Wizards Vs. Lesbians

Today we cover Closer Than Your Kidneys by Ursula Whitcher, BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE by Lowry Poletti, and There's a Door to the Land of the Dead in the Land of the Dead by Sarah Pinsker.

Our classic literature correspondent Kat Weaver joins us for a look at George Eliot's masterpiece about small towns and bad marriages. We find some wizards in it.

It's very easy to get caught up in the titular metaphor, here - this brief, gauzy cyberpunk novel, written in Taiwan in 1995 and only recently available in translation, peels itself back slowly, revealing layer upon layer, until one can almost see the whole genome of the next thirty years of queer speculative fiction, wrapped up tight inside its core.

That being said, please pay particular attention to the content warnings.

Our adventure correspondent Isaac Fellman joins us once again, this time to talk about Patrick O'Brien and the age of sail through the lens of the seventeenth book in the Aubrey/Maturin series. We chose to do it this way a) because we thought it would be funny and b) because this book features a small autistic girl healed through the power of Irishness, which opens an interesting line of inquiry about both the author and the project generally.

What if the Scholomance was a British boarding school, and therefore had funding, prestige and a competent professional faculty that cared about its students? And what if we told the story from the point of view of the Director of Magic, an extremely sensible woman who has devoted herself to a life of public service? And then, finally, what if it turns out that none of that is enough?

At long last we contend with Mercedes Lackey. We are deep in the ancestry of books about girls with swords; so deep that they're not even gay for each other, even though they're married.

The titular manor is lavishly, extravagantly haunted - there are layers upon layers of haunting, over a century's worth, and we get to peel them back one by one. Some of the haunting is inspired by Dream of the Red Chamber, which makes Alexis very happy.

Heather Rose Jones joins us to discuss a delightfully strange book - hell is real, and it's a giant monster that lives underground, and the devil's wife tricked him and took his keys, so she's in charge of it, and she's trying to form a strategic alliance with the king of France, which sucks for you because you're Belgian. Also it's 1328.

Fans of Wizards vs Lesbians may enjoy Heather's Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast, for obvious reasons.

This is a historical novel about life in a small fishing village in Nova Scotia in the 1830s, the options available to women at the time and what happens when a man takes an unwilling bride. In that capacity, it succeeds; as a fairy-tale deconstruction, which it's also trying to be, it doesn't.

A young adult novel about a trans girl who wants to be a witch. Witches in this world are feminist/anarcho-primitivist forest mercenaries, though, which doesn't complicate matters for our hero but does for a reader trying to make sense of what's happening.