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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 Hazards

anchored on:adventure

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 that turn on objects of power — enchanted weapons, rings, and relics sought, wielded, or destroyed.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • 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 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.
      • 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 Tarzan
                  Tarzan

                  series · 50 books · 1912

                  part of Tarzan Universe

                  similar byadventureafricaearly 20th centuryadventurous

                  Tarzan is a series of 24 adventure novels written by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) and published between 1912 and 1966, followed by several novels either co-written by Burroughs, or officially authorized by his estate. There are also two works written by Burroughs especially for children that are not related to the main series.

                • Cover of Allan Quatermain
                  Allan Quatermain

                  series · 25 books · 1885

                  similar byexpeditionsadventureafricaadventurous

                  Allan Quatermain is the protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines, its one sequel Allan Quatermain (1887), twelve prequel novels and four prequel short stories, totalling eighteen works. An English professional big game hunter and adventurer, in film and television he has been portrayed by Richard Chamberlain, Sean Connery, Cedric Hardwicke, Patrick Swayze and Stewart Granger among others.

                • Cover of Doctor Dolittle
                  Doctor Dolittle

                  series · 27 books · 1920

                  similar byearly 20th century+2 more

                  Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle books follow a Victorian-era English physician who gives up treating people to practice medicine among animals, whose languages he learns to speak, traveling the world with an ever-growing menagerie of companions. Lofting wrote twelve novels between 1920 and 1936, beginning with The Story of Doctor Dolittle, with two further story collections published after his 1947 death. Kathryn Knight and Nick Price, credited alongside Lofting in modern editions, are illustrators/editors of reissues rather than co-authors of new installments.

                • Cover of The Ghost Kings
                  The Ghost Kings

                  H. Rider Haggard · standalone novel · 1908

                  similar byexpeditionsadventureafricaearly 20th centuryadventurous

                  The Ghost Kings is a 1908 mystery-adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard, set on the borders of Zululand in Africa.

                • Cover of Voyages extraordinaires
                  Voyages extraordinaires

                  series · 59 books · 1863

                  similar byadventureadventurous+1 more

                  The Voyages extraordinaires is a collection or sequence of novels and short stories by the French writer Jules Verne. The cycle features some of Verne's best known titles, such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Around the World in Eighty Days and The Mysterious Island.

                • Cover of Chronicles of Lucifer Jones
                  Chronicles of Lucifer Jones

                  series · 36 books · 1985

                  completed

                  similar byadventure+2 more

                • Cover of Congo
                  Congo

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byexpeditionsadventureafricaadventurous

                  WorldCat: On an expedition to return Amy, his talking gorilla, to her home in the Congo, Professor Peter Elliot is joined by others who hope to find a legendary diamond mine guarded by mutant gorillas.

                • Cover of Prester John
                  Prester John

                  John Buchan · standalone novel · 1911

                  similar byadventureafricaearly 20th centuryadventurous+1 more

                  Prester John is a 1910 adventure novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It tells the story of the young Scotsman David Crawfurd and his adventures in South Africa, where a native uprising under the charismatic black minister John Laputa is tied to the medieval legend of Prester John.

                • CU
                  Caspak Universe

                  series · 4 books · 1918

                  similar byadventureearly 20th centuryadventurous+1 more

                  The Caspak trilogy — The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and Out of Time's Abyss — is Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1918 adventure sequence set on a hidden Pacific island called Caprona, where a World War I-era U-boat crew discovers an isolated world of dinosaurs and successive stages of human evolution living side by side. The story was later adapted into comics by Mike Wolfer, credited alongside Burroughs.

                • Cover of Queen Sheba's Ring
                  Queen Sheba's Ring

                  H. Rider Haggard · standalone novel · 1910

                  similar byexpeditionsadventureafricaadventurous

                  Queen Sheba's Ring is a 1910 adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard set in central Africa. It resembles the author's earlier works King Solomon's Mines and She, featuring plotting priests, beautiful women, and daring British adventurers.

                • Cover of Pym
                  Pym

                  series · 5 books · 1838

                  similar byexpeditionsadventure+2 more

                  Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), his only complete novel, sends a young stowaway through shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism toward an increasingly strange voyage to the South Pole that breaks off on a mysterious, unexplained image. Jules Verne wrote an unauthorized 1897 sequel, An Antarctic Mystery, resolving Poe's cliffhanger in more rationalist terms, while Mat Johnson's 2011 novel Pym uses Poe's original as the springboard for a satirical modern story about race.

                • Cover of McKay, Ryan and Knowlton
                  McKay, Ryan and Knowlton

                  series · 4 books · 1922

                  completed

                  similar byadventureearly 20th century

                • Cover of Jimgrim / Ramsden
                  Jimgrim / Ramsden

                  series · 10 books · 1916

                  completed

                  similar byadventureearly 20th century+2 more

                  Talbot Mundy's Jimgrim (Jimgrim/Ramsden) novels follow James Schuyler Grim, an American adventurer and secret agent working across the Middle East and Central Asia in the years after the First World War, uncovering hidden treasures and secret societies amid colonial-era intrigue. Serialized in pulp magazines through the 1920s and into the mid-1930s, the loosely connected novels and novellas can mostly be read in any order. Mundy wrote in the swashbuckling, mysticism-tinged adventure-romance tradition typical of the period.

                • Cover of The Sunbird
                  The Sunbird

                  Wilbur Smith · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar byexpeditionsadventureafricaadventurous

                  The Sunbird is a 1972 novel by Wilbur Smith about an archeological dig. The novel depicts a search for a Phoenician city in modern Botswana.

                • Cover of The Wild Adventures of Tarzan
                  The Wild Adventures of Tarzan

                  series · 14 books · 2015

                  part of Tarzan Universe

                  similar byadventureearly 20th century+1 more

                • Cover of They Found Atlantis
                  They Found Atlantis

                  Dennis Wheatley · standalone novel · 1936

                  similar byadventure

                • Cover of Uncharted Seas
                  Uncharted Seas

                  Dennis Wheatley · standalone novel · 1938

                  similar byadventure

                • Cover of Ayesha
                  Ayesha

                  series · 8 books · 1886

                  similar by+4 more

                  The Ayesha books follow H. Rider Haggard's immortal sorceress-queen Ayesha, introduced in his 1887 novel She as the ruler of a hidden civilization who has waited millennia for her lost love to be reborn. Haggard continued her story in later novels, including the 1905 sequel Ayesha: The Return of She, which reunites her with characters from the first book, and further installments tracing her earlier history. Later reissues and retellings continue to build on the same character.

                • Cover of El Borak
                  El Borak

                  series · 25 books · 1934

                  similar byadventureearly 20th centuryadventurous+1 more

                • Cover of Ki-Gor
                  Ki-Gor

                  series · 81 books · 1938

                  similar byadventureafrica+2 more

                • Cover of Jungle Girl
                  Jungle Girl

                  Edgar Rice Burroughs · standalone novel · 1932

                  similar byexpeditionsadventureearly 20th centuryadventurous

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

                • Cover of Lost Species
                  Lost Species

                  series · 12 books · 1897

                  completed

                  similar byexpeditionsearly 20th centuryadventurous+1 more

                • Cover of Hareton Ironcastle
                  Hareton Ironcastle

                  series · 2 books · 1922

                  completed

                  similar byexpeditionsadventureadventurous+1 more

                • Cover of Wold Newton
                  Wold Newton

                  series · 21 books · 1972

                  similar by+3 more

                  The Wold Newton family is a literary concept derived from a form of crossover fiction developed by the American science fiction writer Philip José Farmer.