More like Jailwise
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- The Andromeda Strain
series2 books1969
similar byscience fictioncontemporary+2 more
Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain follows a team of scientists racing to contain a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism that crash-lands in Arizona, told in the clinical, document-driven style that helped establish the techno-thriller genre. Daniel H. Wilson's authorized 2019 sequel The Andromeda Evolution revisits the same threat five decades later. Together the two books form a two-part outbreak story separated by a fifty-year gap in publication.
- Avery Cates
series22 books2007
similar byscience fictiondark+1 more
Avery Cates is set in a collapsed future New York ruled by a corrupt, cybernetically augmented security state, following a gun-for-hire navigating the city's violent underworld and its growing rebellion against System Security Force control. Jeff Somers' cyberpunk series, beginning with The Electric Church, follows Cates through escalating jobs and betrayals across six novels.
- Rosemary Reilly
series2 books1967
completed
similar by+4 more
Rosemary's Baby follows a young wife in a Gothic Manhattan apartment building who grows increasingly convinced that her elderly neighbors, and even her own husband, are part of a conspiracy surrounding her pregnancy. Ira Levin returned to the character thirty years later in the 1997 sequel Son of Rosemary. Together the two novels form a short, self-contained horror series about faith, control, and motherhood.
- H. I. V. E.
series10 books2006
similar byscience fiction+1 more
Mark Walden's series is set at H.I.V.E. (the Higher Institute of Villainous Education), a hidden academy training the next generation of criminal masterminds, following orphan genius Otto and fellow students Wing, Laura, and Shelby as they navigate the school's twisted curriculum while plotting to escape it. The premise plays school-story conventions against a supervillain backdrop across more than a dozen books.
- After Such Knowledge
series7 books1953
completed
similar by+4 more
After Such Knowledge is James Blish's loosely linked trilogy on the costs of forbidden or dangerous knowledge. It opens with A Case of Conscience, in which a Jesuit scientist studying a seemingly sinless alien race is forced to weigh what he finds against his own faith, continues with the historical novel Doctor Mirabilis about the medieval friar and scientist Roger Bacon, and closes with the two-part Black Easter, in which a magician is hired to loose Hell's demons upon the world for a single day. The three books share a theme rather than a continuous plot or cast.
- Frankenstein
universe128 books1818
Start hereFrankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus · Start here
similar by+1 more
Light a candle against the November dark and consider what a single spark, rightly applied to dead matter, might wake. In a laboratory at Ingolstadt a student named Victor Frankenstein learns the secret of animating lifeless flesh, assembles a being from the harvest of charnel houses and graves, and, at the moment it draws breath, flees the thing he has made. What he abandons does not stay abandoned. This is the world Mary Shelley opened in 1818 with Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: the story of a maker and his unmothered creation, and the long ruin each works upon the other. Shelley's novel arrives as a nest of confessions, an explorer's letters from the frozen north enclosing Victor's account, which in turn encloses the Creature's own, an articulate and wounded voice that has read Milton and wants only not to be alone. From that single volume two centuries of other hands have built outward, not as one continuity but as a gathering of independent returns to the same fire. Dean Koontz transplants the myth to modern New Orleans across a five-book cycle, Prodigal Son through The Dead Town, where the original Creature, now called Deucalion, hunts a Victor who never died. Donald F. Glut's New Adventures and Frank Schildiner's Quest of Frankenstein run the monster through pulp adventure; the mid-century French novels published as Benoit Becker chase him across a ruined Europe; Scott Sonneborn's Frankenstein Journals and the comic Frankenstein's Aunt turn the legend toward younger and lighter readers. What binds them is the question the book asks and never settles: which is the monster, the forsaken creature who kills, or the man whose ambition and cowardice made and abandoned him? Expect little comfort and few clean villains; the abiding note is grief, sublime and articulate, set against Alpine ice and candlelit hubris. Begin where it began, with Shelley's own novel; the later cycles reward you only once you have heard the Creature speak for himself.
- Patternist
series6 books1976
completed
similar byscience fictiondark+1 more
The Patternist series is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."
- Cell
Stephen Kingstandalone novel2006
similar byscience fictiondarkour worldcontemporary
In Cell, King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.
