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

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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 structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories 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 Mercy
                  Mercy

                  series · 5 books · 2010

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryyoung adultparanormal+4 more

                • Cover of The Rephaim
                  The Rephaim

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adultangelsparanormal+2 more

                • Cover of The Radleys
                  The Radleys

                  Matt Haig · standalone novel · 2010

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adultparanormal+2 more

                  The Radleys is a paranormal fantasy novel for young adults by Matt Haig, published 1 July 2010 by Canongate Books.

                • Cover of Hush, Hush
                  Hush, Hush

                  series · 5 books · 2009

                  similar byemotionalidentitycontemporaryyoung adultangels+2 more

                  The Hush, Hush quartet is a series of four novels by Becca Fitzpatrick that follow teenager Nora Grey as she falls in love with the fallen angel Patch and discovers her own angelic heritage. The first book in the series, Hush, Hush, was released on October 13, 2009 through Simon & Schuster, with the final novel in the series, Finale, releasing on October 23, 2012. The series was initially promoted as a trilogy, with later announcements stating that the series would comprise four books.

                • Cover of Every Day
                  Every Day

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar byemotionalidentityour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult

                  David Levithan's Every Day follows A, a consciousness with no fixed body who wakes each morning inside a different person's life, and who falls for a girl named Rhiannon despite the impossibility of ever staying in one body to be with her. The story continues from other perspectives in Another Day and, years later, Someday.

                • Cover of Evernight Universe
                  Evernight Universe

                  series · 7 books · 2008

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+3 more

                • Cover of Sweep / Wicca (UK)
                  Sweep / Wicca (UK)

                  series · 15 books · 2001

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryyoung adulturban fantasy+4 more

                • Cover of Wings (Aprilynne Pike)
                  Wings (Aprilynne Pike)

                  series · 6 books · 2009

                  similar bycontemporaryfantasyour worldyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of Fluke
                  Fluke

                  James Herbert · standalone novel · 1977

                  similar byemotionalidentityour worldcontemporaryfantasy

                  A dog named Fluke is barely more than a puppy when fragments of a life that isn't his own surface in his mind -- memories of a wife, a daughter, a job, an entire human existence he can't reconcile with the body he's now living in. Driven by those memories, Fluke sets out to find the family he half-remembers, aided by Rumbo, another dog going through the same impossible transformation. James Herbert follows the journey from a dog's-eye view of the world, using Fluke's confusion and determination to ask what, if anything, survives of a person after death. A standalone novel by James Herbert, better known for straightforward horror.

                • Cover of Only a Monster
                  Only a Monster

                  series · 3 books · 2022

                  similar byidentityfantasycontemporaryour worldyoung adult+2 more

                  Only a Monster is Vanessa Len's YA fantasy trilogy: Only a Monster (2022), Never a Hero and Once a Villain. It follows a teenage girl who discovers she comes from a line of time-manipulating 'monsters', the traditional enemies of a lineage of 'heroes', after falling for a boy from the opposing side. The trilogy reframes familiar hero/monster tropes around a contemporary, time-travel fantasy premise.

                • Cover of The Vampire Chronicles
                  The Vampire Chronicles

                  series · 15 books · 1976

                  completed

                  similar byour worldcontemporary+3 more

                  The Vampire Chronicles is a series of Gothic vampire novels and a media franchise, created by American author Anne Rice, that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.

                • Cover of Earthbound / Tavia Michaels
                  Earthbound / Tavia Michaels

                  series · 3 books · 2013

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldyoung adult+4 more

                • Cover of Paranormalcy
                  Paranormalcy

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byour worldcontemporaryyoung adulturban fantasyparanormal+2 more

                  Paranormalcy is a series of young adult urban fantasy novels by American author Kiersten White, beginning with the entry of the same name. The story focuses on a girl named Evie, a member of a special international police force assigned to paranormal cases. As the tale progresses, Evie's professional duties begin to conflict with her growing desire for a normal life.

                • Cover of Invisibility
                  Invisibility

                  David Levithan & Andrea Cremer · standalone novel · 2013

                  similar byemotionalidentityour worldcontemporaryyoung adultparanormal+1 more

                  To break his curse of invisibility, a boy is helped by a girl, who is the only one who can see him.

                • Cover of Hero
                  Hero

                  Perry Moore · standalone novel · 2007

                  similar byemotionalidentityour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult

                  Hero is a 2007 Lambda-winning novel, and the only novel by film producer and novelist Perry Moore. The fantasy novel is about a teenage superhero, Thom Creed, who must deal with his ex-superhero father's disgrace, his own sexuality, and a murderer stalking the world's heroes.

                • Cover of The Siren
                  The Siren

                  Kiera Cass · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult+1 more

                  "You must never do anything that might expose our secret. This means that, in general, you cannot form close bonds with humans. You can speak to us, and you can always commune with the Ocean, but you are deadly to humans. You are, essentially, a weapon. A very beautiful weapon. I won't lie to you, it can be a lonely existence, but once you are done, you get to live. All you have to give, for now, is obedience and time..." The same speech has been given hundreds of times to hundreds of beautiful girls who enter the sisterhood of sirens. Kahlen has lived by these rules for years now, patiently waiting for the life she can call her own. But when Akinli, a human, enters her world, she can't bring herself to live by the rules anymore. Suddenly the life she's been waiting for doesn't seem nearly as important as the one she's living now.

                • Cover of Den of Shadows (Amelia Atwater-Rhodes)
                  Den of Shadows (Amelia Atwater-Rhodes)

                  series · 9 books · 1999

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldyoung adultparanormal+3 more

                • Cover of Meridian (Amber Kizer)
                  Meridian (Amber Kizer)

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adultparanormal+2 more

                • Cover of Unearthly
                  Unearthly

                  series · 4 books · 2011

                  similar byemotionalcontemporaryfantasyour worldyoung adultangels+2 more

                • Cover of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
                  The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

                  Kate DiCamillo · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar byemotionalidentityour worldcontemporaryfantasy

                  The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is a 2006 children's novel by American author Kate DiCamillo and illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline. Following the life of a china rabbit, the book won the 2006 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in the Fiction category. Scholarly readings of this novel have examined the work from the lens of spirituality and Christian religious studies, human development, and clinical psychology.

                • Cover of The Midnight World
                  The Midnight World

                  series · 2 books · 2020

                  similar byemotionalidentitycontemporaryfantasy+1 more

                • Cover of Elixir
                  Elixir

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byemotionalour worldcontemporaryyoung adult+2 more

                • Cover of Embrace / The Violet Eden Chapters
                  Embrace / The Violet Eden Chapters

                  series · 5 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Miss Meteor
                  Miss Meteor

                  Anna-Marie McLemore & Tehlor Kay Mejia · standalone novel · 2020

                  similar byemotionalidentityour worldcontemporaryfantasyyoung adult

                  Miss Meteor is a 2020 young adult fantasy novel by Tehlor Kay Mejia and Anna-Marie McLemore.