Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

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 Incursion

anchored on:science fictionfar future

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

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

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories 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.
      • 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.

                • Catteni Sequence

                  series · 5 books · 1970

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futureother star systemsaliens+3 more

                  The Catteni series is a tetralogy of science fiction novels by American writer Anne McCaffrey. In this universe, humans are slaves of aliens, the humanoid Catteni. Woven through all four of the books are details of the relationship between Kristin Bjornsen, a former slave, and Zainal, a renegade Catteni.

                • Uplift

                  series · 5 books · 1980

                  part of Uplift Universe

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futureother star systemsaliensspace+1 more

                  David Brin's Uplift trilogy opens with Sundiver, sending human explorers into the Sun itself, then follows a dolphin-crewed starship on the run from hostile aliens in Startide Rising and a fight over the colony world Garth in The Uplift War. The books sit inside Brin's wider Uplift Universe, built on the idea that spacefaring "patron" species genetically engineer younger "client" species into full sapience, with humanity an anomaly that reached the stars without a patron of its own.

                • Deathworld

                  series · 4 books · 1960

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionsurvivaladventurousfar futureother star systems+2 more

                  Deathworld is the name of a series of science fiction novels by American writer Harry Harrison, including the books Deathworld, Deathworld 2 and Deathworld 3, plus the short story "The Mothballed Spaceship". The central hero is a gambler who becomes involved with colonists of an extremely hostile planet.

                • Empire of Man

                  series · 4 books · 2001

                  similar byscience fictionsurvivaladventurousfar futureother star systemswartensemilitary science fiction+1 more

                  The Empire of Man is a series of science fiction books by David Weber and John Ringo published by Baen Books. It combines elements of space opera and military science fiction.

                • Pax / Astra

                  series · 2 books · 1954

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionsurvivaladventurousfar futuretense+2 more

                  Andre Norton's The Stars Are Ours! (1954) and its sequel Star Born (1957) follow a group of scientists and their families who flee a repressive future Earth to colonize a distant world they name Astra, and then the next generation, who must contend with that world's original inhabitants. Star Flight appears to be a later omnibus or reissue rather than a third original novel.

                • Tunnel in the Sky

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1955

                  similar byscience fictionsurvivaladventurousfar futureother star systemstense+1 more

                  As the final test of a survivalist/explorer class, teenagers are dumped on an alien planet to use their skills while awaiting pickup. But something has gone wrong, and they find they are on their own.

                • The Final Architecture

                  series · 6 books · 2021

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futureother star systemsalienswartensespace+1 more

                  The Final Architecture is a series of science fiction novels by British writer Adrian Tchaikovsky. It contains the books Shards of Earth, Eyes of the Void, and Lords of Uncreation. The series focuses on a group of humans fighting against the mysterious Architects, who destroy inhabited planets. The series has been well-received critically, with Shards of Earth winning the 2021 BSFA Award for Best Novel. The entire series was a finalist for the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Series.

                • Icerigger Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 1974

                  part of Humanx Commonwealth

                  similar byscience fictionsurvivaladventurousfar futureother star systems+2 more

                  Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger trilogy, set in his Humanx Commonwealth universe, strands a group of characters on the frozen world of Tran-Ky-Ky, where they get pulled into the local population's fight against a destructive nomadic force. Much of the trilogy follows their overland journey by ice-sailing craft toward the planet's one interstellar outpost, a trek of roughly a year across the ice, as they help the natives survive along the way.

                • Brion Brandd

                  series · 2 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionsurvivalfar futureother star systems+2 more

                  Harry Harrison's Brion Brandd books are two loosely connected science fiction adventures: Planet of the Damned (1962), a Hugo Award finalist, and its later sequel Planet of No Return. Both follow the same troubleshooting protagonist sent to defuse crises on different alien worlds, but the two stories are self-contained rather than parts of one continuous plot.

                • Heorot

                  series · 4 books · 1987

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systems+4 more

                  Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes's The Legacy of Heorot strands human colonists on an idyllic-seeming alien world where they discover apex predators -- grendels -- hidden beneath the surface, forcing them to fight for survival. Beowulf's Children continues the colony a generation later as the children born on the planet clash with their parents over how to live alongside the grendels, and a fourth book, Starborn and Godsons, returns to the settlement decades further on. It's hard-SF creature-horror crossed with generational colony drama.

