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.

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. 

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. 

A really good YA novel about found family, bad parents, small town schools and the power of a good Discord server to change lives.  The selling point - that the server mod is an awakened AI - is the least interesting part of the whole thing, but hey, every book needs a hook.

This one's a hoot.  A fast, funny, nasty book about interdimensional colonialism and structural inequality which manages to fold all manner of economic, racial and gender dynamics into a story which still manages to be a gripping tale of adventure featuring Evil Steve Jobs.

Hello!  Welcome to our new podcast, where we talk about wizards, lesbians and the conflict that naturally arises between wizards and lesbians.  Our first installment concerns a book that is absolutely stuffed with both, Tamsyn Muir's already-a-cult-classic Gideon the Ninth.

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.