Wizards Vs. Lesbians

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.

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.

I think we slipped some good advice in here amidst the silliness?

A violent girl in a milquetoast world gets to go to Autism Heaven, where she can be torn apart as much as she wants. We love this book, despite everything.

Thanks to Fabian for the intro!  His music can be found at:

https://fbgtz.bandcamp.com/

https://toyoudeary.bandcamp.com/

We have struggled to fit Ann Leckie's books under our remit because there are usually too many genders in them for something as pedestrian as lesbianism to take place. Luckily for us this one fits neatly under Narcissistic Parents of Monstrous Children. 

A psychological horror story about the delusions of a narcissistic parent. (We aren't sure the book knows that's what's happening but it is what it is.) It's like the Book Eaters - to the extent that we think they constitute their own emergent genre - but possibly worse.

As an end of year treat (for ourselves, exclusively) we asked for questions and then answered them. Thank you for indulging us.

We've made it to 75 episodes, and as has become the custom for these milestones we're watching cartoons.  We've run out of Utena so we're moving on to one of Isaac's favorites, and we've chosen the most Wizards vs Lesbians part to talk about.

It's one of the great novels of China, With Lesbians!  The contemporary moral framework the author brings to the story sits uneasily atop the chaotic and bloodthirsty original but it's still a good time.

Oh, this is a good one. Sequel to She who Became the Sun, follows the continuing adventures of a bunch of ruthless moral lacunae who want to become Emperor, features the most tender BDSM relationship between a trans man and a eunuch ever committed to paper. 

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 the requisite terrible mom, and is very funny.

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 she was right about the kids these days all along.

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?  

An extra-long episode covering the penultimate installment of the Ninth House series (assuming Homestuck denouement elongation syndrome doesn't strike.  Pray it away.)  You guys already know what this one's about.

Well, we made it to 50 episodes, and as promised we will try to figure out what Be-Papas thought they were doing. 

It's a retro episode!  (We will eventually make it through Nicola Griffith's entire catalog.)  This is a book about celebrity, hereditary wealth, toxic relationships and the science of water reclamation, and even though it was written in 1995 it feels extraordinarily current.  Recommended.

In far-future biopunk (ecopunk? mycopunk?) New Zealand, a queer cop joins a pirate gang and ends up on a trip to the fireworks factory.  It's all very first novel but it's got good politics.

In this episode we discuss Our Souls To The Moon by Tamara Jeree, Onward by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, and A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad.  Tune in for Isaac changing his mind completely about one of these stories midway through the podcast!

A young girl growing up in interwar Los Angeles wants to be a star, which turns out to be alarmingly literal, since Hollywood is run by the fair folk.  Because of course it is.  A fantastically evocative book that solves the nativist magic problem we keep running into.

This episode is about the Renunciates trilogy, but it is more generally about Marion Zimmer Bradley. We're talking about her because she and her ghostwriters pioneered the wizards vs lesbians genre, and also because it is important to remember that the old SF community harbored, protected and enabled predatory monsters when we consider the ways the community has changed.

A milestone for Wizards vs Lesbians - our first advanced review copy!  That put us in a good mood but rest assured this one is great on its own merits.  Think Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Utena, but with wizards, lesbians, communists, and sinister White Russians.

Arthurian wizards vs lesbians!  And it's by Nicola Griffith, one of the all-time greats.  Find out why Percival's spear was so hard, and what she did with it.

A pair of novellas, both of which have the word Tiger in their title, even though only one of them has real tigers in it.  We had some audio issues with this one, but it does feature us discovering the work of Nghi Vo, who has since become one of our favorite authors.

The Sandman may not be Wizards vs Lesbians but it is certainly Wizards vs Women Generally, and we had a whale of a time revisiting what to us is a formative childhood text.  Featuring special guest Kiana, for whom it is decidedly not - check out her art at junkworldusa.tumblr.com.

In this book a gaggle of formerly gifted children drive off to look for America, only to find that this is not actually the best of all possible worlds. 

A whole bunch of wizards vs lesbians alumni were nominated for best novel this year, so we talk about it!  Featuring Leora Spitzer, who has read more of the nominated works than either of us have. 

A terrifying, hallucinatory parable about the breakdown of communism on an alien world, featuring settler colonialism, struggle sessions and lots and lots of goo.  High SF in the tradition of Dick and Lem, and one for fans of Annihilation. 

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.

