Andi and Lise enthusiastically re-watched the sci fi dystopic action movie The Matrix (1999) to determine how well it holds up 21 years after its release. The movie became a sensation (still is) and they’ll tell you why it still holds up in most ways and things they noticed with their 2022 perceptions (as opposed to their 1999 perceptions) that they thought were problematic.
Shout-outs: Lise got a Nintendo Switch for Christmas and has been enjoying it immensely. Andi has been getting back into DIY stuff and discovered HGTV’s Home Town, where there’s a lot of community revitalization and restoration of historic homes going on in Laurel, Mississippi.
Andi and Lise highly recommend Book 1 of the 2019 web comic-turned full-color graphic novel Cosmoknights, by Hannah Templar and had a blast with it. Great story, intriguing world-building, excellent characters, fabulous art, and awesome queer rep that includes WOC (shout-out to the butch lesbian rep!). This tagline from the website will no doubt make you want to check it out: “For this ragtag band of space gays, liberation means beating the patriarchy at its own game.”
Shout-outs: Lise would like to acknowledge the deliciousness of maple cream cookies at ALDI and Andi points out the simple fluffy joy of 80s movie Adventures in Babysitting and early 90s movie Clueless.
Andi and Lise greatly admire Jacqueline Koyanagi’s novel Ascension, an excellent space opera with elements of magic and mystic-ness layered in. Great diverse cast of characters; queer WOC main character who also deals with a chronic illness; fabulous world-building. This one stays with you in many different ways.
“Alana Quick is the best damned sky surgeon in Heliodor City, but repairing starship engines barely pays the bills. When the desperate crew of a cargo vessel stops by her shipyard looking for her spiritually-advanced sister Nova, Alana stows away. Maybe her boldness will land her a long-term gig on the crew. But the Tangled Axon proves to be more than star-watching and plasma coils. …” –from Amazon book description
Lise’s shout-out: super see-krit new project she’s working on but she’s not sharing it yet! Plus, finishing up via Netflix the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender.
“Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine.” –Simon and Schuster
Roanhorse builds a post-apocalyptic world in what was the American Southwest, populated largely by Indigenous people. In this world of Dinétah, resources are in short supply, and myth and mythical beings roam freely among the humans.
LGO morphs into the Kameron Hurley fan club as Lise and Andi dive into her latest book, The Light Brigade, a time travel military science fiction novel that explores themes of militarized capitalism, war, and connection through the eyes of grunt Dietz. Through tech that disassembles soldiers and sends them as beams of light into combat zones and reassembles them upon re-entry, Dietz realizes that she is experiencing the war between Earth and Mars differently than others: she’s jumping around its timeline, which gives her a unique and horrifying view of battles and comrades lost and gained. This is a uniquely layered, tightly-written story that stays with readers long after they finish the last page, as its themes resonate with contemporary issues.
Find more about Hugo-winning author Kameron Hurley at her website.
More information about The Light BrigadeHERE.
Synopsis and review of The Light Brigade at Publishers Weekly.
Andi and Lise talk with Kameron Hurley on episode 52 of the Lez Geek Out! podcast HERE.
This week Andi and Lise get into the retro-cool mystery sci-fi comic series Paper Girls, in which four twelve-year-old girls have paper routes in 1988 and band together to deal with weird and crazy things happening in their town. So you’ve got monsters, strange beings, time travel…and what seems to be a conspiracy underneath it all. Appropriate for kids, strong female characters, and unpredictable plotlines. Have fun!
If you’re interested in finding out more about Paper Girls (AND YOU TOTALLY ARE), see Image Comics.
Andi and Lise totally lose it over one of their joint fave movies, Galaxy Quest (1999), which is a delightful spoof of Star Trek and the Star Trek fandoms. It’s a hilarious romp through sci-fi fandom, a clever nod to various plots and fun show tropes, and just a whole lot of fun in general.
The film stars Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman among others.
Andi and Lise totally geek out over the Netflix original series Stranger Things. The acting, the pacing, the tension, the writing – it’s all brilliant. It’s a hybrid horror/thriller/sci fi set in the early 1980s in the American Midwest.
Synopsis:
A love letter to the ’80s classics that captivated a generation, Stranger Things is set in 1983 Indiana, where a young boy vanishes into thin air. As friends, family and local police search for answers, they are drawn into an extraordinary mystery involving top-secret government experiments, terrifying supernatural forces and one very strange little girl. –Rotten Tomatoes
Andi and Lise totally lose their minds over Hurley’s latest, The Stars are Legion, in which warring worlds are populated only by women in decaying organic world-ships all known as The Legion. The main character, Zan, wakes up to find most of her memories gone, but soon finds out that she is being perpetually sent out to board another world-ship and each time, she comes closer.
Andi and Lise were blown away by Hurley’s world-building – organic world-ships literally birthed by the women who inhabit them, and each with different levels/ecosystems all interrelated (omg the metaphors here!). The story is thus about Zan, who knows that she needs to board this other ship to save Jayd. Jayd, for her part, has her own agenda in bringing change into this warring, authoritarian context. The question is, can they do it and what precisely does “change” mean?
Synopsis: Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. For generations, a war for control of the Legion has been waged, with no clear resolution. As worlds continue to die, a desperate plan is put into motion.
Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say they are her family. She is told she is their salvation – the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan’s new family is not the only one desperate to gain control of the prized ship. Zan finds that she must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion’s gravity well to the very belly of the world.
Zan will soon learn that she carries the seeds of the Legion’s destruction – and its possible salvation. But can she and her ragtag band of followers survive the horrors of the Legion and its people long enough to deliver it?
In the tradition of The Fall of Hyperion and Dune, The Stars Are Legion is an epic and thrilling tale about tragic love, revenge, and war as imagined by one of the genre’s most celebrated new writers.
Andi and Lise really dig the TV series Dark Matter, which airs on the SyFy network. It’s a space opera, which is one of Andi’s all-time fave genres (and Lise’s!) but it’s got some really excellent elements that make it super watchable. Plus, diverse cast.
Six people emerge from stasis on a space ship and none of them know who they are or how they got there. Plus, there’s an android (played by Lost Girl’s Zoie Palmer) who also has to have her memory wiped. So six humans with no idea what they’re doing on this vessel and as the series progresses, they realize that they have shady pasts and even shadier business dealings in a galaxy ruled by mega-corporations vying for power. The six have to learn how to stick together though they have no idea who they are, and both Lise and Andi love how the show explores the idea of how who we are is determined, to an extent, by our memories.
Lez Geek Out!cast 