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 Count Zero

anchored on:science fictioncyberpunknear futureartificial intelligencevirtual realitynorth america+4 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 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 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 Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

                  similar bynear futurecyberpunkscience fictiontensedarkartificial intelligencevirtual realitybig city+1 more

                  The Sprawl Trilogy is William Gibson's foundational cyberpunk sequence: Neuromancer (1984), in which hacker Case is drawn into a high-stakes heist alongside an artificial intelligence and a damaged ex-soldier, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which widen the same near-future world of corporate power and networked cyberspace to new characters. Johnny Mnemonic, an early short story set in the same fictional milieu, predates the novels and introduces the courier Molly Millions before her role in the trilogy. Together these works established much of cyberpunk's visual and thematic vocabulary.

                • Cover of Snow Crash
                  Snow Crash

                  Neal Stephenson · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunktensevirtual realitybig cityorganized crime+1 more

                  Snow Crash is a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.

                • Cover of Bridge Trilogy
                  Bridge Trilogy

                  series · 4 books · 1990

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkbig citynorth america+5 more

                  The Bridge trilogy is a series of novels by William Gibson, his second after the successful Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy comprises the novels Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999). A short story, "Skinner's Room", was originally composed for Visionary San Francisco, a 1990 museum exhibition exploring the future of San Francisco.

                • Cover of The Shockwave Rider
                  The Shockwave Rider

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkdarktensenorth americabig city

                  The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. It also introduces the concept of a Delphi pool, perhaps derived from the RAND Corporation's Delphi method – a prediction market on world events which bears close resemblance to DARPA's controversial and cancelled Policy Analysis Market.

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiondarkcyberpunkbig city+2 more

                  Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he tracks escaped androids through an irradiated, near-abandoned San Francisco, using the hunt to probe questions of empathy and what separates human from machine. The novel became the basis for Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, and Marvel Comics later published an illustrated adaptation of that film. Together the two trace the story's path from prose original to screen and comic-page adaptation.

                • Cover of Hardwired
                  Hardwired

                  series · 3 books · 1986

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunktense+6 more

                  Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (1986) is an early and influential cyberpunk novel. Voice of the Whirlwind, published three years later, is a loosely connected follow-up set in the same future, sharing its technological and political backdrop with a different cast of characters.

                • Cover of Otherland
                  Otherland

                  series · 6 books · 1996

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiontensevirtual realityartificial intelligencecyberpunkmultiple povvirtual world

                  Otherland is a science fiction tetralogy by American writer Tad Williams, published between 1996 and 2001. The story is set on Earth near the end of the 21st century, probably between 2082 and 2089, in a world where technology has advanced somewhat beyond the present. The most notable advancement is the widespread availability of full-immersion virtual reality installations, which allow people from all walks of life to access an online world, called simply the Net. Tad Williams weaves an intricate plot spanning four thick volumes, and creates a picture of a future society where virtual worlds are fully integrated into everyday life.

                • Cover of Mirador
                  Mirador

                  series · 3 books · 2016

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunktensevirtual realitynorth americabig city+4 more

                • Cover of Halting State
                  Halting State

                  series · 2 books · 2007

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiontensecyberpunkartificial intelligence+4 more

                  Charles Stross's Halting State opens as a near-future police procedural: a bank robbery inside a massively multiplayer online game turns out to mask a much larger cybercrime, investigated through shifting narrators using augmented-reality glasses and always-on networks. Its loose sequel, Rule 34, follows an Edinburgh police officer investigating a string of deaths linked by nothing but an obscure internet meme, in the same near-future Scotland. Both are standalone technothrillers connected by setting and tone rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of The Dervish House
                  The Dervish House

                  Ian McDonald · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiontenseartificial intelligencecyberpunkmultiple povbig city+1 more

                  The Dervish House is a 2010 science fiction novel by British author Ian McDonald. The novel was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2011, and won the BSFA Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in the same year. It was a nominee for the 2011 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The French translation La maison des derviches won the Planete-SF Blogger's Award in 2012.

                • Cover of Make Room! Make Room!
                  Make Room! Make Room!

                  Harry Harrison · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiondarktensenorth americabig cityclass conflict

                  Make Room! Make Room! is a 1966 science fiction novel written by Harry Harrison exploring the consequences of both unchecked population growth on society and the hoarding of resources by a wealthy minority. It was originally serialized in Impulse magazine.

                • Cover of The Supernaturalist
                  The Supernaturalist

                  Eoin Colfer · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkdarktensebig city+1 more

                  The Supernaturalist is a science fiction cyberpunk novel by Irish author Eoin Colfer. The book was influenced by film noir and other predecessors of the cyberpunk science fiction movement. Colfer has outlined plans for a sequel, Avernus.

                • Cover of Synners
                  Synners

                  Pat Cadigan · standalone novel · 1991

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkdarkartificial intelligencevirtual realitybig city

                  In Synners, the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim. A constant stream of new technology spawns crime before it hits the streets; the human mind and the external landscape have fused to the point where any encounter with "reality" is incidental.

