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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 Herds

anchored on:science fictionnorth americalate 20th centuryfirst contactmystery & detectivealiens+3 more

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Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories 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 Game-Players of Titan
                  The Game-Players of Titan

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1963

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                  In a depopulated, mostly sterile America, land, marriages and social standing are all wagered on Bluff, a high-stakes game administered by the vugs, gelatinous, gambling-obsessed aliens from Titan who rule Earth without ever quite occupying it. Pete Garden's bipolar disorder threatens his standing among the game's players even as his new wife becomes pregnant, a near-miraculous event in this exhausted world, and his attraction to a telepath complicates things further. When a fellow player turns up dead, Pete finds himself a suspect in a mystery tangled up with induced amnesia and vug politics he barely understands. Philip K. Dick's 1963 novel.

                • Cover of Hellspark
                  Hellspark

                  Janet Kagan · standalone novel · 1988

                  similar bymysterioustensescience fictionaliensmurder investigationfirst contactmystery & detectivepolitical intrigue

                  Lassti, a newly discovered planet, is the center of political intrigue. Recently, Oloitokitok, the planet survey team's physicist was found dead. Was he killed? If so, by who? One of his fellow surveyors? Or by one of the Sprookjes, the birdlike natives of Lassti? Are the Sprookjes intelligent? If so, then parties that want the planet for development will lose it. Why is the survey team having so much trouble finding out? Into this situation arrives Tocohl, a Hellspark trader who just wanted to have a vacation on Sheveschke at the St. Veschke festival. After being attacked, rescuing a young woman, and going before a judge, Tocohl has learned all she ever wanted to know about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now she is on her way to find Lasti to find answers to the mysteries there.

                • Cover of Great North Road
                  Great North Road

                  Peter F. Hamilton · standalone novel · 2012

                  similar bymysterioustensescience fictionmurder investigationmystery & detective+2 more

                  Great North Road is a science fiction novel by Peter F. Hamilton. It was first published in 2012 by Macmillan. Jonathan Wright of SFX magazine said, "Peter F Hamilton’s latest novel may be a standalone tale, but it’s a thuddingly imposing 1,100 pages in length. Not that it seems that way when you’re reading it. Balancing a multi-stranded plot, different exotic locales and a huge cast of characters, Hamilton plunges us straight into a murder mystery set in a near-future Newcastle, a city now adjacent to a portal to another world, the tropical St Libra."

                • Cover of The Visitors
                  The Visitors

                  Clifford D. Simak · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: Intelligent, alien creatures arrive on Earth from outer space, threatening world stability and presaging the destruction of civilization.

                • Cover of Dark Places
                  Dark Places

                  Gillian Flynn · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar bylate 20th centurytensenorth americamurder investigationmystery & detectiveclass conflict

                  Dark Places is a mystery novel by Gillian Flynn published in 2009. The novel deals with class issues in rural America, intense poverty and the Satanic cult hysteria that swept the United States in the 1980s. Dark Places was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and won Dark Scribe Magazine's Black Quill Award for Dark Genre Novel of the Year. It was also listed on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction for two consecutive weeks. A film adaptation of the novel starring Charlize Theron was released on August 7, 2015.

                • Cover of What Did I Do Tomorrow?
                  What Did I Do Tomorrow?

                  L. P. Davies · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar bylate 20th centurymysterioustensescience fictionmurder investigationnorth americamystery & detective

                  ● A senior in high school finds himself transported five years into the future. He is a low-grade office worker and a suspect in a murder case.

                • Cover of The Night the Heads Came
                  The Night the Heads Came

                  William Sleator · standalone novel · 1996

                  similar bylate 20th centurymysterioustensescience fictionaliensfirst contact+1 more

                  "There's no such thing as an alien—at least that's what Leo thinks, until he and his friend Tim are abducted late one night on a deserted road. When Leo comes to, Tim is gone, and no one believes his story. After he sees a psychiatrist and undergoes hypnosis, even he doesn't believe his story. But then memories begin to surface—memories he can't push away—and when Time suddenly returns, Le knows they are in otherworldly extraterrestrial danger." — quoted from the back cover of the third printing of the Penguin paperback edition.

