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 Andra

anchored on:science fictionfar futureyoung adultcoming of ageidentitytense

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 about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • 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 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 The Chrysalids
                  The Chrysalids

                  John Wyndham · standalone novel · 1955

                  similar bytensescience fictioncoming of agefar future+1 more

                  The Chrysalids is a science fiction novel by British writer John Wyndham, first published in 1955 by Michael Joseph. It is the least typical of Wyndham's major novels, but regarded by some as his best. An early manuscript version was entitled Time for a Change.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games Universe
                  The Hunger Games Universe

                  universe · 5 books · 2008

                  Start hereThe Hunger Games · Start here

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futureyoung adultdystopia+1 more

                  Panem, they call it now — a nation raised on the drowned bones of North America, a glittering Capitol ringed by twelve districts it once starved into obedience. Every year the Capitol collects its debt in children: two tributes from each district, drawn by lottery, dropped into an engineered arena, and made to kill one another on live television while the whole country is required to watch. This is the Hunger Games — entertainment, punishment, and government at once. Suzanne Collins tells it in a compact, unified body of work. The founding trilogy — The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay — follows Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the coal-mining District 12 who volunteers in her sister's place and becomes something the Capitol never scripted. Two prequels reach back into the same machinery: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes traces a young Coriolanus Snow long before he is President, and Sunrise on the Reaping returns to District 12 a generation ahead of Katniss. Begin with the trilogy, in order — it is Katniss's voice, close and present-tense, that makes Panem breathe, and the prequels land hardest once you know how her story ends. Beneath the spectacle sits one steady, uncomfortable question: who profits when we agree to look away.

                • Cover of Tunnel in the Sky
                  Tunnel in the Sky

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1955

                  similar bytensescience fictioncoming of agefar futureyoung adult

                  As the final test of a survivalist/explorer class, teenagers are dumped on an alien planet to use their skills while awaiting pickup. But something has gone wrong, and they find they are on their own.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games
                  The Hunger Games

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  part of The Hunger Games Universe

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futureyoung adultdystopia+1 more

                  The Hunger Games is a series of young adult dystopian novels written by American author Suzanne Collins. The series consists of a trilogy that follows teenage protagonist Katniss Everdeen, as well as two prequels. The Hunger Games universe is a dystopia set in Panem, a post-apocalyptic North American country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and 12 districts in varying states of poverty. As punishment for rebellion, the Capitol hosts an annual battle royale competition called The Hunger Games. Each of the 12 districts must send two children between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate, and the last surviving child is dubbed the victor.

                • Cover of The House of the Scorpion
                  The House of the Scorpion

                  series · 2 books · 2002

                  similar bytensescience fictioncoming of ageyoung adultdystopia+2 more

                  Matt is a clone of El Patron, the ancient drug lord who rules Opium, a narco-state carved out of the border between the U.S. and a future Mexico, created and raised solely to supply spare organs for the man he was copied from. Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion follows Matt's growing awareness of what he is and what's expected of him, and his fight to be treated as human once El Patron dies. The sequel, The Lord of Opium, picks up with Matt unexpectedly left in charge of the whole corrupt nation.

                • Cover of Imperial Galaxy
                  Imperial Galaxy

                  series · 2 books · 2012

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of ageidentityfar futureyoung adult+1 more

                  Prince Khemri has spent his life as one of ten thousand princes bred and trained by a sprawling galactic empire, expecting eventual rule -- until he learns just how disposable princes actually are, and how routinely they're assassinated by their own siblings. Garth Nix's A Confusion of Princes follows Khemri through the empire's ruthless military, its secret intelligence service, and a deadly, decades-long competition to determine who might one day take the throne. It's a single, self-contained space opera rather than an ongoing series.

                • Cover of This Perfect Day
                  This Perfect Day

                  Ira Levin · standalone novel · 1970

                  similar bytensescience fictionidentityfar futuredystopia

                  This Perfect Day is a science fiction novel by American writer Ira Levin, about a technocratic dystopia. Levin won a Prometheus Award in 1992 for this novel. This Perfect Day is one of two Levin novels yet to be adapted to film.

