BONUS: CITY ON FIRE
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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, from the granular to the metaphysical. Also it's set in a world where every inch of available territory is covered by a city which generates its own geomantic power and humans (and mutants) are barred from space travel by a giant atmospheric shield. Fundamentally, though, it asks the question: what if there was a hot guy who sucked? City On Fire - Walter Jon Williams
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ESCAPE PLANS
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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 pleasant read but it sure is full of historical interest. ESCAPE PLANS - GWYNETH JONES
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AFTERPARTY
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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 capsule from the war on terror. Also preserved: jokes we thought were funny ten years ago. Afterparty - Daryl Gregory
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EAT THE ONES YOU LOVE
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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
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BONUS: ORLANDO
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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 better. Lolly Willowes; or The Loving Huntsman - Sylvia Townsend Warner
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SAWKILL GIRLS
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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 Girls (2018) - Claire Legrand
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THE CHILD GARDEN
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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 sure if you should read it.
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STORIES FROM THE SINGING HILLS
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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, and A Mouthful of Dust.
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ON A SUNBEAM
Wizards Vs. Lesbians
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 stems from the fact that you can still read it, in its entirety and ad-free, on its own - an unimaginable luxury these days. Check it out (it's a classic for a reason) and then join us for a discussion of what's aged well and what hasn't.
info_outlineKerstin 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.) There's also a lot of stuff about the internet, autism and knowing the names of plants, but more importantly it's a beautiful little book that is absolutely not afraid to get weird with it.