                • Cover of Illegal Alien
                  Illegal Alien

                  Robert J. Sawyer · standalone novel · 1997

                  similar bytensenorth americascience fictionaliensmurder investigationfirst contact

                  The trial of an alien accused of murdering an Earthman. The accused is a crewman of a damaged spaceship which landed on Earth, and the victim was a scientist sent to talk to them. Evidence reveals the ship was on a mission to destroy Earth, but some crewmen rebelled against the order. (WorldCat)

                • Cover of The X-Files Origins
                  The X-Files Origins

                  series · 2 books · 2017

                  part of The X-Files

                  similar bylate 20th centurytensenorth americamurder investigationmystery & detectivepolitical intrigue+1 more

                • Cover of The Dark and Deadly Pool
                  The Dark and Deadly Pool

                  Joan Lowery Nixon · standalone novel · 1987

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                  WorldCat: Sixteen-year-old Mary Elizabeth's summer job at an expensive health club turns out to be more exciting than she bargained for when a series of mysterious events culminate in murder.

                • Cover of Ghost of a Chance
                  Ghost of a Chance

                  Jayne Ann Krentz · standalone novel · 1984

                  similar bylate 20th centurymysterioustensenorth americamurder investigationmystery & detective

                  Anne Silver's Brother had been working to expose a clever ring of swindlers when he was struck down by a car - a clear case of attempted murder. Now Anne's determined to finish what her brother started. But she can't do it without the help of ex-CIA agent Julian Aries, a man who once betrayed her. With Julian as an unwilling conspirator, the couple goes under cover to face ghosts old and new - an unsolved murder and a clever gang of fake psychics. But as Anne and Julian put their lives on the line, the icy chill of danger and powerful desire they can no longer deny force them to confront the greatest unsolved mystery of all...their unlikely love.

                • Cover of Days of Atonement
                  Days of Atonement

                  Walter Jon Williams · standalone novel · 1991

                  similar bymysterioustensenorth americascience fictionmurder investigationmystery & detective

                  Loren Hawn is a traditional Western peace officer walking the streets of 21st Century New Mexico, and seemingly unaware that times have changed. And when a dying man named Randal falls out of a bullet-riddled car and dies in Loren’s arm, Loren finds he isn’t the only man living in the wrong time--- because he remembers pulling Randal’s dead body out of a wrecked car twenty years before. He knows the car belongs to a scientist who works at the high-security laboratory built on the outskirts of town, and he knows that if he doesn’t work fast, all evidence of a crime will disappear into national security vaults. In order to bring justice back to his community, Loren will have to risk everything, his life, his job, his faith, and his family.

                • Cover of Jonathan Maberry's X-Files Anthologies
                  Jonathan Maberry's X-Files Anthologies

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  part of The X-Files

                  similar bymysteriousscience fictionaliensnorth americamystery & detective+3 more

                • Cover of Ancient Shores
                  Ancient Shores

                  series · 3 books · 1996

                  similar bymysteriousnorth americascience fictionalienspolitical intrigue+2 more

                • Cover of Lucifer's Hammer
                  Lucifer's Hammer

                  Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle · standalone novel · 1977

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                  Lucifer's Hammer is a science fiction post-apocalypse-survival novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle that was first published in 1977. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

                • Cover of The Themis Files
                  The Themis Files

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar bytensescience fictionaliensmysterious+3 more

                  Sylvain Neuvel's Themis Files opens when a girl falls into a hole in South Dakota and lands on the palm of a giant metal hand buried underground; the trilogy picks up years later as she leads the team trying to determine what the hand is part of and why it's there. Sleeping Giants and its sequels are told almost entirely through interview transcripts conducted by an unnamed, evasive interrogator, giving the series a documentary, oral-history feel unusual for first-contact SF. The mystery escalates from an archaeological puzzle into a question of who else is looking for the same answer.

                • Cover of Lock In
                  Lock In

                  series · 3 books · 2014

                  similar bynorth americascience fictionmysterioustensemurder investigation+1 more

                  Lock In imagines a near-future pandemic that leaves a fraction of survivors fully conscious but completely paralyzed, able to interact with the world only through robotic surrogates or by borrowing the bodies of rare people whose brains can host another person's consciousness. John Scalzi's series follows a rookie FBI agent investigating crimes that exploit this new class of disability and technology, across the novels Lock In and Head On plus the interstitial oral history Unlocked. It's science-fiction police procedural more than space opera.

