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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 Hard Moon

anchored on:science fictionnear 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 about minds with paranormal abilities — telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, empathy — and how societies handle those who have them.
  • 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 driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories about rising against rulers — uprisings, resistance movements, and revolutions and their aftermaths.
  • 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

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                  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 A Fall of Moondust
                  A Fall of Moondust

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar bytensescience fictionnear futurethe moonhard science fiction

                  From the back cover of the Harbrace paperback: "The action of A Fall of Moondust takes place almost a century from now when tours on the moon are a common occurrence. One of the high points of each tour is a cruise around the Sea of Thirst, a body of volcanic dust, in a specially designed vessel called the Selene On a perfectly routine voyage one day the Selene suddenly disappears. How do you locate a small tourist "cruiser" buried beneath fifty feet of dust? If you find it, how do you rescue the passengers and crew? If you are on board, how do you feel and what do you do while brave men and expert technicians join forces in a race against time? Sustained excitement, lively humor, and an engaging cast of characters make this one of Arthur C. Clarke's most intriguing novels."

                • Cover of Energized
                  Energized

                  Edward M. Lerner · standalone novel · 2012

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                • HC
                  Heaven Chronicles / Zones of Thought

                  series · 8 books · 1976

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                • Cover of Richard Forthrast
                  Richard Forthrast

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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                  Neal Stephenson's Richard 'Dodge' Forthrast novels open with Reamde, a globe-spanning thriller that starts when ransomware inside an MMORPG economy pulls Richard's extended family into a real-world hostage crisis involving hackers, jihadists and Russian mobsters. The sequel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell shifts registers entirely, following Richard's digitally preserved mind after death into an afterlife simulation built from his scanned brain. The two books share a protagonist and family but differ sharply in genre and scale.

                • Cover of Nexus 5
                  Nexus 5

                  series · 3 books · 2012

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                  Nexus opens Ramez Naam's postcyberpunk trilogy in 2040 with scientist Kaden Lane, who works on Nexus, an experimental nano-drug that lets human minds be networked and reprogrammed, and finds himself caught between government and corporate interests once the technology's implications become clear. The trilogy continues through Crux and Apex, following the same central conflict over who controls the technology. Nexus tied for Best Novel at the 2014 Prometheus Awards and Apex won the 2015 Philip K. Dick Award.

                • Cover of Blindsight / Firefall
                  Blindsight / Firefall

                  series · 3 books · 2006

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                  Blindsight sends a crew of radically modified posthumans (including a resurrected, genetically restored vampire) out to the Oort cloud after humanity detects an alien signal, only to make contact with something intelligent, wildly capable, and possibly not conscious at all — a first-contact story built around the question of whether self-awareness is actually useful. Peter Watts's Echopraxia is a same-timeframe "sidequel" rather than a direct sequel, following different characters through the fallout of the same first-contact event.

                • Cover of Warp Speed
                  Warp Speed

                  series · 2 books · 2004

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                • Cover of Dream Park Universe
                  Dream Park Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1981

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                • Cover of Rogue Moon
                  Rogue Moon

                  Algis Budrys · standalone novel · 1960

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                  A project to transport humans by matter transmission becomes the means to send explorers to the Moon when the US discovers an alien artifact on the dark side, but anyone who enters dies, so a hardened adventurer is given the job.

                • Cover of Have Space Suit - Will Travel
                  Have Space Suit - Will Travel

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1958

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                  From the back cover of the Del Rey 9th printing: "Skyjacked - Everything happened at once. One minute Kip Russell was walking about in his own backyard, testing out an old space suit and dreaming about going to the moon - and the next he was out cold and the captive of an insidious space pirate. The whole thing seemed like a very bad dream until he discovered he wasn't the only prisoner on board. Then the reality of the situation became inescapable. He - along with the daughter of a world-renowned scientist and a beautiful creature from an alien planet - had been skyjacked by a monstrous extraterrestrial and they were on their way to the Moon... a journey toward a fate worse than death!"

                • Cover of The God Head Trilogy
                  The God Head Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Childhood's End
                  Childhood's End

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1953

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                  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.

