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.

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.