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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 Old Glory

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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 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 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 Handmaid's Tale
                  The Handmaid's Tale

                  series · 3 books · 1985

                  similar bynorth americanear futurescience fictiondystopia+1 more

                  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 Space Merchants
                  Space Merchants

                  series · 2 books · 1953

                  completed

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                  The Space Merchants (1953) is a satirical science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth that follows an advertising executive navigating a future where aggressive consumer capitalism has swallowed politics and daily life. The authors reunited three decades later for a direct sequel, The Merchants' War (1984), returning to the same satirical world. Together the two books form a compact bookend pair rather than an ongoing series.

                • Cover of Julian West
                  Julian West

                  series · 7 books · 1888

                  similar bynorth americascience fiction+2 more

                  Julian West is the time-displaced narrator of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), a utopian novel in which a nineteenth-century Bostonian wakes from a mesmeric sleep to find his city transformed into a cooperative society more than a century later. Bellamy followed it with Equality (1897), a direct sequel that returns to Julian West's perspective to further elaborate the ideas only sketched in the first book, functioning more as an extended argument than a plotted story. Together the two novels were highly influential on turn-of-the-century utopian and socialist thought.

                • Cover of Legend (Marie Lu)
                  Legend (Marie Lu)

                  series · 5 books · 2011

                  similar bynorth americanear futurescience fictiondystopiayoung adult+1 more

                  Marie Lu's Legend follows two teenagers from opposite ends of a divided, war-torn future society — one a celebrated young military prodigy, the other a hunted fugitive — whose paths collide and gradually complicate what each believed about the system that shaped them. The story continues through Prodigy and Champion, with a fourth book, Rebel, added years after the original trilogy closed; Lu has cited the film Les Misérables among her inspirations for its shape.

                • Cover of Divergent
                  Divergent

                  series · 10 books · 2011

                  similar bynorth americanear futurescience fictiondystopiayoung adult

                  Divergent, also known as The Divergent Series, is a series of young adult dystopian novels by American novelist Veronica Roth set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian Chicago. The trilogy consists of Divergent (2011), Insurgent (2012), and Allegiant (2013). A related book, Four (2014), presents a series of short stories told from the perspective of one of the trilogy's characters, the male love interest Tobias. A later short story, We Can Be Mended (2018), serves as an epilogue five years after the events of the trilogy, again from Tobias/Four's perspective.

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

                  similar bynear futurescience fiction+1 more

                  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 Library of America P. K. Dick Collection
                  Library of America P. K. Dick Collection

                  series · 9 books · 1962

                  completed

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                • Cover of The Hunger Games Universe
                  The Hunger Games Universe

                  universe · 5 books · 2008

                  Start hereThe Hunger Games · Start here

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                  Panem, they call it now — a nation raised on the drowned bones of North America, a glittering Capitol ringed by twelve districts it once starved into obedience. Every year the Capitol collects its debt in children: two tributes from each district, drawn by lottery, dropped into an engineered arena, and made to kill one another on live television while the whole country is required to watch. This is the Hunger Games — entertainment, punishment, and government at once. Suzanne Collins tells it in a compact, unified body of work. The founding trilogy — The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay — follows Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the coal-mining District 12 who volunteers in her sister's place and becomes something the Capitol never scripted. Two prequels reach back into the same machinery: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes traces a young Coriolanus Snow long before he is President, and Sunrise on the Reaping returns to District 12 a generation ahead of Katniss. Begin with the trilogy, in order — it is Katniss's voice, close and present-tense, that makes Panem breathe, and the prequels land hardest once you know how her story ends. Beneath the spectacle sits one steady, uncomfortable question: who profits when we agree to look away.

                • 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 The Thousandth Floor
                  The Thousandth Floor

                  series · 3 books · 2016

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                  Katharine McGee's trilogy imagines Manhattan in 2118 as a single thousand-story tower housing every stratum of society, following five teenagers whose ambitions collide as they climb toward, or fall from, its highest floors. Across The Thousandth Floor, The Dazzling Heights, and The Towering Sky, addiction, surveillance, genetic privilege, and family betrayal play out as soap-opera drama in a meticulously built near-future setting.

                • Cover of The Simulacra
                  The Simulacra

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1964

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                  The Simulacra is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The novel portrays a future totalitarian society apparently dominated by a matriarch, Nicole Thibodeaux. It revolves around the themes of reality and illusionary beliefs, as do many of Dick's works. Additionally, it touches on Nazi ideology.

                • Cover of New York 2140
                  New York 2140

                  Kim Stanley Robinson · standalone novel · 2017

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                  New York 2140 is a 2017 climate fiction novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel is set in a New York City that has been flooded and altered by rising water.

                • Cover of The Game-Players of Titan
                  The Game-Players of Titan

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1963

                  similar bynorth americanear futurescience fiction+2 more

                  In a depopulated, mostly sterile America, land, marriages and social standing are all wagered on Bluff, a high-stakes game administered by the vugs, gelatinous, gambling-obsessed aliens from Titan who rule Earth without ever quite occupying it. Pete Garden's bipolar disorder threatens his standing among the game's players even as his new wife becomes pregnant, a near-miraculous event in this exhausted world, and his attraction to a telepath complicates things further. When a fellow player turns up dead, Pete finds himself a suspect in a mystery tangled up with induced amnesia and vug politics he barely understands. Philip K. Dick's 1963 novel.