                • QL
                  Quantum Logic

                  series · 7 books · 1990

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                • Cover of Artemis
                  Artemis

                  Andy Weir · standalone novel · 2017

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                  Artemis is a 2017 science fiction novel by American writer Andy Weir. It takes place in the late 2080s in Artemis, the first and only city on the Moon. It follows the life of porter and smuggler Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara as she gets caught up in a conspiracy for control of the city. The book received mixed reviews from critics.

                • Cover of Realtime
                  Realtime

                  series · 3 books · 1984

                  completed

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                  Vernor Vinge's The Peace War introduces Paul Hoehler, inventor of the 'bobble' — an impenetrable force-field technology seized by the authoritarian Peace Authority to enforce global dominance. Decades after being driven into hiding, Hoehler works in secret with fellow scientists, including a talented newcomer, to challenge the Authority's grip on the world. Marooned in Realtime continues the story decades further on; the two novels, along with the novella 'The Ungoverned', are collected together as Across Realtime.

                • Cover of Singularity Sky
                  Singularity Sky

                  series · 2 books · 2003

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                  Singularity Sky and its sequel Iron Sunrise are collectively known as the Eschaton novels, after the godlike posthuman intelligence that seeded human colonies across space on the condition they never attempt time travel or threaten causality - rules tested when a low-tech colony world is destabilized by a group calling itself the Festival. Charles Stross uses the setup for a mix of space opera, economics, and diplomatic intrigue.

                • Cover of Seveneves
                  Seveneves

                  Neal Stephenson · standalone novel · 2015

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                  Seveneves is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson published in 2015. The story tells of the desperate efforts to preserve Homo sapiens in the wake of apocalyptic events on Earth after the unexplained disintegration of the Moon and the remaking of human society as a space-based civilization after a severe genetic bottleneck.

                • Cover of The Hammer of God
                  The Hammer of God

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1993

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                  The Hammer of God is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke originally published in 1993. Set in the year 2109, it deals with the discovery of an asteroid to be on course to collide with Earth and depicts the mission for deflecting the asteroid by using fusion thermal rockets.

                • Cover of Future History
                  Future History

                  series · 42 books · 1939

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                • Cover of Glasshouse
                  Glasshouse

                  Charles Stross · standalone novel · 2006

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                  Robin wakes in a rehabilitation clinic with his memory deliberately erased, convinced that whoever tried to kill him before is still out there. To disappear completely, he volunteers for an experimental study recreating a vanished slice of 20th/21st-century society inside a closed habitat called the glasshouse -- a former high-security detention facility for war criminals -- and is assigned a female body and a new name, Reeve. As the simulation's rules of gender and conformity close in, Reeve starts to suspect the experiment's organizers are running something considerably darker than sociology. A standalone posthuman-future novel by Charles Stross.

                • Cover of The God Machine
                  The God Machine

                  Martin Caidin · standalone novel · 1968

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                  The God Machine is a science-fiction novel by American writer Martin Caidin first published in 1968. Set in the near future, the novel tells the story of a top-secret cybernetic technician, Steve Rand, one of the brains behind Project 79, a top-secret US government project dedicated to creating artificial intelligence. Rand survives an attempt on his life before he realizes that Project 79 has gained sentience and is trying to control the minds of humans and take over the world. Assisted by a security agent and a mathematician, Rand sets out to destroy Project 79 before it is too late.

                • Cover of Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

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                  The Sprawl Trilogy is William Gibson's foundational cyberpunk sequence: Neuromancer (1984), in which hacker Case is drawn into a high-stakes heist alongside an artificial intelligence and a damaged ex-soldier, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which widen the same near-future world of corporate power and networked cyberspace to new characters. Johnny Mnemonic, an early short story set in the same fictional milieu, predates the novels and introduces the courier Molly Millions before her role in the trilogy. Together these works established much of cyberpunk's visual and thematic vocabulary.

                • Cover of Blood Music
                  Blood Music

                  Greg Bear · standalone novel · 1985

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                  Blood Music is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer Greg Bear. It is an expanded version of a short story of the same title, originally published in the June 1983 issue of Analog and the winner of both the 1983 Nebula and 1984 Hugo awards for Best Novelette. The novel won the 1986 Prix Apollo Award, given to the best science fiction novel published in France during the preceding year, under the title La Musique du sang.