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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 Dredd

anchored on:science fictionbig citynear futuredarkdystopiamystery & detective+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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 Handmaid's Tale
                  The Handmaid's Tale

                  series · 3 books · 1985

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictiondystopia+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 The Shockwave Rider
                  The Shockwave Rider

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar bynear futurebig citydarktensetotalitarianismscience fictiondystopia

                  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 Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

                  similar bynear futurebig cityscience fictiontensedark+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 Stand on Zanzibar
                  Stand on Zanzibar

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1968

                  similar bynear futurebig citydarkscience fictionmultiple povdystopia+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 The Sheep Look Up
                  The Sheep Look Up

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar bynear futuredarkbig cityscience fictiondystopia+2 more

                  The Sheep Look Up is a 1972 dystopian science fiction novel by British author John Brunner, dealing with the deterioration of the environment in the United States. It was nominated for the 1972 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

                • Cover of Moxyland
                  Moxyland

                  Lauren Beukes · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar bynear futuredarkbig citytensetotalitarianismscience fictiondystopia

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

                • Cover of A Clockwork Orange
                  A Clockwork Orange

                  series · 4 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar bynear futuredarktotalitarianismscience fictionbig citydystopia

                  Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel is narrated by Alex, a teenage gang leader in a near-future Britain gripped by a youth subculture of extreme violence, recounting his crimes in Nadsat, an invented slang blending English with Russian-derived words. After his crimes catch up with him, Alex is made the subject of a controversial state program meant to forcibly reform his behavior, and the novel uses his ordeal to question whether imposed goodness is worth the loss of free will. It is a standalone novel.

                • Cover of Passion Play
                  Passion Play

                  Sean Stewart · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bynear futuredarkbig citytensemurder investigationscience fictiondystopiamystery & detective+1 more

                  From the author's website: "It is a dark time. The great cities are dying, like the country, from the heart out. The Redemption Presidency tolerates vigilantes who kill according to Biblical example. The police subcontract freelancers to bring in criminals for quick and televised execution. Diane Fletcher is one of these freelancers: a "shaper" cursed with the gift of seeing and feeling the emotions of others. Armed with hunter skills, she takes on the mysterious death of Jonathan Mask, a great actor found electrocuted in the costume of a demon. But even a shaper can become lost in the human labyrinth, where patterns of innocence, guilt, passion and deception lead inevitably into that treacherous territory between justice and vengeance."

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

                  Harry Harrison · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar bynear futurebig citydarktensescience fictiondystopia+1 more

                  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 City of Bohane
                  City of Bohane

                  Kevin Barry · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar bynear futuredarkbig citytenseorganized crimescience fictiondystopia

                  City of Bohane is the debut novel by Ireland's Kevin Barry. The book is set in the year 2053, in a world with minimal technology. It received largely positive reviews and won the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award.

                • Cover of The Circle (Eggers)
                  The Circle (Eggers)

                  series · 2 books · 2013

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismbig cityscience fictiondystopia

                  Mae Holland lands a coveted job at the Circle, a Silicon Valley tech company whose relentless, cheerful push toward total transparency -- 'secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft' -- gradually reveals itself as something closer to soft totalitarianism. Dave Eggers's The Circle follows Mae's rise inside the company as she buys further and further into its ideology, at increasing cost to her own privacy and the people around her. The 2021 follow-up, The Every, picks up with Mae now running the merged tech giant and a new employee questioning it from the inside.

                • Cover of The Children of Men
                  The Children of Men

                  P. D. James · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictiondystopia

                  "The human race has become infertile, and under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiatt, the Warden of England the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably, as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind." (pdjames.co.uk)

                • Cover of Snow Crash
                  Snow Crash

                  Neal Stephenson · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bynear futurebig citytenseorganized crimescience fiction+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 Level 7
                  Level 7

                  Mordecai Roshwald · standalone novel · 1959

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictiondystopia

                  Level 7 is a 1959 science fiction novel by American writer Mordecai Roshwald. It is told from the first-person perspective of a modern soldier, X-127, living in the underground military complex Level 7, where he and several hundred others are expected to reside permanently. X-127 fulfills the role of 'push-button' offensive initiator of his nation's nuclear weapons capacity against an unspecified enemy. X-127 narrates life within a deep shelter before, during and after a nuclear war that wipes out the human species.

