If you can survive the deluge of acronymic jargon and sexual abuse that kicks this one off, you're rewarded with a nasty, twisty deconstruction of colonial power dynamics, sex tourism and "going native." Rewarding for those who like their stories hostile.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: ESCAPE PLANS

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 ...

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A rollicking stinker from the heyday of the war on terror. You can entertain yourself adding up the incorrect takes, but the action is gonzo enough that there's genuine fun to be had along the way.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: AFTERPARTY

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 ...

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In retrospect I should be singing "You always eat the ones you love, the ones you shouldn't eat at all" somewhere in this episode, but I decided to do an a capella cover of Darude Sandstorm instead. Hindsight, hindsight. Anyway, this is a fun book!

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: EAT THE ONES YOU LOVE

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...

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Himbo experiences four centuries of English cultural and literary history, inexplicably becoming a herbo at some point in the process. As with much of the classic literature we discuss on the podcast, the twist is that it's all kind of hilarious.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: BONUS: ORLANDO

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

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Lolly Willowes; or, The Loving Huntsman turns 100 this year, and that's a fine excuse to spread the word about a rare and unsung piece of proto-Wizlez. We encourage you to give it a read, and, for best results, to skip the introduction.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: LOLLY WILLOWES

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...

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The Strange Horizons annual fund-drive is now live! Support us to continue publishing free, weekly, online SFFH fiction, poetry, art, and non-fiction for our 27th year! www.backerkit.com/c/users/3516... For new supporters - welcome aboard. For the regulars - you’ll notice something different. 🧵

This one is camp, pure and simple. Raises questions like: how many secret basements can one town have? Why not have the local cops arrest the shadow government? And just how token must a good man be?

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: SAWKILL GIRLS

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...

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The Child Garden joins Lote in the pantheon of novels that have done us physical harm. It's a very good book about mental illness and childhood trauma, and as such you should be careful with it - it's also kind of about finding Jesus in space, and as such you may be baffled by it.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: THE CHILD GARDEN

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...

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The Singing Hills books are just straightforwardly good - they have the comforting aura of a classic detective serial, combined with the academic/historical nous you'd expect from a Steerswoman novel. How can a series that's mostly about disasters and atrocities feel so chill?

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: STORIES FROM THE SINGING HILLS

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...

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On A Sunbeam was the consensus favorite webcomic in my circles around 2017. Looking back on it now, it feels very of its moment - maybe even of a Wizards vs Lesbians moment, despite what feels like a deliberate, even pointed lack of wizards. It's also still free to read online, and you should!

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: ON A SUNBEAM

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...

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Can I call this one a comfort read? Sure, it's a fairy tale retelling, but it's the good kind, and thus doesn't skimp on the trauma and pain. The comfort: even though the fairy tale ending seems unreachable from page one, you know you're going to get there. The question is how it's going to happen.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: THE CINDER HOUSE

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

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Also - our recent guest Louis Evans has a new story out! It's about going to the zoo.

Let's Go to the Zoo - Reactor

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

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We dabble with relevance once again by reviewing a book that just came out! And what a book. We had a delightful time talking about Cameron Reed's re-debut, which feels simultaneously classic and contemporary, and is full of literal and metaphorical treats.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: BONUS: WHAT WE ARE SEEKING

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...

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Despite the fact that our main characters is probably just aro/ace, this is extremely wizards vs lesbians - it's about the deals you need to make to be a girl who is a wizard, and whether the revolution is everything it's cracked up to be. And it's really good!

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: THE SECRET MARKET OF THE DEAD

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.

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Thanks again to everyone who sent us questions! We offer some baseless predictions, some slander and the usual sprinkling of romantic advice.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: BONUS: Q & A 5 (FIVE YEARS!)

A particularly silly one.

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This is a book about losing one's faith in institutions - church, school, The Museum. it turns out the only thing you can truly count on is direct revelation of the divine, which is in line with the traditional folkways of the culture we're drawing on here.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: THE MEMORY HUNTERS

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...

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As winter gives way to spring and daylight savings does massive damage to our circadian rhythms we return once again to that most august of institutions, that most prestigious of events, that bastion of aesthetic infallibility - it's time for the Wizzlies. Check our Tumblr for full written results!

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: BONUS: 5TH ANNUAL WIZZLY AWARDS

I just think silly podcast award shows are neat.

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Taiwan Travelogue reminded us of Kitchen, and so it's off to Kitchen we went. It's a classic, a plate of mourning-flavored comfort food, and there is at least one queer woman in it.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: KITCHEN

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...

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Also! We're hoping to record our 5th anniversary Q&A episode this week. If you have any last-minute questions (indulge us!) - send them along here, at our tumblr or at our email address, wizardsvslesbians at gmail dot com.

A Japanese travel writer goes to Japanese Taiwan in 1938 and falls in love. A series of fictional and non-fictional authors take the story she wrote about it, bury it in layers of history, translation and metatext and leave it to ferment. The result is delicious.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE

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...

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Among the many neat tricks this book pulls off is maintaining a light, fantastical tone while very much being about death and mourning. It never lets the reader off the hook, either - every bit of escapism comes with consequences.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: JANE, UNLIMITED

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...

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We are coming up on five entire years of Wizards vs Lesbians. To mark this occasion, how about a Q&A? Do you have questions for us? About anything? We also give romantic advice, if you need some. DM us here or email us at wizardsvslesbians at gmail. Thank you as always for listening.

We cover some stories that posit queer desire as a counter-revolutionary force (and also one about how straight desire still sucks.) All are available to read for free, and you should; this is a particularly good batch. Check the episode description for links.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: SHORT FICTION ROUNDUP #8

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:

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We're joined by @casella.bsky.social in a discussion of a book that is very gonzo, very silly, very long, and overwhelmingly, agonizingly British.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: BONUS: ANGELMAKER

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...

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This one takes a cool idea - the corpo government sells you masks that enhance your abilities around specific attribute clusters, including being a scared little bunny rabbit if you need to be paranoid professionally - and uses it mostly to ruminate on gender and trauma. The plot is also there.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: VOLATILE MEMORY

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...

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This is a silly book, but in its silliness it made me feel things like hope and joy. Might not do the same for you, but worth a shot, right? It's also an early work by Eleanor Arnason, and is as such inherently of interest to Arnason fans, i.e. people of taste. What happens in it? Uh

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: TO THE RESURRECTION STATION

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...

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You should read Oniisama E if you like Utena - it's short, it's beautiful, it's deeply strange, and it contains blueprints for the next 50 years of development in yuri technology. Watching the anime is optional but in some ways even more informative.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: ONIISAMA E

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...

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This is a book that simultaneously satirizes and revels in decadence, beauty, revolution and the self-serving delusions of the privileged. It's about the 60s, baby!

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: BONUS: BITING THE SUN

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...

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This is clearly not the highlight of Tanya Huff's literary career, but there's a lot to enjoy anyway - a great setting and a cool premise let down by an unconvincing central romance and a wandering plot.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: DIRECT DESCENDENT

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...

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That rarest of things on Wizards vs Lesbians, a review of a new release! We're glad we got to this one - it's really good.

Wizards Vs. Lesbians: WHEN THEY BURNED THE BUTTERFLY

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...

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