Episode 222 - Books from the 1980s

It’s episode 222 and time for us to talk about books from the 1980s! Okay, I say “books” but it’s really “science fiction and fantasy novels from the 1980s.” You probably could have guessed that if you've listened to the podcast before.

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In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards

Things We Read (or tried to…)

• The Further Adventures of Batman (1989)
• Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett (1989)
• Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett (1987)
• Dawn by Octavia Butler (1987)
• The Kindly Ones by Melissa Scott (1897)
• When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger (1897)
  • First edition cover
  • The “more cyberpunk looking” cover

Other Media We Mentioned

• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
• Batman (1989)
• Batman (1960s)
• The Wrong Earth, vol.1 by Tom Peyer and Jamal Igle
• The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
  • Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
  • Dragonriders of Pern
• Mort by Terry Pratchett
• Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
• Gravity Falls
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981)
• E.T. by William Kotzwinkle
• Return of the Jedi (novel) by James Kahn

Links, Articles, and Things

• Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1980s
• The Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness
  • The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
• Beanie Babies
• Labubu

20 Books of the 1980s by BIPOC Authors:

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

• Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai (1980)
• Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko (1980)
• Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis (1981)
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• Zami, A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (1982)
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
• In Search of April Raintree by Beatrice Culleton (1983)
• Suder by Percival Everett (1983)
• The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984)
• Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (1984)
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985)
• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)
• Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe  (1987)
• Dawn by Octavia Butler (1987)
• The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera (1987)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
• Scorpions by Walter Dean Meyers (1988)
• White Badge by Ahn Junghyo (1989)
• Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid by Evelyn Lau (1989)
• The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989)

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Join us again on Tuesday, December 16th we’ll be talking about our favourite books of 2025!

Then on Tuesday, January 6th we’ll be beginning our year of “listener suggested genres” with… non-fiction history!