                • Cover of The Water Knife
                  The Water Knife

                  Paolo Bacigalupi · standalone novel · 2015

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                  The Water Knife is a 2015 science fiction novel by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is Bacigalupi's sixth novel, and is based on his short story, The Tamarisk Hunter, first published in the news magazine High Country News. It takes place in the near future, where drought brought on by climate change has devastated the Southwestern United States.

                • Cover of The House of the Scorpion
                  The House of the Scorpion

                  series · 2 books · 2002

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                  Matt is a clone of El Patron, the ancient drug lord who rules Opium, a narco-state carved out of the border between the U.S. and a future Mexico, created and raised solely to supply spare organs for the man he was copied from. Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion follows Matt's growing awareness of what he is and what's expected of him, and his fight to be treated as human once El Patron dies. The sequel, The Lord of Opium, picks up with Matt unexpectedly left in charge of the whole corrupt nation.

                • Cover of To the Stars (Harrison)
                  To the Stars (Harrison)

                  series · 3 books · 1980

                  completed

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                  The To the Stars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Harry Harrison, first published in 1980 (Homeworld) and 1981. The three books were re-published in an omnibus edition in 1981.

                • Cover of Native Tongue
                  Native Tongue

                  series · 3 books · 1984

                  completed

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                  Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy (1984-1994) is set in a dystopian future America where women have been stripped of legal rights, and follows a family of professional interpreter-linguists whose women secretly develop Láadan, a constructed language built to express female experience that the existing languages of men can't capture. The trilogy follows the spread of Láadan among the oppressed women of the linguist households as an act of quiet resistance against the patriarchal order around them.

                • Cover of Friday
                  Friday

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1982

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                  Friday is a 1982 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It is the story of a female "artificial person", the eponymous Friday, genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally better than normal humans. Artificial humans are widely resented, and much of the story deals with Friday's struggle both against prejudice and to conceal her enhanced attributes from other humans. The story is set in a Balkanized 21st century, in which the nations of the North American continent have been split up into a number of smaller states.

                • QL
                  Quantum Logic

                  series · 7 books · 1990

                  completed

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                • Cover of Renegades (Marissa Meyer)
                  Renegades (Marissa Meyer)

                  series · 3 books · 2017

                  similar bynear futurescience fictionyoung adult+2 more

                  Renegades is set in Gatlon City after a civil war between the superheroic Renegades and the villainous Anarchists, and follows Nova, a young woman with the power to put people to sleep by touch, as she infiltrates the Renegades as a spy for her uncle's Anarchists and falls for Adrian, the adopted son of the Renegades' leaders. Marissa Meyer's trilogy, continuing through Archenemies and Supernova, plays the two factions' history against the leads' divided loyalties; Meyer has said she doesn't plan to extend the series further.

                • Cover of Directive 51 / Daybreak
                  Directive 51 / Daybreak

                  series · 3 books · 2010

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                  Directive 51 opens John Barnes's near-future thriller trilogy with government analyst Heather O'Grainn as anti-technology extremists unleash a nanotech plague called Daybreak that destroys petroleum-based materials, rubber, and electrical systems worldwide. The resulting collapse triggers mass death, a crisis over presidential succession, and mysterious Moon-launched fusion strikes on Washington and Chicago, while a shadowy neofeudalist movement moves into the vacuum. Daybreak Zero and The Last President carry the same unraveling-civilization story through the rest of the trilogy.

                • Cover of Beyond This Horizon
                  Beyond This Horizon

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1948

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                  From the front flap of a 2001 Baen reprint: "Utopia has been achieved. For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty, and war have been things found only in the history tapes. And applied genetics has given men and women the bodies of athletes and a lifespan of over a century. They should all have been very happy... But Hamilton Felix is bored. And he is the culmination of a star line, each of his last thirty ancestors chosen for superior genes. Hamilton is, as far as genetics can produce one, the ultimate man. And this ultimate man can see no reason why the human race should survive, and has no intention of continuing the pointless comedy. However, Hamilton's life is about to become less boring. A secret cabal of revolutionaries who find utopia not just boring, but desperately in need of leaders who know just What Needs to be Done, are planning to revolt and put themselves in charge. Knowing of Hamilton's disenchantment with the modern world, they have recruited him to join their Glorious Revolution. Big mistake! The revolutionaries are about to find out that recruiting a superman was definitely not a good idea..."

                • Cover of Snow Crash
                  Snow Crash

                  Neal Stephenson · standalone novel · 1992

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                  Snow Crash is a 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Like many of Stephenson's novels, its themes include history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics, and philosophy.

                • Cover of Podkayne of Mars
                  Podkayne of Mars

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1963

                  similar bypolitical intriguenear futurescience fictionyoung adult

                  From the back cover of the Baen 1995 edition: "Meet Podkayne Fries, a thoroughly modern Martian Ms. who thinks that Earth is not really fit for habitation and that humanity evolved in the now-exploded Fifth Planet. Poddy has one goal in life, to be the first female starship captain. She has her strategy all scoped out, and with her determination, looks and I.Q. she'll get there, never you doubt! But all work and no play would make Poddy a Dull Girl, so when a chance comes her way to travel to distant Earth via Venus with her elderly uncle, Poddy jumps at it, even if it does mean having her loathsome little brother along for the trip: Travel, Adventure, the chance to cuddle up (in a nice way) with real spaceship officers and ruthlessly pump their brains - she'll have it all. What Poddy doesn't know is that "Unca Tom" is more than her warmly supportive relative: he is also the Ambassador Plenipotentiary from Mars to the Three Planets Conference (travelling not quite incognito enough) and that certain people will stop at nothing to gain control of his vote - including kidnapping and doing terrible things to sweetly innocent Poddy Fries..."