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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.
  • 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 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 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 Shades of London
                  Shades of London

                  series · 4 books · 2011

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporaryyoung adultghost storiesmystery & detective+6 more

                • Cover of Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)
                  Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)

                  series · 100 books · 1996

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldparanormal+2 more

                  Women of the Otherworld is Kelley Armstrong's long-running urban fantasy series about werewolves, witches, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings trying to pass as ordinary people in the contemporary world, told across thirteen novels plus assorted novellas published between 2001 and 2012. Each book tends to follow a different member of this hidden community while slowly building a shared, continuing world.

                • Cover of Blue Is for Nightmares
                  Blue Is for Nightmares

                  series · 5 books · 2003

                  similar bypsychic powerscontemporaryyoung adultparanormalmystery & detective+4 more

                  Blue Is for Nightmares is a young adult mystery novel and subsequent eponymous series by Laurie Faria Stolarz. The first book in the series, Blue is for Nightmares, was made an "ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association as a Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers in 2005 and as a Popular Paperback for Young Adults in 2007."

                • Cover of Girl Meets Ghost
                  Girl Meets Ghost

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryyoung adultparanormalghost stories+5 more

                • Cover of Black Dragon
                  Black Dragon

                  series · 2 books · 1983

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasymysteriousmystery & detective+2 more

                  R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon pairs Martha Macnamara, a folk musician searching for her missing daughter, with Mayland Long, a courtly stranger who reveals himself to be a dragon living in human form, as they investigate a computer-fraud scheme in 1980s San Francisco. Its low-key blend of contemporary mystery and gentle fantasy proved popular enough to spawn a sequel, Twisting the Rope, following the same pair into a new case years later.

                • Cover of The Green Eyes of Bast
                  The Green Eyes of Bast

                  Sax Rohmer · standalone novel · 1920

                  similar byeeriepsychic powersour worldfantasymysteriousparanormal+2 more

                  Psychic investigator Dr. Damar Greefe encounters ancient sorcery and a cult whose leader is possessed by the murderous cat-goddess Bast!

                • Cover of The Seer (Linda Joy Singleton)
                  The Seer (Linda Joy Singleton)

                  series · 6 books · 2004

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldyoung adultparanormal+4 more

                • Cover of Krewe of Hunters Offshoots
                  Krewe of Hunters Offshoots

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  part of Krewe of Hunters

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporaryour worldparanormalmystery & detective+3 more

                • Cover of Becca King
                  Becca King

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar bypsychic powerscontemporaryyoung adult+4 more

                • Cover of Touch (Laurie Faria Stolarz)
                  Touch (Laurie Faria Stolarz)

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar bypsychic powerscontemporaryyoung adultparanormal+4 more

                • Cover of Bod Owens
                  Bod Owens

                  series · 3 books · 2007

                  similar byeerieour worldcontemporaryfantasy+2 more

                  The Graveyard Book follows Nobody "Bod" Owens, a toddler who escapes the murder of his family and is raised among the ghosts of an old English graveyard, absorbing their otherworldly customs while a threat from his past waits beyond the gates. Neil Gaiman's 2008 novel won both the Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and illustrator P. Craig Russell later adapted it into a two-volume graphic novel. Bod's story spans the original novel and that graphic-novel retelling rather than continuing in a prose sequel.

                • Cover of Later
                  Later

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2021

                  similar byeeriepsychic powersour worldcontemporaryghost stories+2 more

                  A young boy, with the power of seeing and talking with the recently deceased, and his single mother try to avoid personal and financial disasters.

                • Cover of Colin McLaren / Claire Moffat
                  Colin McLaren / Claire Moffat

                  series · 7 books · 1972

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporary+4 more

                • Cover of Sleep No More
                  Sleep No More

                  Aprilynne Pike · standalone novel · 2014

                  similar bypsychic powersmurder investigationour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adultmysteriousparanormal+1 more

                  "Charlotte is a sixteen-year-old Oracle who is not supposed to interfere with her visions of the future, but when she foresees a classmate's murder, she realizes she must break the rules to stop the killer"-- Charlotte is a 16-yr-old Oracle who is not supposed to interfere with her visions of the future, but when she foresees a classmate's murder, she realizes she must break the rules to stop the killer. The plot contains profanity and graphic violence.

                • Cover of Midnight Dragonfly
                  Midnight Dragonfly

                  series · 3 books · 2011

                  similar bypsychic powerscontemporaryyoung adultparanormal+6 more

                • Cover of The Haunting of Cassie Palmer
                  The Haunting of Cassie Palmer

                  Vivien Alcock · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: Thirteen-year-old Cassie, the seventh child of a seventh child, begins to exhibit the gift of second sight which enables her to communicate with the Other World.

                • Cover of Odd Thomas
                  Odd Thomas

                  series · 16 books · 2003

                  similar bypsychic powerscontemporaryparanormal+6 more

                • Cover of The Mayfair Witches Saga
                  The Mayfair Witches Saga

                  series · 3 books · 1990

                  completed

                  similar byeeriecontemporaryfantasy+2 more

                  Lives of the Mayfair Witches is a trilogy of Gothic supernatural horror fantasy novels by American author Anne Rice. It centers on a family of witches whose fortunes have been guided for generations by a spirit named Lasher. The series began in 1990 with The Witching Hour, which was followed by the sequels Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1994). All three novels debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times Best Seller list.

                • Cover of Break My Heart 1,000 Times
                  Break My Heart 1,000 Times

                  Daniel Waters · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar byeeriemurder investigationour worldcontemporaryyoung adultmysteriousparanormalghost stories+1 more

                  In the aftermath of the Event, which made seeing the dead a part of life, Veronica and her friend Kirk investigate why the ghosts seem to be gaining power and stumble upon the sinister plot of a teacher who is seeking a replacement for his dead daughter.

                • TG
                  The Ghost Series

                  series · 12 books · 2003

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                • Cover of The Body Finder
                  The Body Finder

                  series · 5 books · 2010

                  similar bypsychic powersmurder investigationcontemporaryyoung adultparanormalmystery & detective+3 more

                • Cover of The Gift
                  The Gift

                  Peter Dickinson · standalone novel · 1973

                  similar bypsychic powersour worldcontemporaryfantasymysteriousparanormal+1 more

                  A Welsh youth with extrasensory perception is warned by his grandmother that bad luck happens to family members who try to use the ability.

                • Cover of The Diviners
                  The Diviners

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar byeeriepsychic powersfantasyyoung adult+1 more

                • Cover of Lockwood & Co.
                  Lockwood & Co.

                  series · 6 books · 2013

                  similar byeeriecontemporaryfantasyyoung adultghost stories+1 more

                  Lockwood & Co. is a young adult supernatural thriller series by Jonathan Stroud. It follows three young operatives of a psychic detection agency as they fight ghosts in London, England.