A nonrealistic fantasy culture-clash novel for all ages about two species, both somewhat distinct from grayliens, where one group is obligate carnivores and the other herbivores. The book focuses on a herbivore ambassador to the carnivore city, and alternates between surreal illustrations that the herbivore is telepathically transmitting back home, narrative from the perspective of the ambassador's host as they try to be a good host, and various records of the minutes of the council meetings on each side. The herbivores are generally presented as overly paranoid and hypervigilant, with the ambassador constantly distorting the actual events as something horrifying, although there are also some hints that the carnivore host is being overly positive about some things themself, and the two slowly get to understand each other better and better. The climax involves the herbivores nearly declaring war on the carnivore city when they believe their ambassador has been murdered, and the carnivores preparing for war due to an unintentional insult, but by now the host and ambassador have become fast friends/romantic interests (it's not entirely clear and could go either way) and manage to stop the war from erupting. The last scene is the herbivore ambassador carefully trying a meat dish, a callback to a previous discussion about the two species having an omnivorous common ancestor.

The periverse has:

A setting bible¹ for a world divided into the material (normal mass governed by the laws of physics) and ethereal (magic, souls, minds). There are several types of sapient creature, such as vampires (ex-humans who can't produce ether on their own and must feed on the ether of others, the most effective way to do so being to drink blood, since humans' material bodies are bonded to their ethereal bodies, or souls), zombies (subset of vampires that eat flesh instead and gain a corresponding boost to physical strength), fairies (creatures that are entirely ethereal), angels (Really Powerful creatures that are entirely ethereal), and constructs (creatures that are entirely material). There's a weak masquerade but not much in practice actually stops interested humans from learning magic, particularly if they know how to summon fairies to teach them or if they have a natural talent for sensing the ethereal.

A novel about children for children where a preteen group of friends has extremely perilous adventures solving mysteries and fighting monsters! None of the protagonists actually die in this one but every member of the friend group comes pretty close in different and exciting ways. 

A novel about children for adults where the highest stakes are "the protagonist is nervous about an upcoming piano competition because what if they make a mistake." It's full of detailed descriptions of home life where all four of the protagonist's parents take very good care of them and make good food and take them on fun activities - each parent has different hobbies and interests that they're delighted to share with the protagonist (and not too disappointed if they're not up to an activity on a particular day). The parents are all able to attend the piano competition, and even though the protagonist makes a minor mistake towards the beginning of the piece they aren't disheartened and manage to finish the piece without freezing up.

A prism² set in a magic system where the protagonists are on opposing sides of a divide between the light-mages and the dark-mages. Much of the story is powered by the fact that light-magic and dark-magic are fueled by opposed aspects of one's self and personality, meaning that while the protagonists may share a basic underlying personality and template attractors, different parts of their self have been encouraged and harnessed over the course of their lifetime.

(The periverse also has nonfiction but that probably won't show up on the fiction site.)

¹A popular genre in the periverse is "extremely thorough writeups of how a setting works." There's no plot; just descriptions of the SFF elements (the periverse doesn't draw a strong distinction between "fantasy" and "science fiction," so there's a term that covers both magic systems as well as things like the warp drive), alternate histories, types of cultures present, and so on. Typically setting bibles will also have descriptions of how the characters and/or plots of other media properties would alt into the setting in question.

²Extremely popular genre where alts meet each other. There are several subgenre: more earthficcy ones where the protagonists discover their althood after a lot of amusing-in-hindsight personality clashes, more magical ones where alts know they share a (usually telepathic in some way) connection but live far away, and ones where several sets of alts of different people meet up through multiversal travel.

Grayliens

That's pretty straightforwardly a culture-clash-perspective-taking novel, with a lot of moral-luck-context-framing. The framing narrative seems to think that carnivorism and herbivorism is... completely equivalent? She can think of some historical cultures that valorized hunting for food, but she really thinks all of them focused on the hunt. Some people need meat to be healthy but this is hardly the same thing as eating vegetables! It gets warnings for an unreliable narrator and false-equivalence, category tag vegetarianism, and a strong ignoring-suffering warning, category animals.

There's a central enemies-to-importantpeople storyline, though neither of them seem to have any anchoring importantpeople at home, which Ilaria finds vaguely stressful to read. She pokes around the tagging sites for a bit and eventually finds a realworldalien-social-assumptions warning, for potentially discomfiting ones, and adds that. There don't seem to be more specific conventions yet, though there's a lively discussion on one of the forums on the difference between unsettling implications and missing moods and confusing-social-cues-stress.

This is well within Ilaria's suspense tolerance but she reads completely untagged books for fun. She gives it a 7 on the suspense scale and a 3 on the unpredictable plot scale.

