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

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Keepsakes

anchored on:science fiction

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 about minds with paranormal abilities — telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, empathy — and how societies handle those who have them.
  • 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 Ender Wiggin
                  Ender Wiggin

                  series · 14 books · 1977

                  part of Ender's Game Universe

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                  Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1985, expanded from his 1977 novella) follows child prodigy Andrew "Ender" Wiggin as he is recruited into a military training program built to prepare Earth's defenses for an anticipated third war against an insectoid alien species known as the Formics. The saga continues years later through Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, following an older Ender as he confronts the moral weight of his role in that earlier conflict, and concludes the core arc in Children of the Mind, with Ender in Exile filling in the years between the first two books. Set within the wider Ender's Game universe, the series shifts from military coming-of-age story to slower, more philosophical science fiction as it progresses.

                • Cover of The Last Man
                  The Last Man

                  Mary Shelley · standalone novel · 1826

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                  The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1826. The narrative concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by the rise of a bubonic plague pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. It also includes discussion of the British state as a republic, for which Shelley sat in meetings of the House of Commons to gain insight to the governmental system of the Romantic era. The novel includes many fictive allusions to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication, as well as their close friend Lord Byron, who had died two years previously.

                • Cover of Culture
                  Culture

                  series · 15 books · 1987

                  completed

                  part of The Culture

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                  The Culture series is a science fiction series written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks and released from 1987 until 2012. The stories centre on The Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main themes of the series are the dilemmas that an idealistic, more-advanced civilization faces in dealing with smaller, less-advanced civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds barbaric. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of the Culture in its plans to civilize the galaxy. Each novel is a self-contained story with new characters, although reference is occasionally made to the events of previous novels.

                • Cover of VALIS
                  VALIS

                  series · 4 books · 1981

                  completed

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                  The VALIS trilogy is a set of science fiction/philosophical novels by author Philip K. Dick which include VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). Dick's first novel about the VALIS concept originally titled "VALISystem A", was published as Radio Free Albemuth after Dick's death in 1985.

                • Cover of The Giver
                  The Giver

                  series · 5 books · 1993

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                  The Giver Quartet is a series of four books about a dystopian world by American author Lois Lowry, which consists of The Giver (1993), Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004), and Son (2012). The first book won the 1994 Newbery Medal and has sold more than 50 million copies. The story takes place at an unknown point of time within the future. Each book has a different protagonist but is set in the same futuristic era.

                • Cover of Francis Sandow
                  Francis Sandow

                  series · 5 books · 1968

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                • Cover of Jenna Fox Chronicles
                  Jenna Fox Chronicles

                  series · 4 books · 2008

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                  The Jenna Fox Chronicles opens with a teenage girl waking from a year-long coma with gaps in her memory, only to uncover unsettling truths about the medical technology that saved her life. Mary E. Pearson's trilogy, beginning with The Adoration of Jenna Fox, explores questions of identity and what makes someone human as the story continues through The Fox Inheritance and Fox Forever.

                • Cover of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
                  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

                  Charles Yu · standalone novel · 2010

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                  How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a 2010 novel by Taiwanese-American writer Charles Yu. The novel revolves around a search for a father and the father-son relationship. It also includes themes about life and how we live especially with respect to time, memories, and creation of the self.

                • Cover of Vorkosigan
                  Vorkosigan

                  universe · 27 books · 1986

                  Start hereShards of Honor · Chronological start

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                  On Barrayar they will tell you that a man is measured by his forebears and the straightness of his spine — which is a difficulty for Miles Vorkosigan, born brittle-boned and half-height into the highest military caste of a planet that not long ago left such infants on the hillside to die. Beyond his backwater lies the wormhole nexus: a scatter of human worlds strung along unstable jump-routes, where a blood-and-honor warrior aristocracy, a coolly egalitarian utopia, and a hundred lesser polities trade, spy, and go to war. Miles cannot pass the physicals. So he builds himself a fleet, a false name, and a career out of sheer talky brilliance and a constitutional refusal to sit still. Lois McMaster Bujold has spent decades on this future, and it reads as one long life more than a franchise. It opens a generation early with Miles's mother, Cordelia — a level-headed survey captain from Beta Colony who marries into Barrayaran politics — before handing the saga to Miles himself, from teenage con-artist admiral to Imperial troubleshooter, and eventually to the next generation. Around that spine stand companion novels set elsewhere in the nexus: Falling Free, among the engineered zero-gee "quaddies"; Ethan of Athos; and the later books. Many volumes are gathered into omnibuses; several have taken Hugo Awards. The pleasure is voice and heart more than hardware — comedies of intrigue that turn, without warning, into hard questions about disability, ambition, biology as destiny, and what honor costs the people who keep it. Newcomers have two clean doors: Shards of Honor (paired with Barrayar as Cordelia's Honor) for the chronological start, or The Warrior's Apprentice to meet Miles at full velocity.

                • Cover of Tomorrow and Tomorrow
                  Tomorrow and Tomorrow

                  Charles Sheffield · standalone novel · 1997

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                  Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a 1997 science fiction novel by Charles Sheffield. The book starts in approximately the year 2020 and follows the protracted adventures of Drake Merlin, in his quest to save his wife from a terminal brain disease, over the course of eons. Similar premises are presented in the 2006 film The Fountain, as well as the Isaac Asimov story "The Last Question".

