You already know we love Zen Cho, so we decided to do an easy breezy runthrough of the gayer stories in her ever-expanding short story collection.

It's another short story roundup!

Featuring:

Miss Bulletproof Comes Out of Retirement: https://podcastle.org/2022/03/08/podcastle-725-miss-bulletproof-comes-out-of-retirement/ (or https://giganotosaurus.org/2020/08/01/miss-bulletproof-comes-out-of-retirement/)

Selkie Stories are for Losers: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/selkie-stories-are-for-losers/

Nuca: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/nuca/

The Space Between Worlds got itself a darker, angrier sequel. It has a really strong character study at its heart, but the further afield you go from that anchor point the fuzzier it gets.

This one got away from us - with returning champion Leora in tow we spend a good two hours mostly gushing. You should play this game if you haven't.

You are a horrible man-eating goo monster. You grew up alone, with nobody there to teach you right from wrong. But somewhere deep in your ooze there slumbers an entire tumblr-approved lexicon of therapy speak, consent theory and minute identity parsing which allows you to become the ethical human chaser. This is thankfully funny on purpose - at least initially.

It's witches versus gay boys this time around! It's a richly-textured epic journey through fantasy Southeast Asia and there's a whole metatextual second-person out of time narrative framework and it all adds up to less than the sum of its parts.

A 150-year-old sexy vampire story, re-released and given a kinda-sorta makeover by Carmen Maria Machado. None of it feels particularly necessary, but the illustrations are cool!

A debut novel from a short fiction specialist. How'd it go? The review writes itself, unfortunately.

So, the horrible vulture monsters have emerged from hiding deep within the earth, and they have read Nietszche, but good news: the US Government has figured out the most efficient way to appease them! It involves summer camp.

Kiana joins us to discuss one of Isaac's favorite games. We talk about furries, murder and a decidedly pre-Trump vision of rural Pennsylvania.