- H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
similar byscience fiction+1 more
No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
- Rats
series4 books1974
completed
similar bydarkcontemporary+2 more
The Rats, James Herbert's 1974 debut novel, imagines a plague of giant mutant rats overrunning London, told through a rotating cast of victims and survivors in the tradition of British disaster horror. It was followed by two sequels, Lair and Domain, which widen the outbreak first to the countryside and then to a besieged, apocalyptic city, completing a three-book trilogy.
- Pym
series5 books1838
similar by+3 more
Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), his only complete novel, sends a young stowaway through shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism toward an increasingly strange voyage to the South Pole that breaks off on a mysterious, unexplained image. Jules Verne wrote an unauthorized 1897 sequel, An Antarctic Mystery, resolving Poe's cliffhanger in more rationalist terms, while Mat Johnson's 2011 novel Pym uses Poe's original as the springboard for a satirical modern story about race.
- The Fog
James Herbertstandalone novel1975
similar bydarkour worldcontemporary+1 more
The Fog is a horror novel by English writer James Herbert, published in 1975. It is about a deadly fog that drives its victims insane when they come into contact with it.
- Aton/Piers Anthony's Worlds of Chthon
series4 books1967
similar byscience fictiondark
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.
- The Status Civilization
Robert Sheckleystandalone novel1960
similar byprison escapescience fictiondark
"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.
- The White Plague
Frank Herbertstandalone novel1982
similar byscience fictiondarkour world+1 more
The White Plague is a 1982 science fiction novel by American author Frank Herbert about an engineered disease which kills only women. It was nominated for a best science fiction novel Locus Award in 1983.
- The Bone Clocks
David Mitchellstandalone novel2014
similar byour worldcontemporary+2 more
The Bone Clocks is a 2014 novel by British writer David Mitchell. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and described as one of the best novels of the year by Stephen King. The novel won the 2015 World Fantasy Award.
- Fledgling
Octavia E. Butlerstandalone novel2005
similar byscience fictiondarkour worldcontemporary
Fledgling is a science fiction vampire novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 2005. It was the author's final book published before her death in 2006.
- Stephen King multiverse
universe46 books1967
Start hereThe Gunslinger · Start here
similar bydark+1 more
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. So begins the long walk of Roland Deschain, last of an order of knight-errant pistoleers, across a land that has "moved on" — where the compass points drift, dead machines rot toward sentience, and the weave of what's real wears thin. His quest is the Dark Tower itself: a spire standing at the hub of every world that exists, the linchpin that holds all of them back from ruin. Roland's road runs eight volumes, from The Gunslinger through the closing Dark Tower, with the later, interleaved tale The Wind Through the Keyhole folding a story-within-a-story back into his youth. Along the way he draws a ka-tet — a fellowship bound by fate, not choosing — through doorways between worlds: a heroin-shackled New Yorker, a woman of two minds, a boy who dies twice. The Tower is also the secret axle around which the wider shelf of King's work turns; threads from The Stand, 'Salem's Lot and beyond wind quietly toward it. Expect a mongrel of Western, high fantasy, horror and decayed science fiction, told in a dusty, incantatory dialect all its own — ka, thankee-sai, the world that has moved on. This is King at his most mythic and most personal, a decades-spanning circle that rewards a patient reader. Begin at the beginning: The Gunslinger, then walk forward in publication order. There are other worlds than these — but this door opens first.
- The Triffids
series3 books1951
similar byscience fictiondarkour world
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) opens with a meteor-shower-like event that leaves most of Britain's population blind, throwing civilization into collapse just as triffids, an aggressive and mobile species of poisonous plant, become free to hunt the helpless survivors. Simon Clark's authorized sequel The Night of the Triffids (2001) picks up a generation later, narrated by the original protagonist's son as he confronts a new triffid-dominated world, and John Whitbourn's The Age of the Triffids extends the shared setting further still. Together the three novels form a loose post-apocalyptic trilogy built on Wyndham's original premise rather than a tightly plotted single story.
- The Fury
series4 books1976
similar bycontemporary+3 more
John Farris's The Fury centers on a teenage girl and boy with escalating psychic and telekinetic powers who become targets of a covert government program trying to weaponize them. The 1976 novel, adapted into Brian De Palma's 1978 film, gave rise to a string of later sequels following the same family's psychic bloodline across decades. Farris writes it as paranoid conspiracy thriller as much as horror, with the powers themselves treated as a violent, destabilizing force.
