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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 Ghosts

anchored on:science fictionpost-apocalypticfar 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 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 Hunger Games
                  The Hunger Games

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  part of The Hunger Games Universe

                  similar bydarkfar futuresurvivalscience fictionpost-apocalyptictense+1 more

                  The Hunger Games is a series of young adult dystopian novels written by American author Suzanne Collins. The series consists of a trilogy that follows teenage protagonist Katniss Everdeen, as well as two prequels. The Hunger Games universe is a dystopia set in Panem, a post-apocalyptic North American country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and 12 districts in varying states of poverty. As punishment for rebellion, the Capitol hosts an annual battle royale competition called The Hunger Games. Each of the 12 districts must send two children between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate, and the last surviving child is dubbed the victor.

                • Cover of Dune
                  Dune

                  series · 20 books · 1963

                  part of Dune Universe

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                  Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles opens with 1965's Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis where House Atreides takes control of the only source of the vital spice melange and young Paul Atreides is pulled into a struggle over its politics and religion. Herbert carried the story forward across five further novels — Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune — following Paul's line over the following millennia, before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson later extended the saga. Many other editions of these six novels are omnibus and box-set repackagings rather than separate stories.

                • Cover of Aton/Piers Anthony's Worlds of Chthon
                  Aton/Piers Anthony's Worlds of Chthon

                  series · 4 books · 1967

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                  Piers Anthony's Chthon (1967) follows Aton Five, imprisoned in a sentient underground mineral world after his obsession with a beautiful, dangerous woman leads him to attempted murder; escaping, he pursues the truth about her and about his own mixed human and alien nature across the galaxy. Its sequel Phthor continues Aton's story and the mythology of the living prison-planet Chthon.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games Universe
                  The Hunger Games Universe

                  universe · 5 books · 2008

                  Start hereThe Hunger Games · Start here

                  similar bydarkfar futuresurvivalscience fictiontense+2 more

                  Panem, they call it now — a nation raised on the drowned bones of North America, a glittering Capitol ringed by twelve districts it once starved into obedience. Every year the Capitol collects its debt in children: two tributes from each district, drawn by lottery, dropped into an engineered arena, and made to kill one another on live television while the whole country is required to watch. This is the Hunger Games — entertainment, punishment, and government at once. Suzanne Collins tells it in a compact, unified body of work. The founding trilogy — The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay — follows Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the coal-mining District 12 who volunteers in her sister's place and becomes something the Capitol never scripted. Two prequels reach back into the same machinery: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes traces a young Coriolanus Snow long before he is President, and Sunrise on the Reaping returns to District 12 a generation ahead of Katniss. Begin with the trilogy, in order — it is Katniss's voice, close and present-tense, that makes Panem breathe, and the prequels land hardest once you know how her story ends. Beneath the spectacle sits one steady, uncomfortable question: who profits when we agree to look away.

                • Cover of Hungry City Chronicles / Mortal Engines
                  Hungry City Chronicles / Mortal Engines

                  series · 5 books · 2001

                  part of Mortal Engines Universe

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                  The Mortal Engines Quartet, also known as the Predator Cities Quartet, is a series of epic young adult science fiction novels by the English novelist and illustrator Philip Reeve. He began the first volume of the series, Mortal Engines, in the 1980s, and it was published in 2001. Reeve then published three further novels, Predator's Gold (2003), Infernal Devices (2005), and A Darkling Plain (2006).

                • Cover of Saint Leibowitz
                  Saint Leibowitz

                  series · 6 books · 1955

                  completed

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                  Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), assembled from three novellas he had published earlier in the decade, follows the monks of a Catholic monastery in the post-nuclear American Southwest as they preserve fragments of scientific knowledge across centuries, watching civilization slowly rebuild itself and edge back toward the mistakes that destroyed it. Miller's posthumous sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, completed by Terry Bisson from his notes after his death and published in 1997, returns to the same abbey and its world decades later. Together the two novels form a sparse, decades-spanning series about memory, faith, and the cycles of civilization.

