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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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anchored on:science fictiontime travelnear future

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.

                • Cover of The Light of Other Days
                  The Light of Other Days

                  Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter · standalone novel · 2000

                  similar byour worldnear futurescience fictiontime traveltense+1 more

                  An industrialist devises a technique to use tiny wormholes as light pipes to enable viewing of any event anywhere; and subsequently it becomes possible to use them to view any event in the past as well. The effects on society are enormous.

                • Cover of Stranger in a Strange Land
                  Stranger in a Strange Land

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar byidentityour worldnear futurescience fiction

                  Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by the American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, and explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.

                • Cover of Friday
                  Friday

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1982

                  similar byidentityadventurousnear futurescience fictiontense

                  Friday is a 1982 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It is the story of a female "artificial person", the eponymous Friday, genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally better than normal humans. Artificial humans are widely resented, and much of the story deals with Friday's struggle both against prejudice and to conceal her enhanced attributes from other humans. The story is set in a Balkanized 21st century, in which the nations of the North American continent have been split up into a number of smaller states.

                • Cover of Time Is the Simplest Thing
                  Time Is the Simplest Thing

                  Clifford D. Simak · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar byour worldnear futurescience fictiontime travel+2 more

                  Time Is the Simplest Thing is a science fiction novel by American writer Clifford D. Simak, first published in 1961. The story combines paranormal abilities with themes of space and time travel. The underlying theme is intolerance of ordinary people towards those with unusual abilities.

                • Cover of Time Travelers Never Die
                  Time Travelers Never Die

                  series · 2 books · 1996

                  similar byour worldscience fictiontime travel+2 more

                  Time Travelers Never Die started life as a Jack McDevitt novella in the mid-1990s (Hugo- and Nebula-nominated) before he expanded it into a full novel over a decade later; the novella and novel are two forms of the same story rather than a sequel. It follows a small circle of people who gain access to working time travel and use it to step into the past, in McDevitt's characteristic register of curious, history-minded science fiction.

                • Cover of Childhood's End
                  Childhood's End

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1953

                  similar byidentityour worldnear futurescience fiction

                  Childhood's End is a 1953 science fiction novel by the British author Arthur C. Clarke. The story follows a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by mysterious Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture.

                • Cover of Renegades (Marissa Meyer)
                  Renegades (Marissa Meyer)

                  series · 3 books · 2017

                  similar byidentityour worldnear futurescience fictiontense+1 more

                  Renegades is set in Gatlon City after a civil war between the superheroic Renegades and the villainous Anarchists, and follows Nova, a young woman with the power to put people to sleep by touch, as she infiltrates the Renegades as a spy for her uncle's Anarchists and falls for Adrian, the adopted son of the Renegades' leaders. Marissa Meyer's trilogy, continuing through Archenemies and Supernova, plays the two factions' history against the leads' divided loyalties; Meyer has said she doesn't plan to extend the series further.

                • Cover of The Missing
                  The Missing

                  series · 10 books · 2008

                  similar byidentityscience fictiontime travel+3 more

                  The Missing is a series of young adult novels written by Margaret Peterson Haddix. It tells the story of famous children from history stolen from their place in time by futuristic time travelers and accidentally sent to the 21st century as babies. Jonah Skidmore is one of the stolen children, and he, along with his non-adopted sister Katherine, must help return the missing kids to their rightful places in history and fix time before it is destroyed. The first book in the series, Found, was published on April 22, 2008. The series continued with book titles Sent, Sabotaged, Torn, Caught, Risked, and Revealed. The eighth and final book, Redeemed, was released on September 8, 2015. There are also two ebook short stories, Sought and Rescued . Haddix originally intended the series to consist of only seven books. However, she stated that she had trouble closing out the series in seven books; leading to her decision to write Redeemed.

                • Cover of Roadmarks
                  Roadmarks

                  Roger Zelazny · standalone novel · 1979

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                  Roadmarks is a science fantasy novel by American author Roger Zelazny, written during the late 1970s and published in 1979.

                • Cover of Flashforward
                  Flashforward

                  Robert J. Sawyer · standalone novel · 1999

                  similar byidentityour worldnear futurescience fictiontime traveltense

                  Flashforward is a science fiction novel by Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer first published in 1999. The novel is set in 2009. At CERN, the Large Hadron Collider accelerator is performing a run to search for the Higgs boson. The experiment has a unique side effect; the entire human race loses their consciousness for about two minutes. During that time, nearly everyone sees themselves roughly twenty-one years and six months in the future. Each individual experiences the future through the senses of their future self. This "flashforward" results in countless deaths and accidents involving vehicles, aircraft, and any other device needing human control at the time of the experiment. The novel was adapted into the 2009 television series FlashForward.

