u/characterlimit

It's time for the two second-in-trilogy enemies-to-lovers KJ Charleses that are the clear standouts of their series but the overarching plots are such that you probably should read the first books first (two nickels etc):

• {A Seditious Affair by K.J. Charles} - two ostensibly intelligent men have had secret BDSM/arguing about politics/trading book recommendations rendezvous for months without noticing that one of them is a radical printer and the other is the government official assigned to track him down

• {An Unnatural Vice by K.J. Charles} - journalist on a mission to expose spiritualist frauds who prey on the grieving meets spiritualist fraud who preys on the grieving, they have some really fantastic hate sex and also fall in love

I tried to get it in better light for you and got basically the same result - my phone camera seems to be desaturating/de-neon-ing it no matter the lighting. I would say it's more noticeably vibrant irl than my picture, though my bottle has either faded lighter or never was as dark as it looks in this post. It's an excellent pink, I wish it was easier to photograph!

This is indirect sunlight indoors iirc (please excuse my messy desk). The weather here is terrible now but I can try tomorrow to get pictures of my swatch stick in better light for you, if that would be helpful.

My bottle is from 2023 (photo is from January this year) and honestly I can't tell if it's faded or not? I would have said no, because it lives in a cupboard and never sees the sun, but some of the swatches online have me doubting myself.

Since you're open to sf I get to recommend The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed, which is 90s cyberpunk about a reporter who broadcasts her experiences in VR (after they're censored, of course); she investigates a genocide and gets more than she bargained for. It's weird and sad and philosophical and aged in most ways terrifyingly well and I am always trying to make people read it.

Every night I go to sleep dreaming of a Shadowheart stepback that's like as bodice-ripper-y as possible (flowing hair, crashing waves, castle looming in the distance, pervasive sense of sexual menace, eyeshadow) except that he's tied up, and every morning I wake up mad that it doesn't exist. We were robbed!

This was a bingo square a couple years ago (well, half of one, anyway) so you can find a bunch of options in the big rec thread.

Dhalgren is too short surely for hard mode cat squasher? My copy is 801 pages and a foreword, and the only editions I'm seeing online that are 900+ are in languages other than English where books tend to be longer.

(But it's a good pick for easy mode, what a wild ride (every sense))

I've read it and it is straight up a history book; it's got some stuff about the Renaissance itself and then pop history after it defining the Renaissance in opposition to an imagined medieval, which as you said has knock-on effects in fantasy particularly, but she doesn't spend much if any time talking about those. You could also make the argument that it's relevant to authors doing sff worldbuilding because a throughline of the book is the varied and surprising ways the past (and so the future) are alien to the present, and the ways fiction can flatten that out (Palmer's own fiction is also very preoccupied with this)... but lots of history books are relevant to authors doing worldbuilding and I wouldn't say this one is unusually so or especially targeted to that audience.

Or I guess the part where Palmer has her students roleplay a papal election counts as speculative because it's alternate history? In any case I'm with you, still all for it if the alternative is, like, someone's blog post about the Hugos lol

I feel like Inventing the Renaissance only counts for related work in that Ada Palmer wrote it, but it's a good read and I'd vote for it over a Hugo spreadsheet in a heartbeat.

It's not well known to English-language readers, who are the target audience for the book, and more importantly Grace of Kings is the only book in the series to which this criticism really applies, because the rest of the series uses the background of "early Han dynasty with the names changed" to explore alternate-historical outcomes and themes. But Liu couldn't expect his audience to follow along if he opened with "hey guys this is Liu Bang, the Chu-Han Contention is over, now what happens if they try to give women access to the imperial bureaucracy and the country gets invaded by dragon riders" in the way that Guy Gavriel Kay or Django Wexler or, like, GRRM can expect people to recognize El Cid or Justinian/Theodora or Napoleon or the general setup of the Wars of the Roses and also recognize when they're changing stuff.

