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.

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/