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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 Devil's Due

anchored on:science fictionalternate historywarearly 20th centurymilitary science fictionrevenge+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 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.

                • DU
                  Destroyermen Universe

                  series · 20 books · 2008

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                • Cover of The War in the Air
                  The War in the Air

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1908

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                  The War in the Air: And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted is a military science fiction novel written by H. G. Wells and published in 1908.

                • Cover of Vatta's War
                  Vatta's War

                  series · 6 books · 2003

                  part of Vatta

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                  Vatta's War is a science fiction series by American writer Elizabeth Moon, comprising five books: Trading in Danger (2003), Marque and Reprisal, Engaging the Enemy (2006), Command Decision (2007), and Victory Conditions (2008). They have been characterized as military science fiction similar in style to the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber and Walter Jon Williams.

                • Cover of Rising Sun
                  Rising Sun

                  Robert Conroy · standalone novel · 2012

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                  "1942: what should have been a decisive victory for the Allies in the Battle of Midway has become a horrendous disaster instead. America's handful of carriers in the Pacific have blundered into a Japanese submarine picket line and most have been sunk. The United States has only one carrier remaining, while the ragtag remnants of U.S. battleships - an armada still reeling from the defeat at Pearl Harbor - are in even worse shape. The Pacific belongs to the Japanese. Yet, despite disaster, the U.S. is determined to strike back. And now a grand plan is put forth to lure the Japanese into an ambush that could restore the balance in the Pacific and give the forces of freedom a fighting chance once more." Goodreads Oct 20, 2022

                • Cover of 1920: America's Great War
                  1920: America's Great War

                  Robert Conroy · standalone novel · 2013

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                  1920: America's Great War is an alternate history novel by the Michigan economics professor Robert Conroy. It was first published as an ebook by Baen Books in November 2013. A hardcover edition followed in December of the same year and then a paperback edition in March 2015. The novel depicts a fictional world in which Imperial Germany had emerged victorious early in World War I and launches a surprise invasion of the United States in 1920 from Mexico. The book's premise is based on an actual plan that Germany had proposed to Mexico during the war.

                • Cover of Janissaries
                  Janissaries

                  series · 4 books · 1979

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                  Janissaries are an American series of military and political-based science fiction novels are set in an interstellar confederation of races, in which humans are a slave race entrusted with military affairs and law enforcement. They were written by Jerry Pournelle, with Roland J. Green co-authoring the second two books.

                • Cover of The Leviathan Trilogy
                  The Leviathan Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2009

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                  Set in an alternate First World War, Leviathan splits the belligerents into Clankers, who fight with mechanical walkers, and Darwinists, who fight with fabricated living creatures built from spliced DNA. Scott Westerfeld follows a British girl disguised as a boy to serve on a living airship and the exiled heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne as their paths collide, continuing across Behemoth and Goliath. Keith Thompson's illustrations are integral to all three books, alternating text chapters with illustrated sequences.

                • Cover of Honor Harrington
                  Honor Harrington

                  series · 14 books · 1993

                  part of Honorverse

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                  David Weber's Honor Harrington novels follow the title character's rise through the Manticoran navy in the 'Honorverse,' a space-opera setting built around Age-of-Sail-style naval combat, interstellar politics and a decades-long war between rival star nations. Beginning with On Basilisk Station, the core series runs to fourteen books, alongside spin-off subseries, prequels and shared-world anthologies also set in the Honorverse. It's one of the longest-running modern military science fiction series, published by Baen.

                • Cover of SS-GB
                  SS-GB

                  Len Deighton · standalone novel · 1978

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                  It's November 1941 in a Britain that lost the war: Operation Sea Lion succeeded, Churchill was executed, and the King is a prisoner in his own Tower of London. Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, still working homicide for the Metropolitan Police under German occupation, catches what looks like a routine case, a well-dressed man murdered above an antiques shop, until the body's oddities point toward something far more dangerous than burglary gone wrong. Archer's investigation collides with occupation politics, the British resistance, and rival factions of the SS and the German Army, each wanting the case to go a different way. Len Deighton's alternate-history spy thriller.

                • Cover of The Lost Regiment
                  The Lost Regiment

                  series · 9 books · 1990

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                  William R. Forstchen's Lost Regiment series begins with Rally Cry, in which a Civil War Union regiment is swept onto a distant world where humans transplanted from many eras and cultures are farmed as food by an alien race. Arriving with nineteenth-century gunpowder weapons and organized tactics, the regiment's survivors fight to build a defensible nation and turn the war back on their captors, a conflict that escalates across nine novels of technology, politics, and generations.

                • Cover of Red Inferno: 1945
                  Red Inferno: 1945

                  Robert Conroy · standalone novel · 2010

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                  Red Inferno: 1945 is a 2010 novel written by Robert Conroy, the author of other alternate history novels.

