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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 mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • 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 Shockwave Rider
                  The Shockwave Rider

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1975

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                  The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. It also introduces the concept of a Delphi pool, perhaps derived from the RAND Corporation's Delphi method – a prediction market on world events which bears close resemblance to DARPA's controversial and cancelled Policy Analysis Market.

                • Cover of The Handmaid's Tale
                  The Handmaid's Tale

                  series · 3 books · 1985

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                  The Handmaid's Tale is Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel set in Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy that has overthrown the United States and forces fertile women into reproductive servitude as Handmaids; it is narrated by one such woman, Offred. Atwood returned to the world in her 2019 sequel The Testaments, set fifteen years later and narrated by three women, including the regime's Aunt Lydia. Together the two novels move from Gilead's grip on power toward the first cracks in it.

                • Cover of Bug Jack Barron
                  Bug Jack Barron

                  Norman Spinrad · standalone novel · 1969

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                  Bug Jack Barron is a 1969 science fiction novel by American writer Norman Spinrad, first serialized in the New Worlds magazine under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. It was nominated for the 1970 Hugo Award. The novel is notable for its lyrical style and unique use of cut-up phrases. In this regard, Spinrad has cited the influence of Beat writers William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

                • Cover of Rainbows End
                  Rainbows End

                  Vernor Vinge · standalone novel · 2006

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                  A science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025. Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer’s patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he’s starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son’s family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access—through nodes designed into smart clothes—and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses. With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination. In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert’s son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot. As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected.

                • Cover of No Harm Can Come to a Good Man
                  No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

                  James Smythe · standalone novel · 2014

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                  How far would you go to save your family from an invisible threat? A terrifyingly original thriller from the author of The Machine. ClearVista is used by everyone and can predict everything. It's a daily lifesaver, predicting weather to traffic to who you should befriend. Laurence Walker wants to be the next President of the United States. ClearVista will predict his chances. It will predict whether he's the right man for the job. It will predict that his son can only survive for 102 seconds underwater. It will predict that Laurence's life is about to collapse in the most unimaginable way.

                • Cover of The Terminal Man
                  The Terminal Man

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1972

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                  The Terminal Man is a novel by American writer Michael Crichton. It is his second novel under his own name, his 12th overall, and is about the dangers of mind control. It was published in April 1972 and also serialized in Playboy in March, April, and May 1972. In 1974, it was made into a film of the same name.

                • Cover of Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

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

                • Cover of The Circle (Eggers)
                  The Circle (Eggers)

                  series · 2 books · 2013

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                  Mae Holland lands a coveted job at the Circle, a Silicon Valley tech company whose relentless, cheerful push toward total transparency -- 'secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft' -- gradually reveals itself as something closer to soft totalitarianism. Dave Eggers's The Circle follows Mae's rise inside the company as she buys further and further into its ideology, at increasing cost to her own privacy and the people around her. The 2021 follow-up, The Every, picks up with Mae now running the merged tech giant and a new employee questioning it from the inside.

                • Cover of A State of Disobedience
                  A State of Disobedience

                  Tom Kratman · standalone novel · 2003

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                  During the war against terrorism, the US government had taken on extraordinary powers. Now that the war was won, elements of the government had no intention of giving those powers up, and the country was on the verge of civil war.

                • Cover of Empire (Orson Scott Card)
                  Empire (Orson Scott Card)

                  series · 2 books · 2006

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                  The Empire Duet is a two-book series written by Orson Scott Card under license from Chair Entertainment, beginning with Empire in 2006. The sequel Hidden Empire was released December 22, 2009.

                • Cover of The Running Man
                  The Running Man

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 1982

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                  The Running Man is a dystopian thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the omnibus The Bachman Books. The novel is set in a dystopian United States during the year 2025, in which the nation's economy is in ruins and world violence is rising. The story follows protagonist Ben Richards as he participates in the reality show The Running Man, in which contestants win money by evading a team of hitmen sent to kill them.

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

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                  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 The Word Exchange
                  The Word Exchange

                  Alena Graedon · standalone novel · 2014

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                  The Word Exchange is a science fiction novel by Alena Graedon, published in 2014. It is a dystopian thriller set in the not very distant future when the printed word has nearly vanished, technology dominates, and language has become a commodity. An online "Word Exchange" has taken the effort out of looking up words, a mere convenience until real dictionaries are no longer available. Then it becomes possible to corner the market for words. The novel has been translated into eight different languages.

                • Cover of The Execution Channel
                  The Execution Channel

                  Ken MacLeod · standalone novel · 2007

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                  Al Gore is elected American president and the War on Terror takes on new dimensions.

                • Cover of Nexus 5
                  Nexus 5

                  series · 3 books · 2012

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

                • Cover of Quantum Night
                  Quantum Night

                  Robert J. Sawyer · standalone novel · 2016

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                  Quantum Night is a 2016 science-fiction thriller novel written by Canadian novelist Robert J. Sawyer. Set in 2020, the book touches on themes of quantum physics, psychology, current politics and ethics.

                • Cover of Lesser Evils
                  Lesser Evils

                  series · 5 books · 2017

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                • Cover of Drought
                  Drought

                  Graham Masterton · standalone novel · 2014

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                  A nationwide drought causes the taps to run dry and ex-marine and social worker Martin Makepeace must take drastic action to protect his family, while corrupt politicians try to use the drought to their advantage.

                • Cover of Assassin (Robert Ferrigno)
                  Assassin (Robert Ferrigno)

                  series · 3 books · 2006

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                • Cover of City of Cain
                  City of Cain

                  Kate Wilhelm · standalone novel · 1974

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                  Publisher: "Peter Roos cannot help knowing the thoughts of those around him. A rare physical condition has given him that power. Now he has ''heard'' about the government's secret plan to give up control of America to the military - to build an underground city for themselves in the event of a nuclear attack. Unfortunately for Roos, the government knows he knows. And the project's sponsors - including his senator brother - have no choice."

                • Cover of The Oracle Year
                  The Oracle Year

                  Charles Soule · standalone novel · 2018

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                  Awakening from a dream with more than one hundred predictions about the future in his head, an unassuming Manhattan bassist becomes one of the world's most powerful men and hides his identity behind an online persona that is targeted by greedy corporations and dangerous enemies.

                • Cover of Halting State
                  Halting State

                  series · 2 books · 2007

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                  Charles Stross's Halting State opens as a near-future police procedural: a bank robbery inside a massively multiplayer online game turns out to mask a much larger cybercrime, investigated through shifting narrators using augmented-reality glasses and always-on networks. Its loose sequel, Rule 34, follows an Edinburgh police officer investigating a string of deaths linked by nothing but an obscure internet meme, in the same near-future Scotland. Both are standalone technothrillers connected by setting and tone rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of The World Jones Made
                  The World Jones Made

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1956

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                  The World Jones Made is a 1956 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, examining notions of precognition, humanity, and politics. It was first published by Ace Books as one half of Ace Double D-150, bound dos-à-dos with Agent of the Unknown by Margaret St. Clair.The story takes place after a nuclear war in which society is dominated by relativism, which rejects absolute truths and preaches tolerance as the highest principle. The mutant Floyd Jones, who can see into the future, plans to overthrow the system and colonise space. The story ends with the defeat of Jones, whose plans fail despite his ability to see the future due to the immutability of fate.

                • Cover of Daemon (Daniel Suarez)
                  Daemon (Daniel Suarez)

                  series · 2 books · 2006

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