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- Lunar Chronicles
series15 books2011
similar byadventurousother star systemsfar future
The Lunar Chronicles is a series of four young adult science fiction novels, a novella, and a short story collection written by American author Marissa Meyer and published by Feiwel & Friends. Each book entails a science fictional twist on a classic fairy tale, including "Cinderella", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Rapunzel", and "Snow White". Set in a futuristic world inhabited by various species and creatures, tensions are rising between Earth and its former colony Luna, while both attempt to manage an ongoing pandemic.
- Vorkosigan
universe27 books1986
Start hereShards of Honor · Chronological start
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On Barrayar they will tell you that a man is measured by his forebears and the straightness of his spine — which is a difficulty for Miles Vorkosigan, born brittle-boned and half-height into the highest military caste of a planet that not long ago left such infants on the hillside to die. Beyond his backwater lies the wormhole nexus: a scatter of human worlds strung along unstable jump-routes, where a blood-and-honor warrior aristocracy, a coolly egalitarian utopia, and a hundred lesser polities trade, spy, and go to war. Miles cannot pass the physicals. So he builds himself a fleet, a false name, and a career out of sheer talky brilliance and a constitutional refusal to sit still. Lois McMaster Bujold has spent decades on this future, and it reads as one long life more than a franchise. It opens a generation early with Miles's mother, Cordelia — a level-headed survey captain from Beta Colony who marries into Barrayaran politics — before handing the saga to Miles himself, from teenage con-artist admiral to Imperial troubleshooter, and eventually to the next generation. Around that spine stand companion novels set elsewhere in the nexus: Falling Free, among the engineered zero-gee "quaddies"; Ethan of Athos; and the later books. Many volumes are gathered into omnibuses; several have taken Hugo Awards. The pleasure is voice and heart more than hardware — comedies of intrigue that turn, without warning, into hard questions about disability, ambition, biology as destiny, and what honor costs the people who keep it. Newcomers have two clean doors: Shards of Honor (paired with Barrayar as Cordelia's Honor) for the chronological start, or The Warrior's Apprentice to meet Miles at full velocity.
- Barsoom
series53 books1917
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Barsoom is a fictional representation of the planet Mars created by American pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first Barsoom tale was serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912 and published compiled as a novel as A Princess of Mars in 1917. It features John Carter, a late-19th-century American Confederate veteran who is mysteriously transported from Earth to the dying world of Mars where he meets and romances the beautiful Martian princess Dejah Thoris. Ten sequels followed over the next three decades, further extending his vision of Barsoom and adding other characters.
- The League
series15 books1994
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Sherrilyn Kenyon's The League opens with Born of Night, a science-fiction romance centered on an assassin protagonist, continuing across more than a dozen further 'Born of...' novels.
- Foundation Universe
universe123 books1940
Start hereFoundation · Start here
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There is a science that reads the future of quadrillions the way an astronomer reads the orbits of stars. It is called psychohistory, and its equations foresee something the ruling Galactic Empire cannot admit: the throne is rotting, and thirty thousand years of barbarism are coming. One man, Hari Seldon, cannot stop the fall. He can only shorten it — by seeding a Foundation of scholars at the rim of the galaxy, a fragile institution built to carry knowledge across the dark and cut the interregnum to a single millennium. This is a universe told in the register of history itself: the long view, the calm of deep time, empires measured in centuries and men measured against them. The spine is Asimov's original trilogy — Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation — followed decades later by the sequels Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth and the prequels Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. Late in life Asimov braided this in with his other future histories: the Robot novels of detective Elijah Baley and his humaniform partner R. Daneel Olivaw (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) and the early Galactic Empire novels (Pebble in the Sky and its kin), until one continuous chronicle ran from the first thinking robots to the Second Empire. Other hands extend it — the Second Foundation Trilogy by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, and shared-world spinoffs such as Robot City — so the corpus sprawls beyond a single author's tidy shelf. What distinguishes it is that the drama is intellectual: crises resolved by insight, nerve, and dialogue rather than fleets and blades, each turn hinging on the hidden logic of the Seldon Plan. Begin where readers have always begun — with Foundation, and the original trilogy in publication order. The rest opens outward from there.
- Defy the Stars (Claudia Gray)
series3 books2017
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