Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like A Hidden Enemy

anchored on:adventuresurvivalour worldcontemporarymiddle gradefound family+2 more

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of Watership Down
                  Watership Down

                  series · 21 books · 1972

                  completed

                  similar bysurvivaladventurousfound familyour worldcontemporary+2 more

                  Watership Down is Richard Adams's 1972 novel following a group of rabbits who flee the destruction of their warren and cross the English countryside of Hampshire in search of a new home, developing over the journey a full rabbit culture of language, proverbs, and mythology. Adams returned to the same world in 1996 with Tales from Watership Down, a collection of nineteen short stories mixing rabbit folklore with further adventures of characters from the novel.

                • Cover of Airman
                  Airman

                  Eoin Colfer · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar byadventureour worldsurvivaladventuroustense

                  Airman, by Eoin Colfer, is a best-selling historical adventure novel set in the 19th century. It was released in the UK, Ireland and US in January 2008. The novel was shortlisted for the 2009 Carnegie Medal.

                • Cover of Maximum Ride
                  Maximum Ride

                  series · 12 books · 2005

                  similar byadventurousour worldfound familysurvival+3 more

                  Maximum Ride is a series of young adult science fantasy novels by American author James Patterson. The series centers on the adventures of Maximum "Max" Ride and her family, called the Flock, who are winged human-avian hybrids created at a lab called The School. The series was inspired by Patterson's earlier novels When the Wind Blows and The Lake House, which were intended for older readers.

                • Cover of Shane Schofield
                  Shane Schofield

                  series · 5 books · 1998

                  similar bycontemporarysurvivaladventuroustenseour world+1 more

                  Shane 'Scarecrow' Schofield is a US Marine captain who leads his unit through single-location, high-body-count action thrillers set in an Antarctic ice station, a disputed Pacific island, and a maximum-security prison built into a mountain, among others. Matthew Reilly's series opens with Ice Station (1998) and keeps escalating its set-pieces across Area 7, Scarecrow, Hell Island, and Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves. It's fast, gleefully over-the-top military action rather than realistic technothriller territory.

                • Cover of Dirk Pitt
                  Dirk Pitt

                  series · 12 books · 1973

                  completed

                  similar byadventurecontemporaryadventuroustenseour world

                  Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels follow the title character, a two-fisted marine engineer and de facto field agent for the fictional National Underwater and Marine Agency, through globe-spanning adventures mixing undersea salvage, historical mystery, and international conspiracy. The run collected here spans The Mediterranean Caper (1973) through Valhalla Rising (2001), the earlier stretch of a series Cussler continued for decades with later co-authors.

                • Cover of Animals of Farthing Wood
                  Animals of Farthing Wood

                  series · 11 books · 1979

                  similar byadventuresurvivalcontemporaryour worldmiddle grade+2 more

                  The Animals of Farthing Wood is a series of books about a group of woodland animals. It originated with the 1979 book, The Animals of Farthing Wood, by Colin Dann, and was followed by six sequels and a prequel by Dann. An animated Animals of Farthing Wood television series based on the books aired in the 1990s, created by the European Broadcasting Union.

                • Cover of Jack Howard
                  Jack Howard

                  series · 8 books · 2005

                  similar byadventurecontemporaryadventuroustenseour world

                • Cover of The Copernicus Legacy
                  The Copernicus Legacy

                  series · 6 books · 2014

                  similar byadventurecontemporaryadventurousmiddle grade+2 more

                  The Copernicus Legacy is a book series written by Tony Abbott. It is about the adventures of Wade Kaplan, Darrell Kaplan, Lily, Becca Moore, Roald Kaplan, and Sara Kaplan, as they try to destroy a time machine made by Ptolemy but discovered and used by Nicolaus Copernicus, from the dangerous Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia. It currently has four books in the main series, but two are in a series diverted from The Copernicus Legacy called Copernicus Archives. While a work of fiction, it does incorporate some facts about Copernicus's history.

                • Cover of Danger Guys
                  Danger Guys

                  series · 6 books · 1994

                  similar byadventurecontemporaryour worldmiddle grade+3 more

                • Cover of Jack West, Jr.
                  Jack West, Jr.

                  series · 7 books · 2005

                  similar byadventureour worldcontemporary+2 more

                  Matthew Reilly's Jack West Jr. series opens with Seven Ancient Wonders (2005), an action-adventure thriller sending Jack West Jr. on a globe-spanning hunt tied to the ancient wonders of the world. The series continues its countdown structure through The Six Sacred Stones and five further novels, ending with The One Impossible Labyrinth (2021).

                • Cover of Whalefall
                  Whalefall

                  Daniel Kraus · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar bysurvivaladventureour worldcontemporarytense

                  Whalefall is a 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus about a teenage scuba diver who is swallowed by a sperm whale. Its cover art is by Will Staehle.

                • Cover of Temple
                  Temple

                  Matthew Reilly · standalone novel · 2001

                  similar byadventureour worldcontemporaryadventuroustense+1 more

                  Temple is a thriller novel written by Australian author Matthew Reilly and first published in 1999. Like Reilly's other books, Temple's major attractions are the fast pace and the complexity of the action scenes.