                • Cover of The Handmaid's Tale
                  The Handmaid's Tale

                  series · 3 books · 1985

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictionnorth america+1 more

                  The Handmaid's Tale is Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel set in Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy that has overthrown the United States and forces fertile women into reproductive servitude as Handmaids; it is narrated by one such woman, Offred. Atwood returned to the world in her 2019 sequel The Testaments, set fifteen years later and narrated by three women, including the regime's Aunt Lydia. Together the two novels move from Gilead's grip on power toward the first cracks in it.

                • Cover of Moxyland
                  Moxyland

                  Lauren Beukes · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar bynear futurecyberpunkdarktensescience fictionbig city+1 more

                  Moxyland is a cyberpunk dystopian novel written by South African author, Lauren Beukes. The book was published in 2008.

                • Cover of The Night Mayor
                  The Night Mayor

                  Kim Newman · standalone novel · 1989

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkdarkvirtual realitybig cityvirtual world+1 more

                  Welcome to the City made from a dream. But this isn't any dream; it is the dark and haunting nightmare of a killer. It is the near future and old-fashioned movies, or "flatties", have been replaced by Dreams, virtual reality scenarios written by professional Dreamers. When infamous criminal Truro Daine escapes imprisonment, he flees into the City, an artificial world of his own creation, where he rules as the all-powerful Night Mayor.

                • Cover of Player Piano
                  Player Piano

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1952

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiondarkartificial intelligencenorth americaclass conflict

                  In the near future, when cybernetic automation has effectively separated people into two castes, the "engineers and managers", and the remainder of the population who can find work only in "recycling and reclamation" or the largely useless military, an underground movement arises with the intention of rolling back those changes and giving the masses the dignity of owning their own, productive, work once more.

                • Cover of Budayeen
                  Budayeen

                  series · 13 books · 1973

                  completed

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkdarkbig city+2 more

                  George Alec Effinger's Budayeen sequence reimagines the French Quarter of New Orleans as a 22nd-century red-light district in a future Middle Eastern city, where body modification has gone electronic: cybernetic 'moddies' and 'daddies' let people plug in new personalities and skills at will. Its hero, hustler-turned-investigator Marid Audran, works the Budayeen's back alleys across the novels When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, and The Exile Kiss. Budayeen Nights, published after Effinger's death, gathers his shorter fiction set in the same neon-lit quarter.

                • Cover of Feed
                  Feed

                  M. T. Anderson · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkdarknorth america+2 more

                  Feed (2002) is a cyberpunk, satirical, dystopian, young-adult novel by M. T. Anderson, focusing on issues such as American hegemony, corporate power, consumerism, information technology, data mining, and environmental decline, with a sometimes sardonic, sometimes somber tone. From the first-person perspective of a teenaged boy, the book takes place in a near-futuristic American culture completely dominated by advertising and corporate exploitation, corresponding to the enormous popularity of internetworking brain implants called feeds.

                • Cover of Resurrection, Inc.
                  Resurrection, Inc.

                  Kevin J. Anderson · standalone novel · 1988

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiondarktensecyberpunkbig cityclass conflict

                  It is the future--and the dead walk the streets, resurrected by technology to become servants to the living. Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it: a microprocessor brain, a synthetic heart, artificial blood--and anyone with money could buy a Servant with no mind of its own, trained to obey any command. But for every Servant created a living worker was out of a job, and suddenly the profits of Resurrection, Inc. became everyone else's loss. Some take to rioting in the streets, their rampages ruthlessly ended by heavily armed Enforcers, eager for the kill. Others join the ever-growing cult of Neo-Satanism, seeking Heaven in the depths of Hell. Only one man tries to save the world. His name is Danal, and he is the last hope of the living. He is dead, but he remembers everything.

                • Cover of The Thousandth Floor
                  The Thousandth Floor

                  series · 3 books · 2016

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiontensemultiple povnorth americabig cityclass conflict+1 more

                  Katharine McGee's trilogy imagines Manhattan in 2118 as a single thousand-story tower housing every stratum of society, following five teenagers whose ambitions collide as they climb toward, or fall from, its highest floors. Across The Thousandth Floor, The Dazzling Heights, and The Towering Sky, addiction, surveillance, genetic privilege, and family betrayal play out as soap-opera drama in a meticulously built near-future setting.

                • Cover of Stand on Zanzibar
                  Stand on Zanzibar

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1968

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiondarkmultiple povbig city+1 more

                  Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first in part published in New Worlds magazine in 1967 and in book form in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award.

                • Cover of Coldwire
                  Coldwire

                  series · 1 book · 2025

                  similar bynear futurescience fictioncyberpunkdarktensevirtual realitymultiple povclass conflict+1 more

                • Cover of The Jackpot Trilogy
                  The Jackpot Trilogy

                  series · 2 books · 2014

                  similar bynear futurescience fictiontensemultiple povnorth america+3 more

                  William Gibson's Jackpot sequence begins with The Peripheral (2014), a science-fiction thriller cross-cutting between a near-future American town and a devastated London seventy years on. Gibson continued the same world in Agency (2020), set slightly later in the near-future timeline.