It has... a lot of images. Wow. Do most grayliens like trying to extract plot-important information from abstract images? She's sure someone somewhere has written that, but it sounds like a high-effort-puzzle book and Ilaria last read one of those when she was 9 and still thought that figuring them out meant she was Very Smart And Special. She tags it mixed-format and nontext-plot (category images, 30%), and unintentional-puzzle, and adds a surreal-confusion warning tag.

Selected other tags: low-systemicizing-spec-fic, alt-physics, two-contrast, moral-lesson (category bridging fundamental differences), writing complexity 5, plot complexity 4, general effort 8, graylien-fantasy*

* This tag borrows the graylien genre word

A fantasy novel set in a world where nothing makes sense, every culture has their own superstitions and all the superstitions seem to be true at once, even contradictory ones. The central protagonist-pair is an asexual man and a trans woman (who manages to use magic to transition, kind of as a side note, roughly halfway through the story, it's not a major focus). The dynamic between this core pair is strong- They're deep and carefully thought out characters. They take lots of notes on local superstitions and travel to new places together and pretend to be husband and wife (or at least a polycule-core-pairing) in most places they visit because lots of places have helpful superstitions about couples. The pretending-to-be-married is held out as a metaphor for not fitting into society, it's kind of awkward. The two are intimate friends, just not in a romantic or sexual way. They avoid danger on the roads and make friends and enemies, and try to do science to superstitions. They eventually piece together that whether you believe something will work has a strong influence on whether it will actually work, and people's superstitions seem to be getting more and more grim and hopeless. They are horrified by the implications and form a secret conspiracy to try and spread more positive, hopeful spiritual beliefs, starting a spiritualist healing cult that has a good initial reception. It stops there with a clear sequel hook.

A book about TRAINS, BOATS, AIRPLANES, and ROCKETSHIPS! Its framing device is pretty minimal, the book almost seems to be a textbook in disguise. Or at most, a collection of short stories about what particular vehicles mean to particular people, light and cheery and hopeful and excited. The various characters and their jobs or reasons for being on a train, boat, airplane, or rocketship are pretty clearly mostly set dressing in favor of rambling nerdy rants about how these various vehicles work and what tradeoffs are made in their design and the historical value of particular models and the lovingly researched process of engineering them (with historical context included in the scenes of old-timey engineers discussing things) and what a difference having excellent vehicles makes to individuals in a society and the various situations in which design mistakes happened and a long rant that somehow diverts into tax policy about how much more efficient trains are than cars and much lamenting on how rockets are way too expensive for everyone to get to ride on one.

A drama told entirely through forum posts complete with avatars, usernames, timestamps, and edit histories. A clique of friends forms an interest group on the internet for a made-up MMO video game. At first they enjoy the small and slowly growing community, but then an event in-game makes their forum explode massively in popularity and the original founders are unsure what to do about it. There is much drama about bad behavior on the forums and how much moderation/oversight is too much and ten page debates on minor changes to the posted rules and complaining about the developers' changes to the MMO. It's largely played for humor rather than politics. The whims of the internet. One of the group is caught getting advance tips on upcoming changes from a game moderator, and this is seen as a massive scandal and immense violation that everyone is upset about - that seems less political and more like a stock trope? Eventually the original friend group splits on a strong disagreement about whether develop their own offshoot of the game. To cling to the past nostalgically, or move on?

A working group has been put together to curate a collection of some the Union's most significant or impressive works. These are some of the selections they've made for fiction. (The form of the submission is a box containing paper books, naturally.) Excepting the book of lies, all are certified for accuracy*.

A fantasy novel in which people have physical 'souls' which record their memories, instincts, and parts of their personalities. Moreover, it is possible to 'eat' the soul of a dead person and gain some of their memories and instincts. Since this is transitive, and most souls are eaten after death, some small part of most people lives on for hundreds or thousands of years after their death, although transmission is lossy. The story who follows a young monk and his life in a monastery (which is equal parts academic and spiritual). One day, returning from an errand, he discovers that the entire monastery has been slaughtered by an errant monster. Alarmed, he hastily eats as many of the souls of the dead that he can before they expire, almost one hundred in total. This is many more than most people ever consume, and for the rest of the story he is afflicted by mysterious visions and impulses. In the aftermath of the massacre, he travels to the nearest military outpost to report the attack, only to discover that they too have been overrun. Soon learning that a large group of monsters have penetrated civilization's defensive lines and are now heading inwards, towards populated areas, he sets off for the nearby large city to warn them. Along the way, the intuition borne of the souls he consumed helps him narrowly avert disaster several times, and he comes to trust it. After reaching the city, he helps organize its defense, and distinguishes himself. After the crisis is resolved, he is recognized as an exceptionally wise and resourceful leader, and accepts a position on the city's ruling council.

