Julia and Victoria learn what the word “flannel” means in British English and formulate their own theories about what happened to a stranded deep-sea researcher in the devastatingly beautiful novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.

Julia is truly bamboozled, Victoria embraces that she is a vampire girlie, and they both dig into the context of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, edited with commentary by the absolute legend Carmen Maria Machado.

Julia and Victoria needed to scream about how much they loved crying over the romantic, angsty sci-fi novella This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, so now it is an episode.

Julia and Victoria celebrate their 100th episode by talking about cultural definitions of magic and the complexities of power in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun.

Julia and Victoria (whose mic simply refused to cooperate this episode) dip their toes into the world of science fiction with “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, and its film adaptation Arrival. This inspires them to think some big, timey-wimey thoughts about language and brains and the way our experience of time affects our views on life.

Julia and Victoria get very excited about their spur of the moment decision to talk about Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, the queer royal romance the world was waiting for. Julia had some technical difficulties and recorded on a less-than-ideal microphone, but it couldn’t be postponed because they were too pumped.