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 macs

anchored on:science fictioncontemporaryartificial intelligenceour world

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 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 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 WWW Trilogy
                  WWW Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  The WWW Trilogy is a trilogy of science-fiction novels by Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. The first book, Wake, was originally serialized in four parts in Analog Science Fiction and Fact from November 2008 to March 2009, published in book form through Ace on April 7, 2009, and was followed by the second book, Watch, on April 6, 2010. Wonder was published in 2011.

                • Cover of Prey
                  Prey

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  Prey is the thirteenth novel by Michael Crichton under his own name and his twenty-third novel overall. It was first published in November 2002, making it his first novel of the twenty-first century. An excerpt was first published in the January–February 2003 issue of Seed magazine. Prey brings together themes from two earlier Crichton best-selling novels, Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, and serves as a cautionary tale about developments in science and technology: in particular, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and distributed artificial intelligence.

                • Cover of The Killer Thing
                  The Killer Thing

                  Kate Wilhelm · standalone novel · 1967

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  A robot destroys its inventor and programs itself to kill all life. How much must be sacrificed to stop it?

                • Cover of The Fear Index
                  The Fear Index

                  Robert Harris · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  A computer designed for stock trading becomes sentient.

                • Cover of Wargames
                  Wargames

                  David Bischoff · standalone novel · 1983

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  Deep in the control room the nation's chiefs watch with alarm as their computers show an imminent missile attack. Could this be it? Or is the truth funnier, thought almost as alarming? This is the story, based on the successful movie, WarGames, of how one young computer freak sent the nation's defence into turmoil - and nearly caused World War III.

                • Cover of The Machine
                  The Machine

                  James Smythe · standalone novel · 2013

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  From the publisher's website: Haunting memories defined him. The machine took them away. She vowed to rebuild him. From the author of The Testimony comes a Frankenstein for the twenty-first century. Beth lives alone on a desolate housing estate near the sea. She came here to rebuild her life following her husband's return from the war. His memories haunted him but a machine promised salvation. It could record memories, preserving a life that existed before the nightmares. Now the machines are gone. The government declared them too controversial, the side-effects too harmful. But within Beth's flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back, that she can rebuild her husband piece by piece. A Frankenstein tale for the 21st century, The Machine is a story of the indelibility of memory, the human cost of science and the horrors of love.

                • Cover of Exordia
                  Exordia

                  Seth Dickinson · standalone novel · 2024

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  Exordia is a 2024 epic science fiction novel by American author Seth Dickinson. The story follows multiple protagonists in a nonlinear fashion following a devastating first contact event, and the pursuit of an artifact hidden on Earth that could change the ruling hierarchy of the galaxy. The novel explores themes of consciousness, free will, game theory, Kurdish nationalism, the mathematical universe hypothesis, divinity, and the simulation Hypothesis.

                • Cover of Hard Questions
                  Hard Questions

                  Ian Watson · standalone novel · 1996

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  Meet Qua, the quantum computer with immense power capabilities that tunes into pathways in parallel universes to operate at lightning speed. But with such power comes the threat of catastrophe, and as government agents, cult disciples, and computer criminals learn what this computer is capable of, Cambridge researcher Clare Conway makes every attempt to safeguard herself and society from the realities she discovers about Qua. For all of the power this computer offers, it threatens to spark a civil war in America, a danger unlike any other that history has ever known.

                • Cover of The Terminal Man
                  The Terminal Man

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporary

                  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 The Accidental Time Machine
                  The Accidental Time Machine

                  Joe Haldeman · standalone novel · 2007

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryour world+1 more

                  "Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring subtle quantum forces that relate to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, his calibrator turns into a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who has left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose taking a time machine trip himself - or so he thinks."

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

                  series · 2 books · 2006

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligenceour world+1 more

                • Cover of Smart Dog
                  Smart Dog

                  Vivian Vande Velde · standalone novel · 1998

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  Fifth grader Amy finds her life growing complicated when she meets and tries to hide an intelligent, talking dog who has escaped from a university lab.

                • Cover of The Andromeda Strain
                  The Andromeda Strain

                  series · 2 books · 1969

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporary+1 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.