                • Cover of The Gone-Away World
                  The Gone-Away World

                  Nick Harkaway · standalone novel · 2008

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                  The Gone-Away World is the debut novel of British author Nick Harkaway, a science fiction story set in a post-apocalyptic world crippled by the 'Go-Away War'. The book was first published in June 2008 by Heinemann.

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

                  similar byidentitynear futurescience fiction+2 more

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

                • Cover of Library of America P. K. Dick Collection
                  Library of America P. K. Dick Collection

                  series · 9 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionnear future+2 more

                • Cover of Dr. Futurity
                  Dr. Futurity

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1960

                  similar byadventurousour worldscience fictiontime travel+1 more

                  Dr. Futurity is a 1960 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is an expansion of his earlier short story "Time Pawn", which first saw publication in the summer 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Dr. Futurity was first published as a novel by Ace Books as one half of Ace Double D-421, bound dos-à-dos with John Brunner's Slavers of Space.

                • Cover of Cas Russell / Russell's Attic
                  Cas Russell / Russell's Attic

                  series · 5 books · 2014

                  similar byidentityadventurousour worldscience fictionnear futuretense

                • Cover of I Will Fear No Evil
                  I Will Fear No Evil

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1970

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                  I Will Fear No Evil is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialised in Galaxy and published in hardcover in 1970. The title is taken from Psalm 23:4.

                • Cover of The Book of Ptath
                  The Book of Ptath

                  A. E. van Vogt · standalone novel · 1947

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                  Ptath, a very powerful god, is throwing by his deadly rival, the goddess Ineznia, on Earth, around 200,000,000 AD, in the form of a mortal, where he has to face numerous dangers to survive.

                • Cover of Shadrach in the Furnace
                  Shadrach in the Furnace

                  Robert Silverberg · standalone novel · 1976

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                  Shadrach in the Furnace is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, first published as a serial in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine in the August, September, and October 1976 issues. It was subsequently published by Bobbs Merrill in 1976. The novel was nominated in 1976 for the Nebula Award, and in 1977 for the Hugo Award.

                • Cover of The Zap Gun
                  The Zap Gun

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1967

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                  The Zap Gun is a 1967 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published as the two-part serial Project Plowshare in Worlds of Tomorrow in 1965 and 1966, before Pyramid Books issued it in paperback under its present title. The novel originated in a title-first commission devised by Pyramid editor Don Bensen and was written in 1964 during a period of rapid production in Dick's career.

                • Cover of The Mind Cage
                  The Mind Cage

                  A. E. van Vogt · standalone novel · 1957

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                  The Mind Cage is a 1957 science fiction novel by American writer A. E. van Vogt, adapted from the short story "The Great Judge" (1948).

                • Cover of Household Gods
                  Household Gods

                  Harry Turtledove & Judith Tarr · standalone novel · 1999

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                  Household Gods is a 1999 science fiction time-travel novel written by Harry Turtledove and Judith Tarr.

                • Cover of Sunrise Alley
                  Sunrise Alley

                  series · 2 books · 2004

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                • Cover of Spaceling
                  Spaceling

                  Doris Piserchia · standalone novel · 1978

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                  The ability to see the other dimensional rings that float in Earth's atmosphere was a late mutation of a few space-age humans. Daryl was under the care of the institution for muters, and she had discovered that if you jump through the right ring at the right time it would land you in another dimensional world and another shape. Spaceling is the story of Daryl's desperate efforts to unravel the mystery of why she was being held captive and of what was really going on in a certain alien dimension. Because she was sure it was all bad and that someday everyone would thank her for the revelation. But instead everyone was engaged in a wild effort to hold her down, to keep her on this Earth, and to keep the world simply intact! It's a fast and furious escapade of a future Huck Finn, female gender, by the author of Earthchild.

                • Cover of The Glory That Was
                  The Glory That Was

                  L. Sprague de Camp · standalone novel · 1960

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                  The Glory That Was is a science fiction novel by American writer L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in the science fiction magazine Startling Stories for April, 1952, and subsequently published in book form in hardcover by Avalon Books in 1960 and in paperback by Paperback Library in March 1971. It has since been reprinted in paperback by Ace Books in July 1979 and Baen Books in April 1992, and in trade paperback by Phoenix Pick in September 2014. An E-book edition was published by Gollancz's SF Gateway imprint on September 29, 2011 as part of a general release of de Camp's works in electronic form; a second e-book edition was issued by Phoenix Pick in September 2014. The book has also been translated into Italian, German and Greek.