BONUS: CITY ON FIRE

A romance between Anglo-French-Transylvanian vampire Sterling O'Blivion and the body-hopping alien porpoise Benaroya (who is disguised as Virginia Woolf.) The answer to the question you may be asking is "cocaine."   I, VAMPIRE - JODY SCOTT    

A bit of submersible-themed wife horror from the English professional class. Not comfortable enough with its supernatural elements to be really weird, not weird enough with its human elements to be really horrifying. Funny in places, though!   OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA - JULIA ARMFIELD    

Searching for a more grounded take on gender and trauma than we're used to getting from our adult science fiction we turn, inevitability, to a non-speculative YA thriller. Let's all agree that charisma is a kind of magic and call this a book about wizard battles.   THE GIRLS I'VE BEEN - TESS SHARPE

It's a girls' boarding school in the 1920s - a time and a place that might cause a reader to indulge in flights of romantic fantasy, which this book first indulges and then dismantles. Whenever and wherever we are, the question remains: who gets to be final girl?

Lee joins us to discuss the latest Raadchaii book. (Our policy remains: if there are Raadchaii, there are lesbians.) This is a hearty meal (ironically) if you're interested in religion, colonialism and/or political power - and, of course, there's cannibalism.

We were promised Moby Dick in space with lesbians, and that's what we got. It's kind of a thankless task, being Moby DIck in space with lesbians - particularly if you're not playing it for laughs, which this book isn't - because the best you're ever going to do is "better than expected." On the plus side, this one is better than expected.   HELL'S HEART - ALEXIS HALL

This book is about struggling with your terrible family while eating lots of lovingly-described food, which means it's the kind of thing we're supposed to like. This episode is mostly dedicated to figuring out why we don't.     The Subtle Art of Folding Space - John Chu

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

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

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