It's a girls' boarding school in the 1920s - a time and a place that might cause a reader to indulge in flights of romantic fantasy, which this book first indulges and then dismantles. Whenever and wh...

💬 0  🔁 0  ❤️ 10 · It's probably time for another recommendation masterpost! Not a lot of recs this summer - it feels like it's been a bit of a lean year for the kind of sf we like to read, general…

Lee joins us to discuss the latest Raadchaii book. (Our policy remains: if there are Raadchaii, there are lesbians.) This is a hearty meal (ironically) if you're interested in religion, colonialism an...

We were promised Moby Dick in space with lesbians, and that's what we got. It's kind of a thankless task, being Moby DIck in space with lesbians - particularly if you're not playing it for laughs, whi...

Lee joins us to talk about a book which is difficult to boil down to a paragraph - it's about power, and the means by which power is acquired and lost, and it examines this on a multitude of scales, f...

A cyberpunk colonial parable from one of our favorite authors - or, at least, the author of one of our favorite books. This one is not quite Divine Endurance, but it's certainly something. It's not a ...

A book about drugs that make you see god. It's day-after-tomorrow SF from the day before yesterday, and it gets all of its predictions so catastrophically wrong that its primary use case is as a time ...

It's Little Shop of Horrors but with lesbian Irish millennials! That's the whole pitch.  It fulfills the brief, and arguably overdelivers.   Eat The Ones You Love - Sarah Maria Griffin &nbsp...

It's gay, it's magic, it's a literary classic. Featuring our old books correspondent Kat Weaver!   Orlando - Virginia Woolf

A charming little novel from 1926. We're normally pretty relaxed when it comes to spoilers, particularly for a book that's a century old, but we think the less you know about this one going in the bet...

Back projects you want to see in the world.

A familiar setup - a misogynist demon who possesses girls and infects them with its predatory desires - executed in a way which is, yes, bad, admittedly very bad, but also very funny.   Sawkill G...

A debilitating novel - simultaneously enormous and petty, tragic and hilarious, insightful and insular. It wrecked us down the stretch but left us unmoved at the end. We think it's great but we're not...

We return to Nghi Vo's Singing Hills series and discuss the three next most wizlez-adjacent books in it (to date.) Covered in this episode: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, The Brides of High Hill, an...

This week we're talking about a classic webcomic in both senses of the word, as it feels like it comes from a departed era of the internet despite being barely a decade old.  Part of that vibe st...

It's a Cinderella retelling! But it's Freya Marsk, so it's better than it needs to be, and stranger.

Equipped with two sandwiches, a couple sets out to the zoo to see the one totally sane human being.

Anthropological SF in the mold of Cherryh or Le Guin, updated for our era and its preoccupations - funny, surprising, and smart.  We have a lot of fun discussing the return of Cameron Reed. Our g...

This is that good, chunky, deeply strange fairy tale stuff. You don't have to settle for Gaiman - you never did, honestly. Plus it's Italian and there are cats.

A particularly silly one.

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 boo...

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 ab...

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 le...

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...

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:

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...

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 fo...

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 a...

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 lov...

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 privile...

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 centr...

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 rea...

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 b...

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...

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 d...

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 ...

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 ha...

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 he...

Arkady Martine joins us to discuss a new spy novel written by Nick Harkaway and starring a bunch of beloved characters created by his father, John le Carré. In doing this, Harkaway has set out what is...

Today we cover by Ursula Whitcher, by Lowry Poletti, and by Sarah Pinsker.

Our classic literature correspondent Kat Weaver joins us for a look at George Eliot's masterpiece about small towns and bad marriages. We find some wizards in it.

It's very easy to get caught up in the titular metaphor, here - this brief, gauzy cyberpunk novel, written in Taiwan in 1995 and only recently available in translation, peels itself back slowly, revea...

Our adventure correspondent Isaac Fellman joins us once again, this time to talk about Patrick O'Brien and the age of sail through the lens of the seventeenth book in the Aubrey/Maturin series. We cho...

What if the Scholomance was a British boarding school, and therefore had funding, prestige and a competent professional faculty that cared about its students? And what if we told the story from the po...

At long last we contend with Mercedes Lackey. We are deep in the ancestry of books about girls with swords; so deep that they're not even gay for each other, even though they're married.