More like A Sacred Devotion
but
- Kairos
series11 books1962
completed
similar by+1 more
The Time Quintet is a science fantasy series of five young adult novels written by American author Madeleine L'Engle and made up of A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989).
- Kai Lung
series62 books1900
completed
Kai Lung is a fictional character in a series of books by Ernest Bramah, consisting of The Wallet of Kai Lung (1900), Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922), Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928), The Moon of Much Gladness, Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree (1940), Kai Lung: Six (1974) and Kai Lung Raises His Voice (2010).
- Dream Archipelago
series16 books1976
completed
similar byliterary & general
Christopher Priest's Dream Archipelago stories return again and again to a vast chain of islands stretched across a world locked in permanent, distant war between two continental powers, without ever quite settling whether the archipelago is a real place or something closer to collective dream or fiction within the fiction. Novels like The Affirmation and The Islanders, along with numerous short stories, revisit the setting from different, often contradictory angles rather than building one continuous narrative. The ambiguity between what's real and what's invented is treated as the point, not a gap to be resolved.
- Cities of the Red Night
series3 books1981
completed
similar byliterary & general+1 more
William S. Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night opens his final trilogy with two interwoven stories: a pirate utopia loosely modeled on the historical Captain Mission, and a present-day detective's investigation into a ritual killing, both shadowed by a plague spreading from a set of lost cities. The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands continue in the same fragmented, cut-up-influenced style rather than a conventional through-line. The three books are linked more by recurring imagery and obsessions, control, contagion, alternate history, than by a shared cast.
- A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
Julian Barnesstandalone novel1989
similar byliterary & generalour world
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by English writer Julian Barnes published in 1989 is usually described as a novel, though it is actually a collection of subtly connected short stories, in different styles. In a review Joyce Carol Oates describes them as "a gathering of prose pieces, some fiction, others rather like essays".
- A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom
John Boynestandalone novel2020
similar byliterary & generalour world
- Flatland
series2 books1884
similar by+1 more
Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions imagines a two-dimensional world of geometric beings, using its narrator's brush with higher dimensions as both a mathematical thought experiment and a satire of Victorian social rank. Ian Stewart's 2001 Flatterland follows a descendant of that narrator on a tour of stranger geometries, from curved and multidimensional space to relativity, as a knowing homage to Abbott's original. Together they pair a Victorian mathematical classic with its modern sequel.
- Universe of Gulliver
universe34 books1726
Start hereGulliver's Travels · Start here
A ship's surgeon with appalling luck keeps washing up in countries that have solved the problem of being human in some appalling new way. Lilliput, where the great question of the age is which end of an egg to break. Brobdingnag, where a king hears out a description of Europe and concludes that its inhabitants are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin. Laputa, floating and abstracted above the island it taxes. And the land of the Houyhnhnms, where the horses are rational and the humans are not. Jonathan Swift published it in 1726 as a genuine traveller's account, and the trick worked. What is collected here is that book and its long afterlife: the eighteenth-century continuations printed as further Travels into Several Remote Nations, the Victorian retellings that trimmed it down to a story about a giant tied up by tiny people, and the picture-book Lilliputs that followed. It is satire with a smile on and a knife behind it — precise, patient, and colder the further in you read. The first two voyages are the ones everybody knows; the fourth is the one that changes what the first two meant. Read Gulliver's Travels whole and in order if you can, and treat the abridgements gathered here as what they are: souvenirs from the shallow end.
- Lord of the Flies
William Goldingstandalone novel1954
similar byliterary & generalour world
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of prepubescent British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves that lead to a descent into savagery. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.
- Stephen King multiverse
universe46 books1967
Start hereThe Gunslinger · Start here
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. So begins the long walk of Roland Deschain, last of an order of knight-errant pistoleers, across a land that has "moved on" — where the compass points drift, dead machines rot toward sentience, and the weave of what's real wears thin. His quest is the Dark Tower itself: a spire standing at the hub of every world that exists, the linchpin that holds all of them back from ruin. Roland's road runs eight volumes, from The Gunslinger through the closing Dark Tower, with the later, interleaved tale The Wind Through the Keyhole folding a story-within-a-story back into his youth. Along the way he draws a ka-tet — a fellowship bound by fate, not choosing — through doorways between worlds: a heroin-shackled New Yorker, a woman of two minds, a boy who dies twice. The Tower is also the secret axle around which the wider shelf of King's work turns; threads from The Stand, 'Salem's Lot and beyond wind quietly toward it. Expect a mongrel of Western, high fantasy, horror and decayed science fiction, told in a dusty, incantatory dialect all its own — ka, thankee-sai, the world that has moved on. This is King at his most mythic and most personal, a decades-spanning circle that rewards a patient reader. Begin at the beginning: The Gunslinger, then walk forward in publication order. There are other worlds than these — but this door opens first.
- After Such Knowledge
series7 books1953
completed
similar by+1 more
After Such Knowledge is James Blish's loosely linked trilogy on the costs of forbidden or dangerous knowledge. It opens with A Case of Conscience, in which a Jesuit scientist studying a seemingly sinless alien race is forced to weigh what he finds against his own faith, continues with the historical novel Doctor Mirabilis about the medieval friar and scientist Roger Bacon, and closes with the two-part Black Easter, in which a magician is hired to loose Hell's demons upon the world for a single day. The three books share a theme rather than a continuous plot or cast.
- East of Laughter
R. A. Laffertystandalone novel1988
- Mother Night
Kurt Vonnegut & Jr.standalone novel1962
similar byliterary & generalour world
Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American playwright who grew up in Germany, writes his memoirs from an Israeli prison cell awaiting trial for war crimes. As the Nazis rose to power, Campbell stayed on, married a German actress, and was recruited by an American agent to serve as a double agent, broadcasting Nazi propaganda over the radio while secretly passing coded intelligence to the Allies. The catch, as Campbell tells it, is that he became one of the war's most effective propagandists in the process, whatever his loyalties. Kurt Vonnegut's darkest novel asks what a person becomes when the mask he wears for a cause is indistinguishable from his face.
- The Mouse That Roared
series6 books1955
completed
similar by+1 more
The Mouse That Roared launches Leonard Wibberley's satirical series about the tiny fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a European microstate whose leaders declare war on the United States purely to lose quickly and collect the postwar reconstruction aid given to defeated nations. The 1955 novel uses Fenwick's mismatched ambitions to poke fun at Cold War politics and the nuclear arms race, and Wibberley kept the joke going across four more novels into the 1970s. Later entries send the duchy into further absurd confrontations with the wider world, including a race to the Moon and a scheme on Wall Street.
- Crash
J. G. Ballardstandalone novel1973
similar byliterary & generalour world
Crash is a novel by J. G. Ballard, first published in 1973 with a cover designed by Bill Botten. It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents.
- VALIS
series4 books1981
completed
similar by+2 more
The VALIS trilogy is a set of science fiction/philosophical novels by author Philip K. Dick which include VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). Dick's first novel about the VALIS concept originally titled "VALISystem A", was published as Radio Free Albemuth after Dick's death in 1985.
- Charlotte's Web
E. B. Whitestandalone novel1952
similar byliterary & general+1 more
When he discovers that he is destined to be someone's dinner, Wilbur the pig is desolate until his spider friend Charlotte decides to help him. (WorldCat)
- The Collected Science Fiction and Fantasy of Jack London
series6 books1906
completed
similar byour world
