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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 Chasing Time

anchored on:our worldcontemporary

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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 The Resurrection Wager
                  The Resurrection Wager

                  Christopher Coates · standalone novel · 2018

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fictiontime travel

                  • "When a man of science and a man of faith develop the ability to go back in time, there is only one place for them to go to demonstrate their new technology. After they make a wager about whether or not the resurrection of Jesus really happened, the two set out to prove it one way or the other. Along the way, they face obstacles and challenges from those who want to use their technology for personal gain." ― quoted from this book's product page on Goodreads.com as of 2020-05-28.

                • Cover of Our Children's Children
                  Our Children's Children

                  Clifford D. Simak · standalone novel · 1974

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fictiontime travel

                  From the back cover of the first DAW printing: "They were our children's children, and they came one day from nowhere - walking through holes in the air into our world. By means of one-way time tunnels, they fled the ravening beasts with teeth, claws and tentacles, that reproduced like bacteria and were intelligent. They fled to escape the uncontrolled horror of their own far future, and we, their distant ancestors, housed and fed and comforted them, content in their assurance that the tunnel was securely guarded from the beasts, whatever or whoever they were. But then somebody up there slipped and the beasts were abroad..."

                • Cover of Departure
                  Departure

                  A. G. Riddle · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fictiontime travel

                  "The world's past and future rests in the hands of five unwitting strangers in this definitive edition of A. G. Riddle's time-traveling, mind-bending speculative thriller. En route to London from New York, Flight 305 suddenly loses power and crash-lands in the English countryside, plunging a group of strangers into a mysterious adventure that will have repercussions for all of humankind.Struggling to stay alive, the survivors soon realize that the world they've crashed in is very different from the one they left. But where are they? Why are they here? And how will they get back home? Five passengers seem to hold clues about what's really going on: writer Harper Lane, venture capitalist Nick Stone, German genetic researcher Sabrina Schroeder, computer scientist Yul Tan, and Grayson Shaw, the son of a billionaire philanthropist.As more facts about the crash emerge, it becomes clear that some in this group know more than they're letting on--answers that will lead Harper and Nick to uncover a far-reaching conspiracy involving their own lives. As they begin to piece together the truth, they discover they have the power to change the future and the past--to save our world. or end it. A wildly inventive and propulsive adventure full of hairpin twists, Departure is a thrilling tale that weaves together power, ambition, fate, memory, and love, from a bold and visionary talent"--

                • Cover of The Guardians of Time
                  The Guardians of Time

                  series · 4 books · 2002

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporarytime travel

                  Guardians of Time is a trilogy of novels written by Marianne Curley. The plot of the trilogy consists of the Guardians of Time, trying to protect the past, present, and future by traveling into the past to thwart their enemies, and the Order of Chaos, who are trying to change past events to give themselves more power.

                • Cover of The Apocalypse Troll
                  The Apocalypse Troll

                  David Weber · standalone novel · 1999

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fictiontime travel

                  The Apocalypse Troll is a novel by American writer David Weber, first published by Baen Books in January 1999. It is a story about time travel and alien invasion.

                • Cover of Footfall
                  Footfall

                  Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fiction

                  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 Fury
                  The Fury

                  series · 4 books · 1976

                  similar bytensecontemporary+2 more

                  John Farris's The Fury centers on a teenage girl and boy with escalating psychic and telekinetic powers who become targets of a covert government program trying to weaponize them. The 1976 novel, adapted into Brian De Palma's 1978 film, gave rise to a string of later sequels following the same family's psychic bloodline across decades. Farris writes it as paranoid conspiracy thriller as much as horror, with the powers themselves treated as a violent, destabilizing force.

                • Cover of Cell
                  Cell

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2006

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                  In Cell, King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.

                • Cover of Recursion
                  Recursion

                  Blake Crouch · standalone novel · 2019

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fictiontime travel

                  Recursion is a thriller science fiction novel by American writer Blake Crouch, first published in the United States in June 2019 by the Crown Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. The novel explores themes of memory, identity, and time.

                • Cover of All This and More
                  All This and More

                  Peng Shepherd · standalone novel · 2024

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fictiontime travel

                  A game show uses a technology that allows contestants to revise their past lives to change their present ones.

                • Cover of Ascension
                  Ascension

                  Nicholas Binge · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fiction+1 more

                  Ascension is a 2023 novel by Nicholas Binge, published in the UK by Harper Voyager, and in the US by Riverhead Books. It is published or forthcoming in twelve languages, and a film adaptation is in development. The novel tells the story of Harold Tunmore, a physicist, who joins a team to climb a mountain that has appeared in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

                • Cover of The Green Futures of Tycho
                  The Green Futures of Tycho

                  William Sleator · standalone novel · 1981

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fictiontime travel

                  Publisher's description: "When he finds an ancient, egg-shaped object with which he travels back and forth in time, eleven-year-old Tycho grapples with several terrible futures he sees for himself and his family."