A heist thriller set in fantasy Europe.   The best we can say for this one is that it's like Foundryside - very like Foundryside - but much shorter.

A novel-length parody of Ready Player One?  Snow Crash meets World of Warcraft?  Lucky Wander Boy, revamped for the mid-2010s?  This book is all these things, and less.

A blessed return to 90s Cyberpunk!  Feels like home.  Join us for a journey to far-future 1994, where cool lesbians fight cyber-corporations and grognard gatekeepers alike for the future of the internet itself (with help from sympathetic EU regulators.)

A murder mystery set in steampunk Cairo, with lesbians, wizards and jokes!  What could possibly go wrong?

It's the sequel to the Wizzly-winning Unspoken Name!  And we like it just about as much, which is to say, a lot.  Possibly more, even.

We stretched our remit to the breaking point with this one, but Ann Leckie definitely helped usher in the current W vs L zeitgeist so we felt the need to cover her work.  Provenance is a social sciences murder mystery, Cherryhesque in both its style and execution, and a lot of fun.

Today's book is a listener suggestion, and a bit of a throwback!  It's an epic fantasy brick, what we hear is referred to as a "cat squasher" in some circles.  It reminded us of the books we used to plow through as teenagers in the 90s, but, crucially, with lesbians.  Despite it violating our cardinal rule ("be short, please") we really enjoyed this one. 

Certainly the most romantic book we've done so far, and at the same time one of the wildest in terms of its worldbuilding.  An epistolary novella about two immortal far-future warriors falling in love.

It's a real meat'n'potatoes wizards vs lesbians - a gay orphan is content being raised by a bad mom in a colonized fantasy nation with a caste system (sumptuary laws!) before an alluring butch arrives from overseas to upset the applecart.  The ending is where it sets itself apart a bit - but you'll have to read it (or listen to us) to find out how.

It's our first short fiction anthology show!  This one features:

How to Swallow the Moon by Isabel Yap

Florilega; Or Some Lies About Flowers by Amal El-Mohtar

The Demon-Sage's Daughter by Varsha Dinesh

Which are increasingly weird adaptations of mythopoetic traditions from around the world (The Philippines, Wales and Kerala, specifically.)

This is a book about a trans runaway who is a survival sex worker and a violin prodigy and the demons and aliens she encounters in suburban LA but it is mostly about eating really amazing meals in restaurants.  Isaac LOVED this one, but it is Not Without Its Problems.

What if you took a standard romance novel setup - girl abducted and made to serve in the harem of the handsome prince - and really leaned into how awful that would be in real life?   You'd get this, a YA novel whose major tone is the suffocating dread of violent sexual assault, but with forbidden lesbian romance and a clan of secret ninjas thrown into the mix.  It's a challenging one.

We've been doing this for a year!  Unbelievably!  To celebrate, it's time for one of my favorite podcast tropes: the silly award show, in which we discuss who the best lesbian is, who the best wizard is, and so forth.

There's a girl trapped in a tower, a handsome prince comes to save her, and then everything goes wrong.  Thankfully there's a lesbian moth demon there to help. 

I mean, what is there to say?

It's our 25th episode, and so we're going to discuss an anime that is very important to us, and which is absolutely a foundational text in the wizards vs lesbians idiom. We could fill up multiple podcasts talking about this show, and just might, if provoked.

It's another retro episode!  This one to takes us back to gay London in the 1990s, where a queer cab driver named Rainbow is being haunted not only by her variously-kosher gaggle of aunts but by an actual dybbuk, unleashed upon her to fulfill a centuries-old curse.  It's Good Omens but Jewish and with lesbians - what's not to like?

It's an accidental holiday episode!  The Raven and the Reindeer is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen by T Kingfisher, AKA Ursula Vernon, furry webcomic artist of the old school.  And it's great - keeps all the weirdness of the original and adds a whole shovelful of gay. 

The rare modern contemporary wizards vs lesbians novel, set here and now.  It's about a young woman of Malaysian Chinese descent who returns to Penang under difficult circumstances and has to deal, among other things, with the ghost of her grandmother.  An extremely solid piece of work: If you have any litfic snobs in your circle, this is the one to break 'em in with.

It's Foundryside!  This is a book that we think might have been better as an anime, or an action movie, or a miniseries, or a comic - pretty much anything but a very long novel that seems to care mostly about setting up the pieces for the very long series of sequels to come.  But we might think that because it has the best action sequence writing of any book we've discussed so far, and also because the lesbian has a wisecracking inanimate object companion to help her in her anti-wizard cause.