                • Cover of The Outlaw of Torn
                  The Outlaw of Torn

                  Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1927

                  similar byadventureour worldadventuroustense

                  Raised from childhood by a vengeful royal fencing master who wants him turned into a weapon against the English crown, Norman of Torn grows up in 13th-century England knowing only combat and contempt for the nobility. By nineteen he leads the kingdom's largest band of outlaws and carries a king's ransom on his head, yet a priest's influence has left him with a streak of chivalry. Amid rebellion against King Henry III, Norman joins Simon de Montfort's rebels, and finds himself drawn to de Montfort's daughter despite a startling resemblance to the crown prince. An early adventure novel from Edgar Rice Burroughs.

                • RS
                  Roland Smith's Cryptid Series

                  series · 5 books · 1998

                  similar byadventurecontemporaryadventuroustensemiddle grade+1 more

                • Cover of Philip Mercer
                  Philip Mercer

                  series · 2 books · 1998

                  similar byadventureour worldcontemporaryadventuroustense

                • Cover of Watchers
                  Watchers

                  Dean R. Koontz · standalone novel · 1987

                  similar byadventurecontemporarysurvivaladventuroustense

                  This probably qualifies as a science-based adventure rather than a science fiction novel. The premise, and only speculative fiction element, is that a U.S. government funded laboratory creates a golden retriever that's as intelligent as a human for use in intelligence gathering and also creates a monkey hybrid that's intended for a military police dog role and as a killing machine on battlefields. The animals escape and the story plays out as a straight adventure novel with a good chunk of romance thrown in.

                • Cover of Footfall
                  Footfall

                  Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar byour worldcontemporarysurvivaltense+1 more

                  When aliens travel to Earth from Alpha Centauri, differences between alien and human psychology result in an unprovoked invasion, and the resulting resistance results in the aliens' use of a devastating weapon.

                • Cover of The Lost Ark
                  The Lost Ark

                  J. R. Rain · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byadventurecontemporarysurvivaladventuroustense

                  In a lonely bar in eastern Turkey, ex-National Geographic photojournalist Sam Ward is hired to find an eccentric professor who disappeared high atop Mount Ararat, fabled resting spot of Noah's Ark. Accompanied by the professor's beautiful daughter, archaeologist Faye Roberts, Sam soon stumbles upon a secret stronghold—a base of operation for unleashing hell on earth. Now running for their lives, Sam and company are about to come face-to-face with the greatest archaeological discovery of all tiime...

                • Cover of Micro
                  Micro

                  Michael Crichton & Richard Preston · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar bysurvivalour worldcontemporarytense+1 more

                  Micro is a techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton, the seventeenth under his own name and second to be published after his death, published in 2011. Upon his death in 2008, an untitled, unfinished manuscript was found on his computer, which would become Micro. Publisher HarperCollins chose science writer Richard Preston to complete the novel from Crichton's remaining notes and research, and it was finally published in 2011. Micro followed the historical thriller Pirate Latitudes, which was also found on his computer and published posthumously in 2009.

                • Cover of Atlantis (Thomas Greanias)
                  Atlantis (Thomas Greanias)

                  series · 3 books · 2005

                  similar byadventureour worldcontemporaryadventuroustense

                  Archaeologist Conrad Yeats teams up with Vatican linguist Serena Serghetti to chase the truth behind Atlantis and the origins of the human race in Raising Atlantis, a globe-trotting thriller that Thomas Greanias followed with The Atlantis Prophecy and The Atlantis Revelation. Greanias originally planned a longer series; this trilogy stands as the completed core of a larger Atlantis mythology he later expanded through prequels and spin-offs.

                • Cover of The Cave Girl
                  The Cave Girl

                  Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1925

                  similar byadventuresurvivaladventurousour world

                  The Cave Girl is a lost world novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. Originally published in two separate stories, The Cave Girl begun in February 1913 and published by "All-Story" in July, August, and September 1913; and The Cave Man begun in 1914 and published by "All-Story Weekly" throughout March and April 1917. The book version was first published by A. C. McClurg on 1925-03-21. In August 1949, Dell Paperback published a version with a map captioned "Wild Island Home of Nadara the Cave Girl Where Violence and Bloodshed Rule."

                • Cover of Living
                  Living

                  series · 2 books · 2013

                  similar bysurvivaladventurecontemporarytenseadventurous+1 more

                • Cover of Congo
                  Congo

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byadventuresurvivaladventuroustense

                  WorldCat: On an expedition to return Amy, his talking gorilla, to her home in the Congo, Professor Peter Elliot is joined by others who hope to find a legendary diamond mine guarded by mutant gorillas.

                • Cover of Kalahari
                  Kalahari

                  Jessica Khoury · standalone novel · 2015

                  similar byadventuresurvivalcontemporaryadventuroustense

                  Sarah and her father have lived in the Kalahari as researchers for years, and have created a home there. Ever since Sarah's mother had died, her part in the family has grown. In need of money for research, Sarah and her father agree to take 5 chosen students to take on a week trip in the Kalahari Desert. Poachers invade the area, chasing after a lion that seems to be the colour of finest mercury, a virus created called metallcium, the living metal. This animal hasn't been seen before and makes everyone question. Sarah's father heads out for a little bit to stop the hunters, but doesn't return. The colour of that lion though makes Sarah question everything she has ever known.