                • Uplift Universe

                  universe · 13 books · 1980

                  Start hereUplift · Start here

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futureother star systemsaliensspace+1 more

                  No species, the Galactics insist, ever climbs to sapience alone. For a billion years the elder races have "uplifted" their chosen clients — reshaping some promising animal, gene by patient gene, into a thinking being, then binding it through long ages of indenture. Patron lifts client; client one day becomes patron; and every lineage traces back through the vast Galactic Library to the vanished Progenitors who began it all. Then a ragged band of primates arrives at the stars with no patron to claim them — wolflings, self-made, an affront to a hundred thousand years of law — and worse, these humans have already started uplifting neighbors of their own: the neo-dolphins and neo-chimpanzees of Earthclan. David Brin builds this galaxy across two trilogies. The first — Sundiver, the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Startide Rising, and the Hugo-winning The Uplift War — sends an expedition into the Sun, then follows the dolphin-crewed survey ship Streaker as it flees a discovery that sets fanatical star-clans at war, and a chimp-led resistance on an invaded colony world. The second sequence, Uplift Storm — Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, Heaven's Reach — descends to Jijo, a forbidden world where six fallen races hide as illegal settlers, and draws every loose thread toward a reckoning. Short fiction fills the margins. This is space opera with an ecologist's conscience: teeming with invented biologies, wry cross-species banter, and real unease about what we owe the minds we make. Begin with Startide Rising — the saga's beating heart, and readable on its own — or take Sundiver first and read straight through in publication order.

                • Central Control

                  series · 2 books · 1953

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futureother star systemsspace+3 more

                  Andre Norton's Central Control novels are a loose future history that sketches the rise of a galactic empire through events echoing Norton's own reading of Terran history rather than following one continuing cast. Star Rangers follows the crew of a crashed Stellar Patrol scoutship who, after entangling themselves in a local rebellion on what seems an unknown world, discover they have found humanity's long-lost original homeworld, Terra. Star Guard and Star Soldiers extend the same shared background with their own separate stories.

                • Skyward

                  series · 9 books · 2018

                  part of Cytoverse

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systemsspace+4 more

                  On the ruined world of Detritus, humanity lives underground beneath near-constant aerial bombardment from an alien force called the Krell, and Spensa Nightshade wants nothing more than to fly a starfighter, despite her father's reputation as a coward who fled battle. Brandon Sanderson's Skyward follows her fight to earn her wings and clear her father's name, uncovering secrets about her own strange abilities and the planet's buried past across Starsight, Cytonic, and Defiant. Co-author Janci Patterson contributes companion novellas that widen the view to supporting characters.

                • Moties

                  series · 4 books · 1974

                  part of CoDominium

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systemsaliensspace+3 more

                  Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye (1974) depicts humanity's first contact with an alien species, the Moties, set within the far-future interstellar setting of Pournelle's codominium future history. The Gripping Hand continues that first-contact crisis years later, and Outies, written by J. R. Pournelle, carries the story forward into a new generation. Together the three books trace an escalating encounter between human and Motie civilizations within the codominium universe.

                • Cities in Flight

                  series · 10 books · 1950

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionfar futurespace+3 more

                  Cities in Flight is a four-volume series of science fiction novels and short stories by American writer James Blish, originally published between 1950 and 1962, which were first known collectively as the "Okie" novels. The series features entire cities that are able to fly through space using an anti-gravity device, the spindizzy. The stories cover roughly two thousand years, from the very near future to the end of the universe. One story, "Earthman, Come Home", won a Retro Hugo Award in 2004 for Best Novelette. Since 1970, the primary edition has been the omnibus volume first published in paperback by Avon Books. Over the years James Blish made many changes to these stories in response to points raised in letters from readers.

                • Blackcollar

                  series · 3 books · 1983

                  similar byscience fictionfar futurewartensemilitary science fiction+4 more

                  Timothy Zahn's Blackcollar trilogy, his debut work, follows survivors of Earth's underground resistance against the Ryqril, an alien empire that conquered the planet a generation earlier. The Blackcollars themselves are elite commando-agents trained before the invasion, presumed a spent, aging force until circumstances pull survivors back into action against their occupiers. The Backlash Mission and The Judas Solution continue the resistance's fight as the underground network is drawn deeper into interstellar politics beyond Earth.