A memoir written by a woman who grew up as a member of one of the last isolated primitive tribes of the great river forest. When she is a young woman, a group of Hadarite missionaries arrive, bearing gifts. Once they learn the language, they tell stories of faraway lands, vast cities, great wealth, and an incredible amount of knowledge about the natural world. Most of her tribe is skeptical, but she, ever curious, listens to them with rapt attention. After a year, they depart. She chooses to accompany them to the city, leaving her old life and family behind. Over the next several years, she attends a school, and learns a great number of things---the knowledge of more than a thousand years of civilization—very, very fast. The book describes in detail her thoughts and inner experience, and what it was like for her life and view of the world change so much so quickly. She seems to have found it both overwhelming and exhilarating. During her time in the city, she also comes to grips with an entirely foreign culture, and the book recounts various stories of misunderstandings or confusions on her part or on the part of others, not used to people with her background. These events are not only humorous, but also offer a deep look into both cultures, and the unstated assumptions and beliefs that underlie them. (This book is popular in the Union for its rare perspective on Hadarite culture, and the curators expect that, for similar reasons, it will be useful to help other worlds understand that culture.) The increased comfort and security available to her in her new life is also a significant change, although she seems to find this less important than what she's learning. After studying for several years, she returns home to visit. After so long, and dressed in foreign clothing, they do not recognize her at first. When they do, they welcome her back, and ask her about her travels. She struggles to recount the most magnificent things she's seen or learned, but finds it difficult to communicate why they mean so much to her when her audience lacks the background knowledge to understand. In her time away, she has grown accustomed to Hadarite culture, and must make an effort to remember what it was like to be so different, to know so little. Realizing that she cannot go back to the life she once had, she departs for good. It is a bittersweet farewell. She returns to the city, begins a career as a biologist, and (as described by the afterword) eventually makes several significant discoveries and is acclaimed as one of the greatest minds of her era.

This book isn't fiction, precisely, but it's definitely not nonfiction either. The most common religion on Olam, called Hadar, is centrally about truth. A fringe sect (allegedly) believes that the best way to learn truth is to be exposed to lies—the trickier the better—examine them, and learn from them how to overcome illusions. This book, written by a member of that sect, is one of the most acclaimed examples of what are known as 'books of lies'. Not everything is a lie, of course, or else you would be able to reverse them and consistently discover what the author really thinks. Instead, the book is a careful mixture of truths and falsehoods, some more obvious than others. It combines various arguments about philosophy, psychology, sociology, and history into a strangely persuasive theory of everything. This book is clearly labeled as not-reliably-true, and the included advice recommends reading this carefully, treating it as a challenge to discern which parts of it are true and which are false, and avoiding drawing any strong conclusions from the text, even if you're pretty sure you've got it right. The curators have included an 'answer sheet', containing the priesthood's best judgments about which parts are true and where the deceptions lie (although it is strongly cautioned that they could have missed something). It is strongly recommended not to distribute these answers, except to a small group of sanity-checkers who will be in a position to notice if your extra-dimensional civilization has a special vulnerability to any of the deceptions contained herein. If used in accordance with the provided instructions, the curators expect this book to be much more valuable as a learning exercise than it is dangerous.

(There are other books of lies, designed to be deceptive taking into account that you expect to be deceived, those are much more dangerous and the curators thought it best not to send any to other worlds just yet.)

A book of post-post-apocalyptic speculative fiction (set on Olam) in which, in the aftermath of an improbably dangerous plague that killed most of the population, the survivors rebuild civilization. It follows seven characters from all around the world, of various ages, genders, and social roles, over a period of several decades. In this period, substantial recovery and reconstruction takes place, and isolated lands come back into contact with one another. Many decades of separation—and varying consequences of and reactions to the plague and its aftermath—cause the already distinct cultures of these various lands to diverge further. When characters from these separate populations meet, they are struck by the differences between them, and seek to understand each other and draw together despite those differences. The book focuses most on its examination of the cultural and economic consequences of the plague, and contains several appendixes detailing the timeline of events, how the economic and cultural conditions changed over time, and why they changed in those ways. The plot, in comparison, is rather straightforward and unsurprising.

*'Accuracy' in this context, seems to be related to how safe it is to draw conclusions about the world from a work. In the case of fiction, it mainly has to do if the work's implicit or explicit models of psychology, sociology, economics, biology, etc. are accurate.

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the morality of executions, while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony.