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Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

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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

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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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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 a machine intelligence — an AI, computer mind, or sentient program — is a central character or the story's driving problem.
  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories driven by deliberate modification of genomes — designer organisms, engineered humans, and the consequences of remaking life.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • 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.
  • Stories following an expedition into the unknown — uncharted lands, lost cities, and the discovery or ruin waiting at the end.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • 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.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • 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.
    • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
    • 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.
    • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
    • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
    • 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 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.
    • 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 propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • 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 Stand on Zanzibar
            Stand on Zanzibar

            John Brunner · standalone novel · 1968

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            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 Cryptonomicon
            Cryptonomicon

            Neal Stephenson · standalone novel · 1999

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            There are two main timelines in this novel. This first is during World War II, and follows the lives of three cryptologists: Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse (American), Alan Turing (British), and Rudolf von Hacklheber (German), as well as the strange exploits of Detachment 2702. The second timeline takes place during the present, filled with the offspring of the main characters in the first timeline. They are preoccupied with the construction of a data haven.

          • Cover of The Windup Universe
            The Windup Universe

            series · 3 books · 2005

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          • Cover of Station Eleven
            Station Eleven

            Emily St. John Mandel · standalone novel · 2014

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            "Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time — from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains — this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet." (source: Goodreads.com)

          • Cover of Mother of Storms
            Mother of Storms

            John Barnes · standalone novel · 1994

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          • Cover of Teranesia
            Teranesia

            Greg Egan · standalone novel · 1999

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            from the flaps of the HarperPrism first printing: "Welcome to Teranesia, the island of butterflies, where evolution has stopped making sense. Prabir Suresh lives in paradise, a nine-year-old boy with an island all his own to name, to explore, and to populate with imaginary monsters stranger than any tropical wildlife. Teranesia is his kingdom, shared only by his biologist parents and baby sister, Madhusree. The unexplained genetic mutation of the island's butterflies that brought his family to the remote South Moluccas barely touches Prabir; his own life revolves around the beaches, the jungle, and the schooling and friendship made possible by the net. When civil war breaks out across Indonesia, this paradise comes to a violent end and his family is broken apart, leaving Prabir with nagging feelings of guilt and an overwhelming, almost irrational sense of responsibility for his sister. The mystery of the butterflies remains unsolved but nearly twenty years later reports begin to appear of strange new species of plants and animals appearing throughout the region - species separated from their known cousins by recent, dramatic mutations that seem far too efficient and functional to have arisen by chance from pollution, disease, or any other random catastrophe. Madhusree is now a biology student; proud of her parents' unacknowledged work, and with no memories of the trauma of the war to discourage her, she decides to join a multinational expedition being mounted to investigate the new phenomenon. Unable to cast off his fears for her safety, Prabir reluctantly follows her. But travel between the scattered islands is difficult, and Madhusree's expedition is out of contact. In the hope of finding her, Prabir joins up with an independent scientist, Martha Grant, who has come to search for clues to the evolutionary mystery and whatever commercial benefits it might bring to her sponsor. As Prabir and Martha begin to untangle the secret of Teranesia, Prabir is forced to confront his past, and to face the painful realities that have shaped his life while also dealing with the implications of an unprecedented biological revolution. A Scientific mystery, an adventure story, and a meditation on the origins of love, Teranesia is Greg Egan's most ambitious and accessible novel yet."

          • Cover of The Healer's War
            The Healer's War

            Elizabeth Ann Scarborough · standalone novel · 1988

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            The Healer's War is a 1988 science fiction novel by American writer Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1989. The story is about a military nurse during the Vietnam War.

          • Cover of The Firework-Maker's Daughter
            The Firework-Maker's Daughter

            Philip Pullman · standalone novel · 1995

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            The Firework-Maker's Daughter is a children's novella by Philip Pullman. It was first published in the United Kingdom by Doubleday in 1995. The first UK edition was illustrated by Nick Harris; a subsequent edition published in the United States was illustrated by S. Saelig Gallagher.

          • Cover of The Chronoliths
            The Chronoliths

            Robert Charles Wilson · standalone novel · 2001

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            The Chronoliths is a 2001 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer Robert Charles Wilson. It was nominated for the 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novel and tied for the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

          • Cover of Creatures of the Abyss
            Creatures of the Abyss

            Murray Leinster · standalone novel · 1961

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          • Cover of Old Twentieth
            Old Twentieth

            Joe Haldeman · standalone novel · 2005

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            The passengers aboard the starship Ad Astra spend most of their time on the thousand-year journey to Beta Hydrii within the virtual reality of twentieth-century Earth. There, they can experience nostalgia for the hardship of a life they've since evolved beyond. But when people inside the virtual reality chamber start to die, engineer Jacob Brewer finds himself face-to-face with a sentient machine obsessed with humanity. It has put itself in charge of the ship. And it wants to talk to Jacob...

          • Cover of Divine Endurance
            Divine Endurance

            series · 2 books · 1984

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          • Cover of Jungle Girl
            Jungle Girl

            Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1932

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            Jungle Girl is a novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, set in a forgotten kingdom in the jungles of Cambodia.

          • Cover of Brotherhood of War
            Brotherhood of War

            series · 9 books · 1982

            completed

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          • Cover of Icons
            Icons

            series · 2 books · 2013

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          • Cover of Black Water Sister
            Black Water Sister

            Zen Cho · standalone novel · 2021

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            Black Water Sister is a 2021 fantasy novel by Zen Cho. It focuses on Jessamyn Teoh, a closeted lesbian who moves from the United States to her birth country of Malaysia. In Malaysia, she meets the ghost of her deceased grandmother and becomes involved in a conflict related to a local deity. The book received critical praise, and was nominated for the 2022 Ignyte Award, Locus Award for Best Novel, and World Fantasy Award.

          • Cover of Jasmine Nights
            Jasmine Nights

            S. P. Somtow · standalone novel · 1994

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            Jasmine Nights is a 1994 novel by the Thai author S.P. Somtow, first published by Hamish Hamilton in the United Kingdom in book form after first being serialized in weekly installments in the Bangkok Post. The U.S. edition, from St. Martin's Press, followed in 1995. It is a semi-autobiographical novel with touches of magic realism which relates a year in the life of a young Thai boy living with eccentric elderly relatives in a gilded estate hidden in an apparently ordinary soi in 1960s Bangkok.

          • Cover of She Is a Haunting
            She Is a Haunting

            Trang Thanh Tran · standalone novel · 2023

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            Smoking Poppy

            Graham Joyce · standalone novel · 2001

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          • Cover of The Spirit House
            The Spirit House

            series · 2 books · 1991

            completed

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            Bangkok Wakes to Rain

            Pitchaya Sudbanthad · standalone novel · 2019

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            The Stone Buddha's Tears

            S. P. Somtow · standalone novel · 2012

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            The Night Tiger

            Yangsze Choo · standalone novel · 2019

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          • Cover of Magic Circles
            Magic Circles

            series · 2 books · 2009

            completed

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