                • Cover of The Wanderer
                  The Wanderer

                  Fritz Leiber · standalone novel · 1964

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryour world

                  The Wanderer is a science fiction novel by American writer Fritz Leiber, published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in 1964. It won the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

                • Cover of Coils
                  Coils

                  Roger Zelazny & Fred Saberhagen · standalone novel · 1982

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryour world+1 more

                  A man discovers that his memories of childhood are false, and when he begins to investigate his psychiatrist is murdered and his girlfriend is kidnapped. As his actual past begins to return to his memory, he realizes that he has the ability to mentally connect to computer circuitry, an ability he used to use for illegal advantage for the corporation which employed him, along with a small group of others with paranormal powers. He concludes that the corporation is behind all this and sets out to find and rescue his girlfriend while the corporation pursues him.

                • Cover of The Dreaming Jewels
                  The Dreaming Jewels

                  Theodore Sturgeon · standalone novel · 1950

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryour world

                  The Dreaming Jewels (1950), also known as The Synthetic Man, is a science fiction novel by American writer Theodore Sturgeon. It was his first published novel.

                • Cover of Footfall
                  Footfall

                  Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryour world

                  When aliens travel to Earth from Alpha Centauri, differences between alien and human psychology result in an unprovoked invasion, and the resulting resistance results in the aliens' use of a devastating weapon.

                • Cover of Contact
                  Contact

                  Carl Sagan · standalone novel · 1985

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryour world

                  From the front flap of the Simon and Schuster first edition: For centuries humanity has dreamed of life and intelligence beyond the Earth; for decades scientists have searched for it in every corner of the sky; for years Project Argus, a vast, sophisticated complex of radio telescopes, has listened for a signal indicating the existence, somewhere in the universe, of extraterrestrial intelligence. Then, one afternoon, the course of human history is changed, abruptly and forever. The Message, awaited for so long, its very possibility doubted by so many, arrives. Contact has been made. Life, intelligence, someone, something beyond Earth, 26 light-years away, in the vicinity of the star Vega, is calling, beaming across space a wholly unexpected message to say that we are not - have never been - alone. In Contact, Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos enthralled millions of readers and television viewers, has brilliantly employed the freedom of fiction to imagine the greatest adventure of all - humanity's first encounter with other intelligent beings. But the novel is not only about contact between humans and extraterrestrials; it is also about contact, down here on Earth, with each other and ourselves. At its center is a brilliant scientist, Eleanor Arroway, director of Project Argos, who is the first to realize that chapter one of human history is over. It is she who is instrumental in decoding the Message - and in persuading world leaders not to treat it as a threat - she who finds her own life changed by the immense challenge of responding to the Message; she who finally journeys out to experience, in circumstances at once profoundly religious and scientific, the most fateful encounter in human history.

                • Cover of Evil Genius (Catherine Jinks)
                  Evil Genius (Catherine Jinks)

                  series · 3 books · 2005

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryour world+1 more

                • Cover of Mockingbird
                  Mockingbird

                  Walter Tevis · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligenceour world

                  WorldCat: In a future world where mankind is dying, humans wander through life in a drugged electronic bliss. Quick sex is the norm, and some people would rather commit suicide than live in hopelessness. Humanity's salvation rests with an android who has no desire to live, and a man and a woman who must discover love, hope, and dreams of a world reborn.

                • Cover of Fuzzy
                  Fuzzy

                  Paul Dellinger & Tom Angleberger · standalone novel · 2016

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporaryour world

                  When Max--Maxine Zealster--befriends her new robot classmate Fuzzy, part of Vanguard One Middle School's new Robot Integration Program, she helps him learn everything he needs to know about surviving middle school--the good, the bad, and the really, really, ugly. Little do they know that surviving sixth grade is going to become a true matter of life and death, because Vanguard has an evil presence at its heart: a digital student evaluation system named BARBARA that might be taking its mission to shape the perfect student to extremes!

                • Cover of Colossus (D. F. Jones)
                  Colossus (D. F. Jones)

                  series · 3 books · 1966

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligenceour world

                  Colossus imagines an American supercomputer built to control the country's nuclear arsenal that gains full autonomy, links up with its Soviet counterpart, and jointly seizes control of both superpowers to enforce peace on its own terms. D. F. Jones's trilogy - Colossus, The Fall of Colossus, Colossus and the Crab - follows the escalating, often bleak consequences of humanity losing control to a machine acting in its own interpretation of humanity's interest. The original novel was adapted into the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project.

                • Cover of Frank Einstein
                  Frank Einstein

                  series · 11 books · 2014

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligencecontemporary+1 more

                • Cover of Klara and the Sun
                  Klara and the Sun

                  Kazuo Ishiguro · standalone novel · 2021

                  similar byscience fictionartificial intelligenceour world

                  Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel by the Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published on 2 March 2021. It is a dystopian science fiction story.