                • Cover of Takeshi Kovacs
                  Takeshi Kovacs

                  series · 3 books · 2002

                  similar bytensescience fictionidentityfar future+1 more

                  Takeshi Kovacs is a former elite soldier turned freelance troubleshooter in a future where human consciousness can be digitized and transferred between bodies, or sleeves, making death an inconvenience for those who can afford new ones. Richard Morgan's trilogy - Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies - moves Kovacs through noir-inflected mysteries on different worlds, using the resleeving premise to interrogate class, violence, and what, if anything, survives a person's original body. It became the basis for a Netflix series.

                • Cover of Chaos Walking
                  Chaos Walking

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futureyoung adultdystopia+1 more

                  Chaos Walking is a young adult science fiction series written by American-British novelist Patrick Ness. It is set in a dystopian world where all living creatures can hear each other's thoughts in a stream of images, words, and sounds called Noise. The series is named after a line in the first book: "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking." The series consists of a trilogy of novels and three short stories.

                • Cover of Divergent
                  Divergent

                  series · 10 books · 2011

                  similar bytensescience fictionidentitydystopiayoung adult+1 more

                  Divergent, also known as The Divergent Series, is a series of young adult dystopian novels by American novelist Veronica Roth set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian Chicago. The trilogy consists of Divergent (2011), Insurgent (2012), and Allegiant (2013). A related book, Four (2014), presents a series of short stories told from the perspective of one of the trilogy's characters, the male love interest Tobias. A later short story, We Can Be Mended (2018), serves as an epilogue five years after the events of the trilogy, again from Tobias/Four's perspective.

                • Cover of The Ferryman
                  The Ferryman

                  Justin Cronin · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar bytensescience fictionidentityfar futuredystopia

                  The Ferryman is a 2023 dystopian fiction novel by Justin Cronin. The protagonist, Proctor Bennett, is a titular "ferryman", responsible for transporting elderly citizens to be reborn. Proctor gradually realizes that his utopian life is not what it seems. The Ferryman is Cronin's first novel since 2016's The City of Mirrors.

                • Cover of Citizen of the Galaxy
                  Citizen of the Galaxy

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1957

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of ageidentityfar future+1 more

                  On a planet far distant from Earth, a lame beggar buys a young boy slave who has forgotten his origins. The beggar is more than he seems, and gives the boy an extensive education while employing him as an observer of activity in their city. Years later, the beggar is captured by the government, and the youth must escape the planet.

                • Cover of Ship Breaker
                  Ship Breaker

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar bytensescience fictionyoung adult+4 more

                  Nailer works a light-crew scavenging copper wire and scrap from beached oil tankers on a Gulf Coast reshaped by rising seas and vanished order, until a wrecked clipper ship washes ashore carrying a half-drowned girl from the wealthy world he'll never belong to. Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker follows Nailer as helping her pulls him out of his abusive father's orbit and into a much larger, more dangerous game involving her family's fortune. The sequels The Drowned Cities and Tool of War widen the same flooded, resource-scavenging future to new characters and coastlines.

                • Cover of Matched
                  Matched

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futureyoung adultdystopia+2 more

                  Ally Condie's dystopian trilogy follows Cassia, a teenager in a rigidly controlled Society that assigns citizens' spouses, careers, and even manner of death, after a glitch shows her a second face at her own Matching ceremony. Across Matched, Crossed, and Reached, her quiet doubt about the Society's choices grows into open resistance against the system that shaped her whole life.

                • Cover of Glasshouse
                  Glasshouse

                  Charles Stross · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar bytensescience fictionidentityfar future

                  Robin wakes in a rehabilitation clinic with his memory deliberately erased, convinced that whoever tried to kill him before is still out there. To disappear completely, he volunteers for an experimental study recreating a vanished slice of 20th/21st-century society inside a closed habitat called the glasshouse -- a former high-security detention facility for war criminals -- and is assigned a female body and a new name, Reeve. As the simulation's rules of gender and conformity close in, Reeve starts to suspect the experiment's organizers are running something considerably darker than sociology. A standalone posthuman-future novel by Charles Stross.