                • Cover of High-Rise
                  High-Rise

                  J. G. Ballard · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar bynear futuredarkbig citytensedystopiascience fiction

                  High-Rise is a 1975 novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The story describes the disintegration of a luxury high-rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos. As with Ballard's previous novels Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974), High-Rise inquires into the ways in which modern social and technological landscapes could alter the human psyche in provocative and hitherto unexplored ways. It was adapted into a film of the same name, in 2015, by director Ben Wheatley.

                • Cover of The Thousandth Floor
                  The Thousandth Floor

                  series · 3 books · 2016

                  similar bynear futurebig citytensescience fictionmultiple povdystopia+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 Tomorrow!
                  Tomorrow!

                  Philip Wylie · standalone novel · 1954

                  similar bynear futuredarkbig citytensescience fictiondystopia

                  Conjecture of a tomorrow which brings an attack by the enemy and the destruction of all major cities across an unprepared country.

                • Cover of The Lathe of Heaven
                  The Lathe of Heaven

                  Ursula K. Le Guin · standalone novel · 1971

                  similar bynear futurebig citytensescience fictiondystopia+1 more

                  The Lathe of Heaven is a 1971 science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first serialized in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. It won the 1972 Locus Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the 1971 Nebula Award for Best Novel and 1972 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Two television film adaptations were released: the PBS production, The Lathe of Heaven (1980), and Lathe of Heaven (2002), a remake produced by the A&E Network.

                • Cover of Pastworld
                  Pastworld

                  Ian Beck · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar bynear futurebig citytensemurder investigationscience fictionmultiple povmystery & detective

                  What if all of London were really an amusement park—a whole city returned to Victorian times to entertain visitors from the twenty-first century? That's the wildly original premise of Ian Beck's Pastworld, a high-stakes mystery set in a simulated past. Eve is a lifelong resident of Pastworld who doesn’t know she’s living in a theme park until a mysterious threat forces her to leave home. Caleb is a visiting tourist who finds the lawlessness of the past thrilling—until he suddenly becomes a fugitive from an antiquated justice system. And in the midst of it all, in the thick London fog a dark and deadly figure prowls, claiming victim after victim. He’s the Fantom, a creature both of the past and of the present, in whose dark purpose Caleb and Eve will find their destinies combined. Page-turning, complex, and haunting, Pastworld masterfully exposes the human experience of the past, of violence, of technology, and of entertainment.

                • Cover of Hummingbird Salamander
                  Hummingbird Salamander

                  Jeff VanderMeer · standalone novel · 2021

                  similar bynear futuretensemurder investigationscience fictiondystopiamystery & detective+1 more

                  Hummingbird Salamander is a 2021 novel by American author Jeff VanderMeer. It is set in a near-future dystopia affected by climate change, and narrated by a corporate security consultant, "Jane Smith," who is drawn into a mystery incited by her receipt of a taxidermied hummingbird from an extinct species.

                • Cover of The Windup Universe
                  The Windup Universe

                  series · 3 books · 2005

                  similar bynear futuredarkscience fictiondystopia+2 more

                • Cover of A Song Called Youth / Eclipse
                  A Song Called Youth / Eclipse

                  series · 3 books · 1985

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fiction+2 more

                  The Eclipse Trilogy is a series of three English language cyberpunk science fiction novels by John Shirley consisting of Eclipse (1985), Eclipse Penumbra (1988), and Eclipse Corona (1990).

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

                  similar bynear futurescience fictionbig citydark+1 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 SS-GB
                  SS-GB

                  Len Deighton · standalone novel · 1978

                  similar bybig citydarktensemurder investigationmystery & detectivescience fiction+1 more

                  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.