                • Cover of The Masks of Time
                  The Masks of Time

                  Robert Silverberg · standalone novel · 1968

                  similar bylate 20th centurymysterioustensescience fictionpolitical intrigue

                  From the back cover of the Ballantine first edition: "The year is 1999. The century is about to turn. The civilized world is prosperous but tense with fear about the still existing possibility of a major war. While in the large area that used called "underdeveloped" there is a hysterical conviction that the world will cone to an end with the arrival of the new century Into this explosive situation floats a creature calling himself Vornam-19 - and claiming to be a visitor from 1000 years in the future... The world is ready, indeed ripe, for a sign, an omen, a new cult. But no one realizes exactly what Vornaa-19 is in his own right."

                • Cover of Die Softly
                  Die Softly

                  Christopher Pike · standalone novel · 1991

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                  HE MAY HAVE PHOTOGRAPHED A MURDER. Herb just wanted to photograph the cheerleaders in the school showers. He planted his camera high in the corner where no one could see it, and rigged it to a special homemade timer. He did that Thursday night, and he hoped that by Friday night he would have an exciting roll of film to develop. But a girl dies Friday afternoon. On the surface it appears to be nothing more than a tragic car accident. But when Herb finally does collect his roll of film, he develops a picture that shows a shadowy figure sneaking up on the girl who has died -- sneaking up on her with a baseball bat. It makes Herb wonder if the girl was dead long before the car accident. But unfortunately for Herb, he doesn't wonder if the murderer knows he took the picture.

                • Cover of The Man from Primrose Lane
                  The Man from Primrose Lane

                  James Renner · standalone novel · 2012

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                  The Man From Primrose Lane is an adult science-fiction thriller novel by American author and investigative journalist James Renner. It was published by Sarah Crichton Books in 2012. A television adaptation of the novel was picked up by 20th Television and Working Title Films in 2017.

                • Cover of The Puppet Masters
                  The Puppet Masters

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1951

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                  Parasitical aliens attach themselves to human hosts and take over their bodies. Two spies are sent to find out what's happening, but the extent is much farther than they knew. With access to the humans' memories, the aliens quietly invade the government and start taking over.

                • Cover of Deception Point
                  Deception Point

                  Dan Brown · standalone novel · 2001

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                  Deception Point is a 2001 mystery-thriller novel by American author Dan Brown. It is Brown's third novel. It was published by Simon & Schuster.

                • Cover of The Two Georges
                  The Two Georges

                  Harry Turtledove & Richard Dreyfuss · standalone novel · 1995

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                  Alternate history where Britain keeps the American colonies after George Washington and King George III agree a settlement.

                • Cover of Trinity
                  Trinity

                  A. J. Hartley & Tom DeLonge · standalone novel · 2024

                  similar bymysterioustensenorth americascience fictionaliensfirst contact

                  A thrilling new novel by the creators of Sekret Machines who, with the help of a team of government insiders, exposed the secret pentagon UFO program that captured America’s attention and led to the first public congressional hearings about unidentified flying objects. It’s 1962, in Trinity, Nevada, a small town on the edge of the desert, home to a military base serving the nuclear testing grounds. Van Lopez and his brother Andy have enough to do keeping their truck running and the local criminal gang happy to be concerned about nuclear tests. Van has dreams, or—he’s not sure what to call them—that he cannot explain or forget, but when he sees mysterious lights in the sky, he struggles to make sense of what now feel like his earliest memories. On the day of the atomic test, the nuclear blast brings down something over Trinity that wasn’t supposed to be there—something not of this world. Now Van is running for his life, pursued by a murderous Soviet agent and government forces bent on keeping all he has seen—and all he has remembered—from getting out. Romances and rivalries come to a head as he fights for the things he cares about most, and in that final battle he may have to make allies of his oldest enemies. A thrilling new novel by the creators of Sekret Machines who, with the help of a team of government insiders, exposed the secret pentagon UFO program that captured America’s attention and led to the first public congressional hearings about unidentified flying objects.