                • Cover of Vatta
                  Vatta

                  universe · 10 books · 2003

                  Start hereVatta's War · Start here

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                  Get kicked out of the Academy and the family still hands you a ship. That is the arithmetic Kylara Vatta lives by. Born into Vatta Transport, Ltd. — a dynasty of interstellar traders who reckon their honor in delivered cargo and honored contracts — Ky wants a soldier's commission and gets a merchant hull instead. Then someone starts murdering her relatives and burning the ledgers, and the daughter learns that a trade fleet, armed and angry, is its own kind of war. This is military science fiction run on a merchant's books. The core cycle, Vatta's War, moves in five volumes — Trading in Danger, Marque and Reprisal, Engaging the Enemy, Command Decision, Victory Conditions — as piracy, a sabotaged faster-than-light communications network, and a scattered family push Ky from cautious captain to fleet commander. The later duology Vatta's Peace (Cold Welcome, Into the Fire) drops her, older and decorated, into a colder survival ordeal on her own homeworld. Moon writes clean, competent, procedural: supply lines and boarding actions, chains of command, the cost of a signature on a bad contract. Expect capable women, hard decisions costed to the last credit, and space combat that respects physics and paperwork alike. Begin at the beginning — Trading in Danger — and read straight through in publication order; the arc is chronological and cumulative, no side doors required.

                • Cover of How Few Remain Universe
                  How Few Remain Universe

                  series · 11 books · 1997

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                  How Few Remain opens Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory timeline, imagining a North America where the Confederacy won the Civil War. Set mostly in 1881-1882, it follows political and military figures on both sides of a divided continent as old grievances resurface into a new war. It's a single novel here, but the starting point for a much longer alternate-history sequence Turtledove extended across both twentieth-century world wars.

                • Cover of Oswald Bastable
                  Oswald Bastable

                  series · 5 books · 1971

                  part of Moorcock's Multiverse

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                  Oswald Bastable follows an Edwardian-era British soldier flung into a series of alternate futures where the First World War never happened, opening with The Warlord of the Air (1971). Across the trilogy he drifts between rival empires and airship wars, an early and influential example of what would later be called steampunk. Michael Moorcock's A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy sits within his wider multiverse of linked worlds and recurring avatars of the Eternal Champion.

                • Cover of Conquerors
                  Conquerors

                  series · 3 books · 1994

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                  Conquerors is Timothy Zahn's military science-fiction trilogy following human fighter pilots and their commanders through an interstellar war that neither side fully understands, told across Conquerors' Pride, Conquerors' Heritage, and Conquerors' Legacy. Zahn alternates perspective between the human and alien chains of command, using the shifting viewpoints to slowly unpick why the conflict started in the first place. It's contact-and-conflict SF built around miscommunication rather than straightforward invasion.

                • WU
                  Worldwar Universe

                  series · 8 books · 1994

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                • Cover of Barney Custer
                  Barney Custer

                  series · 3 books · 1914

                  completed

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                  Barney Custer is an American farmer from Nebraska who travels to the small European kingdom of Lutha only to discover he's the spitting image of its unstable ruler, King Leopold. Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Mad King drops him into court intrigue on the eve of World War I, as a scheming uncle's plot for the throne and a budding romance with a princess force Barney to impersonate the king he resembles. It's a standalone Ruritanian adventure rather than an ongoing series.

                • Cover of Sten
                  Sten

                  series · 11 books · 1982

                  completed

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                  The Sten Chronicles, also called The Sten Adventures, are a series of eight military science fiction and space opera novels by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole published from 1982 to 1993. The series was originally published by Del Rey and then re-released by Orbit.

                • Cover of Days of Infamy
                  Days of Infamy

                  series · 2 books · 2004

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                  Harry Turtledove's Days of Infamy duology reimagines the Pacific theater of World War II with an alternate outcome at Pearl Harbor: a Japanese invasion and occupation of Hawaii rather than a single carrier strike. Days of Infamy covers the invasion itself, while End of the Beginning follows the ensuing occupation and eventual counter-invasion. As in his other alternate-history work, Turtledove follows the changed war through a wide, rotating cast of civilian and military viewpoints.

                • Cover of A Century of Progress
                  A Century of Progress

                  Fred Saberhagen · standalone novel · 1983

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                  For centuries two meg-powers from the future have been waging war for control of timelines of history. Alan Norlund, a WWII airman vet, is promised a life saving cure for his granddaughter, if he will undertake a mission fifty years back in time to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Hitler with his 'angels' from the opposing power would like to take over our timeline and 1933 Chicago may be just the place to start.

                • Cover of 1945
                  1945

                  William R. Forstchen & Newt Gingrich · standalone novel · 1995

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                  1945 is an alternate history novel written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen in 1995 that described the period immediately after World War II in which the United States had fought only against Japan, which allowed Nazi Germany to force a truce with the Soviet Union, and the two victors confront each other in a Cold War, which swiftly turns hot.

                • Cover of Empire of Man
                  Empire of Man

                  series · 4 books · 2001

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                  The Empire of Man is a series of science fiction books by David Weber and John Ringo published by Baen Books. It combines elements of space opera and military science fiction.

                • Cover of 1942
                  1942

                  Robert Conroy · standalone novel · 2009

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                  1942 is an alternate history novel written by Robert Conroy. It was first published, as an e- book, by Ballantine Books on February 24, 2009, with a hardcover edition following from the same publisher in March 2009. The novel won the 2009 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

                • Cover of Axis of Time
                  Axis of Time

                  series · 7 books · 2004

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                  The Axis of Time trilogy is an alternative history series of novels written by Australian journalist and author John Birmingham, from Macmillan Publishing.