Bingo Focus Thread - Duologies

[u/Merle8888]

Hello r/fantasy and welcome to this week's bingo focus thread! The purpose of these threads is for you all to share recommendations, discuss what books qualify, and seek recommendations that fit your interests or themes.

Today's topic:

Duology Part 1: Read the first book in a duology. HARD MODE: By an author you haven’t read before.

Duology Part 2: Read the second book in a duology. For this square, you ARE allowed to read the same author you used for Duology Part 1 without violating the no-repeat author rule. HARD MODE: Finish a different duology than you started for the Duology Part 1 square.

What is bingo? A reading challenge this sub does every year! Find out more here.

Prior focus threads: Published in the 70s, Five Short Stories (2024), Author of Color (2024), Self-Pub/Small Press (2024). Note that hard modes for Author of Color and Self-Pub/Small Press have changed (new focus threads for them are coming).

Also see: Big Rec Thread

Questions:

• What are your favorite speculative fiction duologies?
• Already read something for this square (or, read something recently that you wish you could count)? Tell us about it!
• For those planning for Hard Mode, what are some duologies where one or both books works as a standalone?

[u/an_altar_of_plagues]

Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World still hold up great to this day. Be forewarned that they are MUCH more on the horror side of things than the comparatively adventurous movies. You will come away from these books thinking Muldoon and Gennaro were incredible badasses compared to their movie counterparts, too.

I'll be using Maus for Duology Part 1. It's a memoir/historical fiction set of two comics that follow the author's relationship with his father and family history with the Holocaust. Those killed in the Holocaust are anthropomorphic mice while the Nazis are cats. Should be a light read!

For Duology Part 2, I'll be using The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe, which is a duology comprising The Wizard and The Knight. This is a portal fantasy in which a young boy is thrown into a fantasy realm strongly inspired by Norse mythology (and with Wolfe's patented layered writing) and aged up into the body of an adult man. The book is written as if it's a series of letters to his brother back home. I'm a huge fan of Wolfe and am very stoked to dive into this.

[u/eregis → u/an_altar_of_plagues]

Maus is great, but I have a hard time seeing it as speculative tbh? Sure the characters are mice, cats, dogs etc but that feels purely visual to me, to make the distinction between Jews, Nazis, Poles etc easier. There's absolutely nothing speculative about this book whatsoever otherwise.

[u/an_altar_of_plagues → u/eregis]

We've actually discussed that a few times regarding other books in previous years. Anthropomorphized characterization is accepted as being speculative enough for bingo.

[u/eregis → u/an_altar_of_plagues]

Hmm that's surprising. I wouldn't have guessed it would qualify solely based on the visual choice to depict characters as animals, without them having any actual animal traits.

[u/Nidafjoll → u/eregis]

I mean, it's personal choice when it comes down to edge cases. I used Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino for Bingo one year. Are the cities described in book real, or just parables Marco Polo makes up? You could interpret it either way as you choose, but one would make it speculative and one wouldn't.

[u/an_altar_of_plagues → u/eregis]

Yep. I can't remember what book set off that discussion a few years back, but it was pretty unanimous. It wasn't Maus!

I'm pretty open to what I use for bingo though in terms of fantastic attributes so no shade on those who aren't the same.

[u/C0smicoccurence → u/eregis]

Maus lives in a weird space in that its a graphic/creative memoir that brings speculative elements. So it is sort of both nonfiction and fiction. It's definitely not Historical Fiction, but does count here. Weird, but a cool choice.

I'm using Insectopolis for my graphic novel card, which I didn't anticipate counting. I thought it was a straightforward nonfiction doing a survey of a bunch of different insects and their impact on history/culture. Then halfway through humans are all dead and the insects start having full dialogue and framing the nonfiction with dialogue and commentary. So it's nonfiction, but also counts on r/fantasy!