Given that lower baseline of knowledge Liu could have made other artistic choices to deal with it - dropped the reader in to let them either figure it out or miss the parallels entirely, or stapled a printout of the Wikipedia page for the Chu-Han Contention to every copy of Wall of Storms - but the choice he did make is justifiable, it's better than the Wikipedia printout lol

Also when Kay wrote books set in fantasy China he straight up did do "hey guys this is Yang Guifei and An Lushan, I'm changing nothing, enjoy" but somehow I've only ever seen this criticism leveled at Chinese diaspora authors (not by you specifically, to be clear, but in general.)

You've gotten a ton of good suggestions already but:

• At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop - barely speculative but I remember squeezing it into some prior bingo on a technicality
• Walking Practice by Dolki Min - if you haven't already read it
• The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
• The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei
• Red Ants by Pergentino José (short stories)
• Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
• Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
• a bunch of César Aira is novella-length or shorter - I've only read The Literary Conference, which is... wacky, in a litfic kinda way, but I think he's best-known for Ghosts

Authors of color: Claire G. Coleman (Noongar; I want to say Terra Nullius is set just after first contact but it miiight also work for that?), Shelley Parker-Chan (Chinese Australian; the Radiant Emperor books would count for trans/nonbinary protagonist), Nalini Singh (Indo-Fijian, grew up and lives in NZ), Sascha Stronach (Māori; I believe Stronach is trans but her books are stuck on my TBR so I don't know if any of her protagonists are)

Yes, I'd agree with that. (Broadly, anyway, there's an argument to be made that it was already ruined because it was always used mostly as an expression of internalized misogyny, but that's veering off the point of the thread.)

This is not true - the origin of Mary Sue is a parody Star Trek fanfic by a woman and before the term broke containment and got diluted to uselessness (these days it's absolutely misogynistic and means approximately "female protagonist I don't like") it was slang used in majority female fanfic culture, men directing at female characters came much later

I think last time we had this square I used Triangulum by Masande Ntshanga, which is set in South Africa.

Yan's Wikipedia page says she's lived in Dublin since 2015 and Strange Beasts is from 2006, so I think you're right on the dates. I haven't read her new collection (actually didn't know it existed until I was looking her up to double-check where she lived) but it doesn't have any speculative tags on Storygraph or Goodreads, so I think probably not? But now I'm going to read it anyway, so I can let you know.

Do you read Chinese, disqualifying authors writing in Chinese from the translation square? If not, Yan Ge (Strange Beasts of China) lives in Ireland and writes in Chinese (except her latest collection which is English originals); Ho Sok Fong is a Chinese Malaysian author living in Taiwan who has a short story collection (Lake Like a Mirror) translated to English, though iirc not every story in it is speculative.

If you do know Chinese obviously it's much harder, though I'm sure there's still someone out there - I know of Shan Sa, who writes in French, but I don't think she's ever done sff.

• The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei (Chinese, English translation from June 2021 so HM currently)
• The Invisible Valley by Su Wei (Chinese)
• The Finno-Ugrian Vampire by Noémi Szécsi (Hungarian)
• The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (Polish, English translation HM)
• But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo (Portuguese, English translation HM)
• Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (Spanish, English translation HM)

Also loads of Chinese danmei (m/m romance) webnovels getting translated these days, I'll leave it to someone more familiar with the scene to make recommendations

It's not really speculative and unless Griffith has said she's done somewhere it's not really a duology; the end of book 2 pretty clearly leaves the door open for at least one more (though it might take another decade to get it)

Still excellent books, though!

City in Glass would work for non-human (hard mode I'm pretty sure) and older protagonist (not hard mode, she's a demon)

I no longer remember the minutia of the power mechanism but I'm sure they're exhaustively explained (I say this with love), but Grace of Kings also has fantasy narwhal riding so you should be good on hard mode either way.

I was thinking of Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom and the Nikolai books for Bardugo duologies, completely forgot about Ninth House. idk what Bingo Law would say on that one; I feel like I personally wouldn't count it if there's clearly more than two books planned unless for some external reason no more books are coming (like an Earthseed situation) but who am I to decide?

Also been meaning to read this one forever, thank you! Though it's tempting to save it for Bard Mode...

Binti and/or Noor by Okorafor would also work (Alanis Morisette ironically, my phone autocorrects Binti to Bingo)

N.K. Jemisin and Leigh Bardugo have both done two duologies, just off the top of my head. I think Carol Berg too?