                • Cover of Dune Universe
                  Dune Universe

                  universe · 78 books · 1963

                  Start hereDune · Start here

                  similar byfar futurescience fiction+2 more

                  Arrakis. Dune. The desert planet, where empire runs on a single substance: the spice melange, which folds space, prolongs life, and unlocks prescience, and which exists nowhere else in the known universe. Frank Herbert's saga is a meditation dressed as an adventure — feudal houses and a secret sisterhood, engineered messiahs and the patient ecology of a world without water, all turning on the terrible gravity of who commands the spice. It reads like scripture and schemes like a war room, ten thousand years hence, among people who have outlawed the thinking machine and made instruments of themselves instead. At its heart stand Herbert's original six — Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune — a single deepening arc across millennia, arguing the whole way between prophecy and free will. Around that spine his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have raised a vast prequel architecture: Prelude to Dune, tracing the great houses a generation before Paul; Legends of Dune, reaching back to the crusade that broke the machines; the Schools of Dune cycle on the founding of Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator; the Caladan Trilogy and Heroes of Dune filling years the originals left in shadow. Many hands, dozens of volumes, one desert. What sets Dune apart is its refusal of the simple: religion is manufactured, heroes are hazards, and the sand itself — worm, water, ecology — acts as a political power. Begin where the universe did, with Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), and read the original six in order; you need nothing else to feel the full weight. The prequels are a country to explore afterward, taken by era. Beginnings are delicate times.

                • Cover of Razorland
                  Razorland

                  series · 6 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Level 7
                  Level 7

                  Mordecai Roshwald · standalone novel · 1959

                  similar bydarksurvivalwarunderground & cavesscience fictionpost-apocalyptictense

                  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 Galaxy's Edge: Omnibus
                  Galaxy's Edge: Omnibus

                  series · 2 books · 1961

                  completed

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                • Cover of Hell Divers
                  Hell Divers

                  series · 17 books · 2016

                  similar byscience fictionpost-apocalypticfar future+3 more

                • Cover of Forever War
                  Forever War

                  series · 10 books · 1972

                  similar byscience fictionfar future+3 more

                  Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1974) follows a soldier conscripted into a centuries-long interstellar war against the alien Taurans, using relativistic space travel so that months spent in transit correspond to years or decades passing back on Earth. Haldeman later returned to the same conflict in Forever Peace (1997), a thematically connected but separate story, and Forever Free (1999), a direct sequel set years after the original war's end. The first novel won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and is considered a foundational work of military science fiction.

                • Cover of Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)
                  Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)

                  series · 59 books · 1963

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                  The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels by Fred Saberhagen, in which robotic self-replicating machines strive to destroy all life.

                • Cover of Maurai
                  Maurai

                  series · 6 books · 1959

                  completed

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                  The Maurai series is a series of short stories and a novel by Poul Anderson set in a resource depleted, post-apocalyptic earth several centuries in the future. The series is named after its most frequent protagonists, citizens of the Maurai Federation. The Maurai dominate the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Fearful of the social and ecological implications of a return to large-scale industrial society, they use their considerable might and covert resources to prevent other nations from developing nuclear power.

                • Cover of The Stars My Destination
                  The Stars My Destination

                  Alfred Bester · standalone novel · 1956

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                  When a passing spaceship refuses to rescue the lone survivor from the drifting wreck of another ship, he dedicates his life to discovering who made that decision and exacting his revenge, in the process altering human history and his own character.

                • Cover of Bio of a Space Tyrant
                  Bio of a Space Tyrant

                  series · 6 books · 1983

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                  Bio of a Space Tyrant series is a six-book science-fiction series by Piers Anthony based within the Solar System. The series revolves around the character Hope Hubris and his family, and charts Hope's ascent from poor Hispanic refugee to Tyrant of Jupiter, a single person heading the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of the government. It is considerably more adult-themed than many of Anthony's earlier works.

