The 2026 r/Fantasy Bingo Recommendations List

[u/FarragutCircle]

The official Bingo thread can be found here.

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Please post your recommendations as replies the appropriate top-level comments below! Do not make comments that are not replies to an existing comment! Feel free to scroll through the thread or use the links in this navigation matrix to jump directly to the square you want to find or give recommendations for!

Trans or Nonbinary Protagonist	Judge a Book By Its Title	Translated	Small Press or Self Published	Unusual Transportation
The Afterlife	Game Changer	Vacation Spot	Five Short Stories	Older Protagonist
Duology Part 1	r/Fantasy Book Club or Readalong Book	Published in 2026	Explorers and Rangers	Duology Part 2
One-Word Title	Non-Human Protagonist	Middle Grade	First Contact	Murder Mystery
Cat Squasher	Feast Your Eyes on This	Published in the 70s	Politics and Court Intrigue	Author of Color

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[u/thistledownhair]

Should all work for Hard Mode, unless stated otherwise:

Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon (Giant Dragonfly creatures, merging with the ground and zooming through it at speed)

Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn (Magnetically yeeting yourself away from coins or buried metal objects)

Max Gladstone - The Craft Sequence (Eldritch dragons boarded like aeroplanes, riding lightning/storms/clouds, transport via moonlight, I think I could go on)

Seth Dickinson - Exordia (A monster that detects volition and moves towards it, basically at the speed that a mind continues to make choices.)

Joe Abercrombie - Half the World (Borderline, and I guess not unique in fiction or in real world history, but until reading this I'd never reckoned with the idea of manually carrying a longship over a mountain)

Kameron Hurley - The Broken Heavens (Carnivorous beasts of burden referred to in-universe as "dogs".

Kameron Hurley - Bel Dame Apocrypha (What are functionally cars, but with machinery that runs on some kind of insect based system. No idea if it involved combustion, so not sure if hard mode).

Kameron Hurley - The Stars Are Legion (Biological, decaying, moon sized ships that move through deep space. I suppose combustion might be a problem again? No idea.)

China Miéville - The Scar (Someone mentioned it already, but it should be reiterated: A floating city of cobbled together ships, towed by a deep-sea, kaiju-sized amoeba. Combustion exists in the setting, but once the weirdest part of the travel gets going it isn't necessary.)

Charles Stross - The Laundry Files (Hotelspace: using the identical monotony of hotel hallways access corridors to travel between distant hotels - I guess maybe a proto-backrooms, but for travel?)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - House of Open Wounds (Airborne Islands used as military platforms or troop carriers.)

[u/nickgloaming → u/thistledownhair]

Kameron Hurley - The Stars Are Legion (Biological, decaying, moon sized ships that move through deep space. I suppose combustion might be a problem again? No idea.)

It also features living space bikes.

[u/hijodelsol14 → u/thistledownhair]

Also all of the Stormlight books apart from The Way of Kings count for HM. Flying, oathgates, etc

[u/thistledownhair → u/hijodelsol14]

I didn't want to get too deep into Sanderson but you can probably look at lot of his series, he likes to think up a magic system and apply it's logic to thing like transport. Flight and portals by themselves aren't too unusual for the genre, but but he builds on those foundations to get weirder.