In a slight departure for us we are discussing a romance novel - a romance novella, in fact - a romance novella starring a werebear who works at Vogue.  It's self-identified "chick lit" but it's also Wizards vs Lesbians, or at least close enough, so we discuss it (and also spend quite a long time talking about the theory that queer desire itself is the revolutionary moment.)

So, what if the founder of the Ming Dynasty was a lesbian?  That is the question this book dares to ask, and it does a really good job answering it.  A rollicking, morally complex historical fantasy which is one of my favorite contemporary books we've read for this project.

A mainline wizards vs lesbians empire narrative, this one, set in fantasy South Asia.  It's a long old read but the characters are good - particularly the colonial governor's wife, a hall of fame eminence gris.

It's our first ever bonus episode!  This series was initially disqualified due to lack of lesbians but our guest, the author P.H. Lee, argues that the lesbianism is subtextual.  Whether that's true or not, this is a classic SF series for a reason and contains both a bromance for the ages between our adventure librarian hero and her barbarian companion and some premium wizard behavior.

Retro episode!  In this one we tackle a forgotten classic of 90s cyberpunk, recommended by a listener.  It's insane and we had a tremendous amount of fun with it.   (Thanks to Isaac's internet son Olive for providing the intro and inspiring him to make a busload of terrible techno jingles.)

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.

We journey to Fantasy Algeria for today's episode, where the Princess of Fantasy France has arrived to review her colony, only to have her life saved and (in due course) her heart stolen by a captain in her colonial guard.   This one goes deep on the emotional consequences of empire and the conflicting loyalties that arise in conquered peoples, but maintains that focus by ignoring or eliding factors that are arguably just as central to those dynamics as race.

A strange book, this - tremendously awful things happen in it but one leaves with the impression that everything might turn out all right if we all just listen to each other. Comfortable, well-written, and features a magical giant blacksmith lesbian who talks to crows.

We're back to Teixcalaan for another dose of diplomatic/linguistic foofaraw.  This is a very comfortable book, and we discuss how nice it is that the legacy of CJ Cherryh lives on, Except With Lesbians.  I could read another fifty of these, honestly.

It's Alexander the Great, but in space, with lesbians!  And she wins American Idol??

Fair warning: one of us really hated this book.

Here we have a book about being in love with a creep - same-sex attraction, it turns out, is not proof against such things - and about attempting to colonize a planet inimical to human life and the problems that arise therefrom.  This is another bleak one, with the escape hatch at the end difficult to describe in real human terms, but it has its charms.

A girl and her cat (or is it a cat and her girl?) wander away from the factory where they were built and discover what remains of human civilization in a deeply poetic/depressing journey down the Indochinese peninsula to the sea.  It's a downer, but it's Isaac's favorite book we've done so far! 

Chaos!  Intrigue!  Murder cults!  Fantasy racism!  Problematic content as far as the eye can see!  It's Green, and we're talking about it.

It's Journey to the West but with lesbians, in space!  Or, alternately, lesbian Tony Stark wrestles with her own capacity for evil.  What's not to like?

It's our first retro episode!  We read a book from 1990 in which a magical Irish harpist (who lives in Denver) takes on the immortal elves who have stolen her girlfriend using the power of heavy metal - and friendship.  It's a hoot.

Many thanks to my buddy Phoebe, AKA moltenglassheart, for providing the fresh guitar lick on the intro.   If you'd like to check out her music (which features both heavy metal and space lesbians), head to https://soundcloud.com/moltenglassheart

It's our first sequel!   Back to the world of the locked tomb we go, to talk about a locked room mystery, where the room is a brain, and the lock is denial. 

What happens when you fall in love with the empire that's colonizing you?  What if the empire is a wizard?  How far can we stretch the theme of this podcast?  All these questions and more are addressed in our discussion of A Memory Called Empire.

Today we're discussing a novel Alexis calls "Lesbian Games of Thrones meets The Monster at the End of This Book."  We get a little bit critical, but remember: the author is dead!

In this episode we discuss Ninefox Gambit, a book about calendars, empire, and war, and the first in a number of books we'll discuss wherein the wizard lives inside the lesbian's head, rent-free, and literally.

In this episode we talk about The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood, which is maybe our favorite wizards vs. lesbians tale (for now), and which is like the Locked Tomb meets Planescape, but with added Themes.

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.