Wizards Vs. Lesbians

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.

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.