                • The Stars My Destination

                  Alfred Bester · standalone novel · 1956

                  similar byscience fictionsurvivaladventurousfar futureother star systemsspace

                  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.

                • Old Man's War

                  series · 16 books · 2005

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futureother star systemswarspacemilitary science fiction+2 more

                  The Old Man's War series is a series of science fiction novels by John Scalzi. The first book in the series, Old Man's War, was first published in 2005 by Tor Books, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006. In 2026 it was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Series.

                • Vatta

                  universe · 10 books · 2003

                  Start hereVatta's War · Start here

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futureother star systemstensespacemilitary science fiction+2 more

                  Get kicked out of the Academy and the family still hands you a ship. That is the arithmetic Kylara Vatta lives by. Born into Vatta Transport, Ltd. — a dynasty of interstellar traders who reckon their honor in delivered cargo and honored contracts — Ky wants a soldier's commission and gets a merchant hull instead. Then someone starts murdering her relatives and burning the ledgers, and the daughter learns that a trade fleet, armed and angry, is its own kind of war. This is military science fiction run on a merchant's books. The core cycle, Vatta's War, moves in five volumes — Trading in Danger, Marque and Reprisal, Engaging the Enemy, Command Decision, Victory Conditions — as piracy, a sabotaged faster-than-light communications network, and a scattered family push Ky from cautious captain to fleet commander. The later duology Vatta's Peace (Cold Welcome, Into the Fire) drops her, older and decorated, into a colder survival ordeal on her own homeworld. Moon writes clean, competent, procedural: supply lines and boarding actions, chains of command, the cost of a signature on a bad contract. Expect capable women, hard decisions costed to the last credit, and space combat that respects physics and paperwork alike. Begin at the beginning — Trading in Danger — and read straight through in publication order; the arc is chronological and cumulative, no side doors required.

                • Of Man and Manta

                  series · 3 books · 1968

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousother star systemsfar futurealiens+2 more

                  Of Man and Manta is a trilogy of science fiction novels written by Piers Anthony. It consists of the three books: Omnivore (1968), Orn (1970), and 0X (1975).

                • Beast Master

                  series · 5 books · 1959

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systems+2 more

                  Andre Norton's Beast Master series follows Hosteen Storm, a Navajo veteran of an interstellar war who resettles an alien frontier world with a team of specially trained animals bonded to him by touch-telepathy. The original novels came from Norton in the late 1950s-60s; Lyn McConchie added further installments decades later, extending Storm's story on the frontier planet Arzor. It's frontier-adventure science fiction built around an unusual human-animal partnership.

                • Space Beagle

                  series · 5 books · 1939

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionadventurousfar futurealienstensespace+1 more

                  The Voyage of the Space Beagle is a 1950 fix-up novel by A. E. van Vogt, stitched together from four previously published pulp stories into a single continuous account of the exploration ship Space Beagle's encounters with a series of dangerous alien life forms. Its episodic, crew-versus-monster structure reads as a loose sequence of adventures rather than one continuous plot.

                • Heechee

                  series · 19 books · 1972

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systemsaliensspace+1 more

                  The Heechee Saga, also known as the Gateway series, is a series of science fiction novels and short stories by Frederik Pohl. The Heechee are an advanced alien race that visited the Solar System hundreds of millennia ago and then mysteriously disappeared. They left behind bases containing artifacts, including working starships, which are discovered and exploited by humanity.

                • Man-Kzin Wars

                  series · 84 books · 1986

                  part of Known Space

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systemsalienswartensespacemilitary science fiction+1 more

                  The Man–Kzin Wars is the name of a series of military science fiction anthologies as well as the name of the first book in the series. The short stories detail the eponymous conflicts between mankind and the Kzinti, set in Larry Niven's Known Space universe. However, Niven himself has written only a small number of the stories; most were written by other science fiction writers, as Niven opened this part of the Known Space to collaboration in the form of a shared universe. The cover art for the books in the series is created by Stephen Hickman.