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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

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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 Takeshi Kovacs
                  Takeshi Kovacs

                  series · 3 books · 2002

                  similar byfar futurescience fictiondarktenseother star systemscyberpunkidentity+1 more

                  Takeshi Kovacs is a former elite soldier turned freelance troubleshooter in a future where human consciousness can be digitized and transferred between bodies, or sleeves, making death an inconvenience for those who can afford new ones. Richard Morgan's trilogy - Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies - moves Kovacs through noir-inflected mysteries on different worlds, using the resleeving premise to interrogate class, violence, and what, if anything, survives a person's original body. It became the basis for a Netflix series.

                • 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 Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

                  similar byscience fictiondarkrobotscyberpunkidentity+2 more

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

                • Cover of Dune Universe
                  Dune Universe

                  universe · 78 books · 1963

                  Start hereDune · Start here

                  similar byfar futurescience fictionother star systems+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 Pandora
                  Pandora

                  series · 4 books · 1966

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                  The Pandora Sequence opens with Frank Herbert's solo novel Destination: Void, in which a starship crew must jury-rig a working artificial consciousness after their vessel's control systems fail. Bill Ransom co-writes the three novels that follow, carrying the survivors to the world Pandora, where they must contend with both a manipulative machine intelligence and the planet's own hostile ecology. Across its four books the series moves from a claustrophobic ship-bound crisis to a generations-long struggle over faith, control, and survival on a dangerous new world.

                • Cover of The Artificial Kid
                  The Artificial Kid

                  Bruce Sterling · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: A popular home-video star and ultimate warrior on a planet dangerously divided by class and wealth distinctions discovers the lethal truth about his world and its origins in this satiric science fiction masterwork Founded centuries ago by the enigmatic genius Moses Moses, the planet Reverie can either be heaven or hell, depending on whether you live on or above it.

                • Cover of Dune
                  Dune

                  series · 20 books · 1963

                  part of Dune Universe

                  similar byfar futurescience fictionother star systems+2 more

                  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 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 Armor
                  Armor

                  John Steakley · standalone novel · 1984

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                  Armor is a military science fiction novel by John Steakley. It features the military use of exoskeletons and insect-like alien enemies but concentrates on the psychological effects of violence on human beings.

                • Cover of Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

                  similar byscience fictiontensedarkcyberpunkartificial intelligence

                  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 The Status Civilization
                  The Status Civilization

                  Robert Sheckley · standalone novel · 1960

                  similar byfar futurescience fictiondarktenseother star systems

                  "Will Barrent had no memory of his crime ... but he found himself shipped across space to a brutal prison-planet. On Omega, his only chance to advance himself -- and stay alive -- is to commit an endless series of violent crimes. The average inmate's life expectancy from time of arrival is three years. Can Barrett survive, escape, and return to Earth to clear his name?" - From the cover of the 2007 Wildside paperback edition.

                • Cover of Dancers in the Afterglow
                  Dancers in the Afterglow

                  Jack L. Chalker · standalone novel · 1978

                  similar byfar futurescience fictiontenseother star systemsrobotsidentity+1 more

                  From the back cover: FIRST CAME THE TOURISTS... Ondine was a resort planet. Sixteen million tourists traveled there from just about every world you could think of to live and love in sixteen million different ways. THEN CAME THE MACHISTS... They had gobbled up world after world, spreading their culture to thousands of different races with a brutal, vicious, but most effective system. They were inhuman, unthinking... uncaring. The Combine had already seen what they had done on other worlds, seen whole populations converted into something horrible... something not quite human, non-thinking and no longer caring. Now they had captured Ondine, and no human could save the planet. AND THEN DANIEL CAME TO JUDGMENT Daniel was a cyborg, a former fighter pilot now wedded to a master computer and life-support system housed in a flying golden egg. He was the Combine scientists' finest creation, a spaceship that could control twenty-two robot slaves. He was the perfect savior for Ondine, but for one thing. Everyone seemed to forget that somewhere deep inside that golden egg was a very human being...

                • Cover of Transformation
                  Transformation

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  part of Polity

                  similar byfar futurescience fictiontenseartificial intelligence+3 more

                  Neal Asher's Transformation trilogy, set within his wider Polity universe, follows an AI mind investigating a black-ops project gone wrong, opening with Dark Intelligence. War Factory and Infinity Engine escalate the search into a hunt across a mechanized alien warzone left behind by an earlier conflict. As with Asher's other Polity fiction, the story favors large-scale, hard-edged space combat over character-driven drama.

                • Cover of Angel Station
                  Angel Station

                  Walter Jon Williams · standalone novel · 1989

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                  Angel Station is a 1990 cyberpunk space opera science fiction novel by Walter Jon Williams.