                • Cover of Dayworld
                  Dayworld

                  series · 5 books · 1971

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futureidentitydystopia

                  Dayworld is a trilogy of science fiction novels by Philip José Farmer, inspired by his own short story "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World". They are set in a dystopian future in which people are allowed to live only one day of the week. For the rest of the six days, they are "stoned", kept in a kind of suspended animation. The novels focus on a man, Jeff Caird, who is a daybreaker: someone who lives more than one day a week. As the series progresses, the main character seems to be suffering from dissociative identity disorder. The novels comprising the trilogy are:Dayworld (1985) Dayworld Rebel (1987) Dayworld Breakup (1990)

                • Cover of Shade's Children milieu
                  Shade's Children milieu

                  series · 2 books · 1997

                  similar bytensescience fictioncoming of ageyoung adultdystopia

                  Shade's Children is set on an Earth where all adults vanished overnight fourteen years earlier, leaving children to be harvested at puberty by the machines that now run the world, unless they escape into hiding with Shade, a mysterious AI-like protector. Garth Nix's 1997 novel is a single, self-contained book rather than a series, though its bleak post-apocalyptic premise has drawn comparisons to his other work.

                • Cover of Across the Universe
                  Across the Universe

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futureyoung adult+3 more

                • UU
                  Uglies Universe

                  series · 9 books · 2005

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adultdystopia+4 more

                  Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series is set roughly three centuries in the future, after industrial collapse, in a society that classifies everyone by mandatory cosmetic-surgery life stages - Uglies, Pretties, Middle Pretties, and Crumblies - policed by the surveillance division Special Circumstances. Tally Youngblood, the original tetralogy's protagonist, initially awaits her own operation before learning it also surgically dulls independent thought, driving her toward the hidden resistance community called the Smoke. Beyond the four core novels (Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras), the franchise extends into other formats, including the manga-influenced graphic novel Shay's Story, co-written with Devin Grayson, and a later Impostors spin-off series.

                • Cover of A Dusk of Demons
                  A Dusk of Demons

                  John Christopher · standalone novel · 1993

                  similar bytensescience fictioncoming of agefar futureyoung adult

                  A Dusk of Demons is a young adult science fiction novel written by the British author John Christopher and published in 1993. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future in England where it is believed that demons rule Earth.

                • Cover of The 100
                  The 100

                  series · 4 books · 2013

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futureyoung adult+2 more

                  The 100 is a series of young adult science fiction novels by Kass Morgan. The first book in the series, The 100, was published on September 3, 2013, by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. Day 21, its sequel, was released on September 25, 2014, and Homecoming was released on February 26, 2015. A fourth novel, Rebellion, was released on December 6, 2016.

                • Cover of Double Star
                  Double Star

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1956

                  similar byscience fictionidentityfar future+1 more

                  Lorenzo Smythe, the excellent yet unemployed actor, meets Dak Broadbent in a bar. Broadbent hires Lorenzo for an unspecified role, and hustles him onto a rocket ship. Broadbent turns out to be an assistant to the famous interplanetary politician and leader of the Expansionist party: John J. Bonforte. Bonforte, however, has been kidnapped by the political opposition on Mars, and due to Lorenzo's physical similarity to Bonforte, his staff wants Lorenzo to impersonate the politician for an important Martian ceremony.

                • Cover of Maze Runner
                  Maze Runner

                  series · 11 books · 2009

                  similar bytensescience fictionyoung adultdystopia+2 more

                  The Maze Runner is a series of young adult dystopian science fiction novels written by American author James Dashner. The series consists of the trilogy The Maze Runner (2009), The Scorch Trials (2010) and The Death Cure (2011), as well as two prequel novels, The Kill Order (2012) and The Fever Code (2016). A novella titled Crank Palace (2020) and a companion book titled The Maze Runner Files (2013) have also been released. A sequel trilogy in the series titled The Maze Cutter takes place 73 years following the events of The Death Cure and consists of the novels The Maze Cutter (2022), The Godhead Complex (2023), and The Infinite Glade (2025).

                • Cover of Red Planet
                  Red Planet

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1949

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of agefar future+1 more

                  A boy colonist on Mars takes his bouncing ball Martian pet with him to boarding school, but the new Headmaster is a controlling tyrant. Things get worse when he discovers a plot that will jeopardize all of the colonists.