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.