                • Cover of Forge of God
                  Forge of God

                  series · 2 books · 1987

                  completed

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                  The Forge of God (1987) is Greg Bear's science fiction novel about Earth's discovery that it is the target of an incomprehensible, overwhelming alien attack, following scientists and ordinary people as they try to understand what is destroying the planet. Its 1992 sequel, Anvil of Stars, follows a group of young survivors sent on a mission of interstellar retaliation, continuing directly from the first book's ending.

                • 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 Imperial Radch
                  Imperial Radch

                  series · 7 books · 2012

                  part of Radchaai Universe

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                  Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy, 2013-2015) follows Breq, the sole surviving fragment of an AI that once inhabited both a troop-transport starship and dozens of soldier bodies, now alone and hunting for revenge inside the vast, expansionist Radch empire. Breq's quest widens across the trilogy into a conflict with the empire's own fractured ruler, and the books use her alien difficulty perceiving gender to unsettle the space-opera conventions around her.

                • Cover of Ian Cormac
                  Ian Cormac

                  series · 6 books · 2001

                  part of Polity

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                  Neal Asher's Ian Cormac novels (Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, Polity Agent, Line War, plus the earlier-set prequel Shadow of the Scorpion) follow Ian Cormac, an agent of Earth Central Security in Asher's Polity universe. Gridlinked opens with Cormac investigating a destroyed matter-transmitter on a remote colony while wrestling with the personality erosion caused by long-term neural linkage to the Polity's AI network; the following novels escalate into interstellar conflict with the alien Prador. Together they form the core action sequence of Asher's wider Polity series.

                • Cover of The Dosadi Experiment
                  The Dosadi Experiment

                  Frank Herbert · standalone novel · 1977

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                  From the flaps of the Berkley Putnam first edition: "In his first new work of science fiction since the best-selling Children of Dune, Frank Herbert returns to his world of Whipping Star, and involves Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary, in a new intrigue. In Whipping Star, McKie discovered that some of the stars in the universe are actually intelligent, super-powerful beings, and was able to befriend one of them, the star Alcyone - affectionately known as Fannie Mae. As The Dosadi Experiment opens, McKie is assigned to investigate the planet Dosadi, which is isolated from the rest of the galaxy by a "god-wall," a barrier set up by one of the intelligent stars. Dosadi is rumored to be an experimental planet, and the experimenters are the froglike Gowachin, whose culture is founded upon a strange legal system in which McKie is the only human ever trained. He learns that humans and Gowachin have been placed on Dosadi, without their consent, for an experiment that could last centuries: an experiment in extreme overcrowding. But this monstrous plot is apparently out of control, and it seems the Gowachin may be prepared to destroy Dosadi rather than expose its secret, thus breaking the peace among the races, and starting the first interstellar war. But this is just the beginning. When McKie finally reaches Dosadi he discovers that the Dosadis have taken control of their own evolution and produced a competitive, highly evolved elite, of both humans and Gowachin, who have been able to extrapolate the existence of a universe beyond the god-wall and hate whoever has imprisoned them like this. They plan to break out and avenge themselves on the galaxy."

                • Cover of This Perfect Day
                  This Perfect Day

                  Ira Levin · standalone novel · 1970

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                  This Perfect Day is a science fiction novel by American writer Ira Levin, about a technocratic dystopia. Levin won a Prometheus Award in 1992 for this novel. This Perfect Day is one of two Levin novels yet to be adapted to film.

                • Cover of Chaos Walking
                  Chaos Walking

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar byfar futuretensescience fictiondarkother star systems

                  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.

                • Cover of The Exile Waiting
                  The Exile Waiting

                  Vonda N. McIntyre · standalone novel · 1975

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                  From the front flap of the Gollancz first printing: The time is the distant future and Earth has been rendered uninhabitable for much of the year by terrible storms during which its only city, Center, constructed around a natural cave system, is closed off from the outside. Mischa, a young thief whose capabilities are enhanced by hereditary mutation, is trying to escape with her drug-addicted brother from the dominance of her uncle. So when a starship arrives commanded by the twin alien pseudosibs, Subone and Subtwo, Mischa seizes her chance. She is soon assigned for training to Jan Hikaru, who quickly realises that Mischa has immense abilities. All goes well until Subone, in a moment of cruelty, lures Mischa's brother into a fight and then kills him. Mischa attacks Subone and both she and Jan have to flee the wrath of the brothers and take refuge n the deep cave system underneath the city.

                • 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 Eyes of Heisenberg
                  The Eyes of Heisenberg

                  Frank Herbert · standalone novel · 1966

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                  Tens of thousands of years in the future, Earth is ruled by the Optimen, a genetically engineered aristocracy that has made itself functionally immortal, while ordinary people, the Folk, live under strict reproductive control. When Harvey and Lizbeth Durant arrive to have their embryo genetically screened, the examining doctor finds something in the child no one has seen in a very long time: real potential for both fertility and life span, traits the Optimen have arrogated to themselves. Rather than destroy the embryo as policy demands, the doctor hesitates, setting off a chain of surveillance, suspicion and resistance. A tightly wound Frank Herbert thriller about genetic caste and rebellion.