Wizards Vs. Lesbians

A young adult novel about a trans girl who wants to be a witch. Witches in this world are feminist/anarcho-primitivist forest mercenaries, though, which doesn't complicate matters for our hero but does for a reader trying to make sense of what's happening.

This one's about a guy who gets stuck in a labyrinth. Lee joins us to discuss why the guy is there and what, if anything, it all means. We all agree it's a very good book but past that point things get a little contentious.

A synaesthete vagabond who wants to live like the Bright Young People accidentally goes to grad school instead. It's like if Foucault's Pendulum was funny. 

What if the dude who is possessing you is actually a nice guy? And what if you're the kind of gremlin who can only be fixed by a live-in boyfriend, and by "live-in" I mean in your actual brain?

Masha du Toit joins us to discuss a book about going to college and writing fanficiton which turns out to be laser-targeted at one of our hosts. So what we end up with is a strange mixture of cultural history and personal pain, much like the book itself.

It's this again! In this episode we discuss the following stories: The V*mpire by P.H. Lee   Katya Vasilevna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka by Christine Hanolsy  The Witch Trap by Jennifer Hudak Joanna's Bodies by Eugenia Triantafyllou

We could do nothing but weird small press lesbian novellas on this podcast and I'd be happy.  This one's about how we really need to blow up the sun but we're too busy having smoldering academic love triangles.

Lianyu Tan joins us for another foray into literature that started life as Xena AU fanfiction (or Xena Uber, in the parlance of the time.)  This one starts out as a pirate romp featuring the world's brattiest sub/voluntary slave girl and ends up in some really dark places.

This is the most Wizards vs Lesbians book we've covered in ages, and it's also really good. It's a familiar setup - there's a thing in a pit in a little tiny town and the locals have to keep it fed. The beauty's in the execution.

We adventure into the realm of non-fiction - mostly - for the first time, courtesy of Isaac Fellman, who has joined us to discuss a book about two disasters. The first is the Andree Expedition, a real-life polar quest which failed both disastrously and predictably; the second is an exercise for the reader. 

Finally, the all-caps title is correct! During the 2023 Wizzly awards we all said we were going to read Moby Dick by the time the next Wizzlies rolled around, and most of us did. It turns out it's really good. Like, I'd call it the great American novel, at least for the days before women were invented. Has anybody else heard about this?

We kick off a new series of author's choice episodes with Cameron Reed, who has brought us a novel you can chew on like the ragged edge of a thumbnail. 

This book is about whether murdering antisemites is a good idea or not, morally and strategically, and as such it's about Israel without ever discussing Israel, which as a rhetorical gambit has its advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is that it's therefore a New York Novel and it comes with all the problems that implies.

We persevere through technical issues to bring you this, our annual extravaganza of self-indulgence. Is it possible four years in that we're actually worse at this than when we started?

In fantasy Germany a fantasy Jewess and her fantasy Aryan forest princess must go up the river to save the cat, or something.  Not as much blood as you'd expect in this one but there's plenty of soil.

We're dipping our toes into Dark Academia here. This book asks the question: what if your abusive academic advisor was literally a vampire? And the answer is it would be kinda cool. A classic example of horror elements blunting the actual horror, down to a 1960s setting that elides all the worst parts of the era.

This one takes a while to get going - at first it seems like a genderswapped swords & sorcery novel, but it turns out that's only one part of a much larger world. Recommended for Steerswoman fans.

A book about empire, memory, historical trauma and the consequences of dating your blorbo. Huge thanks to Vajra for suggesting this one and for coming on to talk about it!

Our esteemed pal P.H. Lee joins us for a rundown of this charming bit of YA. It's Brazilian! It's Really Brazilian!

We return to the schools that resemble the prisons for a book that predates the Ninth House but has a couple of startling similarities, including a proto-John Gaius Gen-X godhead.

On the occasion of our 100th mainline episode we treat ourselves by answering your questions.

In perhaps our most controversial take yet, we posit that this anime is good, actually. Your tolerance for breast collision physics will factor in whether you agree. 

Helpful alien friends take over the world and make everyone immortal and kind of chill, man. It's a metaphor for something or other. Maybe AI, maybe legal weed. Maybe california in general. It doesn't amount to much.

We have fandom historian and BL expert Naked Bee on to discuss this extremely charming bit of gay metafiction.

We return to Nicola Griffith to get a more measured take on the lesbian space colony genre, written if not in direct response to Daughters of a Coral Dawn then to books like it. (We know this because of a helpful author's note.)

We get to do a literary classic - significantly, an extremely funny literary classic - in the company of the excellent Kat Weaver. A joy.

Vintage lesbian separatist science fiction from 1984. It's almost charming until the implications set in - since women can't commit sexual assault and men can't not, pederasty for the one and extermination for the other only makes sense.

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/fiction/nuca/

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.