprepared ," by Alison Tam 

We were so delighted with The Outside that we decided to cover its sequels!  We probably shouldn't have.

It's a novella which feels like a very long short story, and we struggled to get a full episode out of it.  What happens when you make your hardboiled noir detective a magical lesbian?  Anything?

We really enjoyed this one - it's about being autistic and trying to follow the rules when you're an inveterate anti-authoritarian, and it's also about cyborgs and spaceships and tentacle monsters and AI gods. Featuring the world's worst graduate advisor. 

In this episode we are unduly harsh on a sequel to a book we both liked, which is kind of par for the course with sequels.  Take it as a study of the peril of high expectations. (This episode was recorded before we embarked on our ideological short novels series - apologies for any resulting continuity errors.)

We are glad to live in a world where a movie as weird as this can win Best Picture, and we have a lot to say about it.  Our guest for this episode is Soyi Kim, doctor of comparative literature and art history (and big fan of this film, more to the point.)

Swords! Sorcery! Nipponese Steel! I mean Naiponese Steel! Come see the medieval Japan that 1980s otaku dreamed of. 

It's Frankenstein!  And just like in the original, the real monster is the doctor, who is a lesbian.  This is the third in our series on highly ideological short novels, and this one involves a Creature who is raised in the woods entirely on leftist critical theory.

In Part 2 of our series on extremely ideological short novels we arrive at Sappho's Bar and Grill, holdover from an imagined heyday of lesbian culture where everyone was rough and tough and manly and did women's magic in the woods and absolutely nobody had a penis.   In this book a professor of women's studies goes on a magical journey through women's history and learns the important lesson that s...

A Hallmark Christmas movie of a book, except it's Halloween and there are lesbians.  This is a return to the world of chick lit and also the first in a trilogy of episodes about works which are extremely ideological, intentionally or otherwise. 

As a treat we decided to read three Tamsyn Muir short stories.  Tremendous fun was had.    

What if vampires drank ink and ideas instead of blood?  And what if there was an incredibly dumb book about it?

We've made it through two years of this!  Due to a series of circumstances we kind of had to throw this episode together at the last minute, but we  had fun, and that's what matters.

What if British colonizers in early 20th century Singapore were literal vampires?  And what if they wanted to have sex with you?  And what does it say that this bit of ebook erotica is one of the strongest and most structurally creative novels we've read for this podcast?