                • Cover of The Kraken Wakes
                  The Kraken Wakes

                  John Wyndham · standalone novel · 1953

                  similar bydarksurvivalwarscience fictionpost-apocalyptictense

                  " Behind a spectacular meteor shower actually hides the beginning of an invasion by a mysterious and powerful alien race. Earth's life is disrupted by the attacks of extraterrestrials whose war machines, emerging from the depths of the oceans, seem indestructible. The coalitioned forces of the whole world are worthless, powerless in the face of the indecipherable and deadly plans of a superior intelligence, capable of bringing the entire planet to the brink of catastrophe" Goodreads May 20, 2022

                • Cover of The Penultimate Truth
                  The Penultimate Truth

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1964

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                  The Penultimate Truth is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story is set in a future where the bulk of humanity is kept in large underground shelters. The people are told that World War III is being fought above them, when in reality the war ended years ago. The novel is based on Dick's 1953 short story "The Defenders". Dick also drew upon two of his other short stories for the plot of the novel: "The Mold of Yancy" and "The Unreconstructed M".

                • Cover of Ship Breaker
                  Ship Breaker

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                  Nailer works a light-crew scavenging copper wire and scrap from beached oil tankers on a Gulf Coast reshaped by rising seas and vanished order, until a wrecked clipper ship washes ashore carrying a half-drowned girl from the wealthy world he'll never belong to. Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker follows Nailer as helping her pulls him out of his abusive father's orbit and into a much larger, more dangerous game involving her family's fortune. The sequels The Drowned Cities and Tool of War widen the same flooded, resource-scavenging future to new characters and coastlines.

                • Cover of City at World's End
                  City at World's End

                  Edmond Hamilton · standalone novel · 1951

                  similar bydarkfar futuresurvivalscience fictionpost-apocalyptictense

                  An experimental atomic weapons test in small-town America goes catastrophically wrong, hurling the entire town of Middletown, buildings, streets and all, untold ages into Earth's future, to a time when the sun is dying and humanity's last city struggles on beneath a darkening sky. Cut off from everything and everyone they knew, the townspeople have to find a way to survive in a world that has nothing left to spare for latecomers. Edmond Hamilton's novel strands a slice of mid-century America at the literal end of the world.

                • Cover of Paratwa Saga
                  Paratwa Saga

                  series · 4 books · 1987

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                  Christopher Hinz's Paratwa Saga is set in orbital colonies built above a devastated, abandoned Earth, opening with Liege-Killer as those colonies confront the return of a genetically engineered assassin race, the Paratwa, thought long eliminated. The trilogy (continued in Ash Ock and The Paratwa) plays out as a blend of post-apocalyptic SF and thriller, with the colonies' survival resting on hunting down a threat their ancestors created and thought they'd destroyed. A later fourth book returned to the setting decades after the original trilogy closed.

                • Cover of Ender Wiggin
                  Ender Wiggin

                  series · 14 books · 1977

                  part of Ender's Game Universe

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                  Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985, expanded from his 1977 novella) follows child prodigy Andrew "Ender" Wiggin as he is recruited into a military training program built to prepare Earth's defenses for an anticipated third war against an insectoid alien species known as the Formics. The saga continues years later through Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, following an older Ender as he confronts the moral weight of his role in that earlier conflict, and concludes the core arc in Children of the Mind, with Ender in Exile filling in the years between the first two books. Set within the wider Ender's Game universe, the series shifts from military coming-of-age story to slower, more philosophical science fiction as it progresses.

                • Cover of The 5th Wave
                  The 5th Wave

                  series · 4 books · 2013

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                  Rick Yancey's The 5th Wave opens after a series of escalating alien attacks has already devastated Earth's population and infrastructure, following sixteen-year-old survivor Cassie Sullivan as she searches for her younger brother while trying to work out who, among the remaining humans, can still be trusted. The trilogy is young-adult science fiction that treats its alien-invasion premise as a survival and paranoia story more than a war story.

                • Cover of Chaos Walking
                  Chaos Walking

                  series · 5 books · 2008

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                  Chaos Walking is a young adult science fiction series written by American-British novelist Patrick Ness. It is set in a dystopian world where all living creatures can hear each other's thoughts in a stream of images, words, and sounds called Noise. The series is named after a line in the first book: "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking." The series consists of a trilogy of novels and three short stories.