                • Cover of The Andromeda Strain
                  The Andromeda Strain

                  series · 2 books · 1969

                  similar bytensecontemporaryscience fiction+1 more

                  Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain follows a team of scientists racing to contain a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism that crash-lands in Arizona, told in the clinical, document-driven style that helped establish the techno-thriller genre. Daniel H. Wilson's authorized 2019 sequel The Andromeda Evolution revisits the same threat five decades later. Together the two books form a two-part outbreak story separated by a fifty-year gap in publication.

                • Cover of Timescape
                  Timescape

                  Gregory Benford · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bytenseour worldscience fictiontime travel

                  WorldCat: In the year 1998, a group of scientists works desperately to communicate with the scientists of 1962, warning of an ecological disaster that will destroy the oceans in the future--if it is not averted in the past.

                • Cover of WWW Trilogy
                  WWW Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2009

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                  The WWW Trilogy is a trilogy of science-fiction novels by Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. The first book, Wake, was originally serialized in four parts in Analog Science Fiction and Fact from November 2008 to March 2009, published in book form through Ace on April 7, 2009, and was followed by the second book, Watch, on April 6, 2010. Wonder was published in 2011.

                • Cover of Deception Point
                  Deception Point

                  Dan Brown · standalone novel · 2001

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                  Deception Point is a 2001 mystery-thriller novel by American author Dan Brown. It is Brown's third novel. It was published by Simon & Schuster.

                • Cover of The Fog
                  The Fog

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1975

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                  The Fog is a horror novel by English writer James Herbert, published in 1975. It is about a deadly fog that drives its victims insane when they come into contact with it.

                • Cover of When the Sleeper Wakes
                  When the Sleeper Wakes

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1899

                  similar bytenseour worldscience fictiontime travel

                  Graham, an insomniac Englishman in 1890s London, takes a course of sleep-inducing drugs and falls into a coma that lasts two centuries. He wakes in the year 2100 to find his investments have compounded, through a ruling body called the White Council, into effective ownership of most of the world's wealth and power, making him, on paper, humanity's master, and in practice, its prisoner, held under guard while the Council governs in his name. A rebel faction led by a man named Ostrog frees him, hoping to use his symbolic authority to spark an uprising against the Council. An early H. G. Wells dystopia about inherited power and manufactured consent.

                • Cover of Digital Fortress
                  Digital Fortress

                  Dan Brown · standalone novel · 1998

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                  Digital Fortress is a techno-thriller novel written by American author Dan Brown and published in 1998 by St. Martin's Press. The book explores the theme of government surveillance of electronically stored information on the private lives of citizens, and the possible civil liberties and ethical implications of using such technology.

                • Cover of Dark Matter
                  Dark Matter

                  Blake Crouch · standalone novel · 2016

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                  Jason Dessen, college physics professor, husband and father, is kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe where his counterpart had dedicated his life to inventing a method of traveling between an infinity of parallel universes.

                • Cover of The Wanderer
                  The Wanderer

                  Fritz Leiber · standalone novel · 1964

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                  The Wanderer is a science fiction novel by American writer Fritz Leiber, published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in 1964. It won the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

                • Cover of The Visitors
                  The Visitors

                  Clifford D. Simak · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bytenseour worldcontemporaryscience fiction

                  WorldCat: Intelligent, alien creatures arrive on Earth from outer space, threatening world stability and presaging the destruction of civilization.

                • Cover of Running Out of Time
                  Running Out of Time

                  series · 2 books · 1995

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                  Margaret Peterson Haddix's Running Out of Time follows Jessie, who believes she lives in the frontier village of Clifton, Indiana, in 1840 — until a diphtheria outbreak kills several children and her mother reveals the truth: it is actually 1996, and Clifton is a reconstructed historical tourist village cut off from the outside world. Sent by her mother on a desperate mission for real medicine, Jessie discovers a modern world stranger and more threatening than she imagined, with her own life on the line. Falling Out of Time continues her story.

                • Cover of The Eternal Enemy
                  The Eternal Enemy

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1993

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                  A VCR that could tape tomorrow's news. Rela has just bought herself a new VCR. She sets the machine to tape a movie she plans to show at a party she is throwing. But instead of the movie she gets the news - tomorrow's news. Soon Rela is regularly recording next week's news, even what is to happen in the far future. It's fun, at first, until she sees herself on the news. And learns that there is no future for her. But can she change destiny? Can Rela survive what is meant to be?