                • Cover of Hainish
                  Hainish

                  series · 33 books · 1964

                  completed

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                  The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. The cycle is set in a future history that features civilizations of human beings on planets orbiting a number of nearby stars, including Terra ("Earth"); these humans are contacting each other for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations, as well as setting up a confederacy under the guidance of the oldest of the human worlds, the peaceful planet Hain. In this history, human beings did not evolve on Earth, but they were instead the result of interstellar colonies planted by Hain in the distant past, after which interstellar travel ceased for an extended period. Some of the human races have new genetic traits, a result of ancient Hainish experiments in genetic engineering; this includes people who can dream while awake, and a world of hermaphroditic people who only enter active sexuality once per month, not knowing which sex will manifest in them. In keeping with Le Guin's narrative approach, she uses varied social and environmental settings to explore the anthropological and sociological outcomes of human evolution in those environments. The author often discounted the characterization of a so-called "Hainish Cycle".

                • Cover of Dying Inside
                  Dying Inside

                  Robert Silverberg · standalone novel · 1972

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                  Dying Inside is a 1972 science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg. It was first serialized in Galaxy in 1972 and published in book form by Charles Scribner's Sons later that year. The novel follows David Selig, a middle-aged telepath in contemporary New York City, as the mind-reading ability that has shaped his life begins to disappear.

                • Cover of Lincoln's Dreams
                  Lincoln's Dreams

                  Connie Willis · standalone novel · 1987

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                  Lincoln's Dreams is a 1987 novel by American author Connie Willis about a historical researcher studying the U.S. Civil War who meets a young woman who seems to be dreaming General Lee's dreams. The book is about parapsychology, metaphysical speculations, death, and love.

                • Cover of Cards of Grief
                  Cards of Grief

                  Jane Yolen · standalone novel · 1984

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                  Cards of Grief is a novel by Jane Yolen published in 1984.

                • Cover of Greybeard
                  Greybeard

                  Brian W. Aldiss · standalone novel · 1964

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                  Long after a catastrophe that has sterilized humans and most other mammals, the 54-year-old protagonists—Greybeard and Martha—take a tour of entropic England. In scattered self contained communities only the old survive, while outside these enclaves nature comes back into its own, peopling the land with new animal life.

                • Cover of Thousand Worlds
                  Thousand Worlds

                  series · 24 books · 1971

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                  George R.R. Martin's Thousand Worlds is a loose future-history setting he used for several of his 1970s-80s stories and novels, encompassing human interstellar colonization and encounters with older, stranger civilizations. Dying of the Light, A Song for Lya and the novella Nightflyers are among its best-known entries, sharing background rather than continuing characters or plot.

                • Cover of Kéthani Stories
                  Kéthani Stories

                  series · 13 books · 1997

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                • Cover of Station Eleven
                  Station Eleven

                  Emily St. John Mandel · standalone novel · 2014

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                  "Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time — from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains — this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet." (source: Goodreads.com)

                • Cover of Never Let Me Go
                  Never Let Me Go

                  Kazuo Ishiguro · standalone novel · 2005

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                  Never Let Me Go is a 2005 science fiction novel by the British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005. It included the novel in its '100 Best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME'. It also received an ALA Alex Award in 2006. A film adaptation directed by Mark Romanek was released in 2010.

                • Cover of Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
                  Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

                  Kurt Vonnegut & Jr. · standalone novel · 1969

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                  Vonnegut opens in his own voice, describing the twenty years it took him to face writing about surviving the firebombing of Dresden as a POW. He then hands the story to Billy Pilgrim, an awkward, fatalistic American chaplain's assistant swept into the Battle of the Bulge and captured by German forces alongside a soldier who dies blaming him for it. Imprisoned in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden, Billy survives the firebombing that follows, and, we're told upfront, has also come 'unstuck in time,' living his life out of order, including a stretch on the alien world of Tralfamadore. Vonnegut's best-known novel folds war memoir into science fiction and black comedy.

                • Cover of Mission Child
                  Mission Child

                  Maureen F. McHugh · standalone novel · 1998

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                  Mission Child is a science fiction novel by Maureen F. McHugh. Set on a once-forgotten colony planet, it follows the life of Janna, the titular mission child, who witnesses the massacre of her loved ones and is displaced time and again as her world is radically changed by contact with new colonists from Earth. The novel explores the impacts of colonization on colonized peoples, the estranging power of technology, and Janna's gender identity as she disguises herself as a young man, takes on a new name, and over time comes to identify as neither a man nor a woman.

                • Cover of The Martian Chronicles
                  The Martian Chronicles

                  series · 30 books · 1946

                  completed

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                  The Martian Chronicles (1950) is Ray Bradbury's fix-up novel, a chain of linked short stories following waves of settlers leaving a troubled Earth to colonize Mars and encountering its native Martians, before Earth itself is ultimately consumed by nuclear war.

                • Cover of Caiette
                  Caiette

                  series · 2 books · 2020

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                • Cover of Canopus in Argos: Archives
                  Canopus in Argos: Archives

                  series · 5 books · 1979

                  completed

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                  Canopus in Argos: Archives is a sequence of five science fiction novels by Nobel laureate author Doris Lessing, which portray a number of societies at different stages of development, over a great period of time. The focus is on accelerated evolution guided by advanced species for less advanced species and societies.