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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 Phthor

anchored on:science fictionunderground & cavesfar futurescience fantasychosen onewar+2 more

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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 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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 Aton/Piers Anthony's Worlds of Chthon
                  Aton/Piers Anthony's Worlds of Chthon

                  series · 4 books · 1967

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fiction+3 more

                  Piers Anthony's Chthon (1967) follows Aton Five, imprisoned in a sentient underground mineral world after his obsession with a beautiful, dangerous woman leads him to attempted murder; escaping, he pursues the truth about her and about his own mixed human and alien nature across the galaxy. Its sequel Phthor continues Aton's story and the mythology of the living prison-planet Chthon.

                • Cover of The Stars My Destination
                  The Stars My Destination

                  Alfred Bester · standalone novel · 1956

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionidentityother star systems+1 more

                  When a passing spaceship refuses to rescue the lone survivor from the drifting wreck of another ship, he dedicates his life to discovering who made that decision and exacting his revenge, in the process altering human history and his own character.

                • Cover of Armor
                  Armor

                  John Steakley · standalone novel · 1984

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionwarother star systems

                  Armor is a military science fiction novel by John Steakley. It features the military use of exoskeletons and insect-like alien enemies but concentrates on the psychological effects of violence on human beings.

                • Cover of Creatures of Light and Darkness
                  Creatures of Light and Darkness

                  Roger Zelazny · standalone novel · 1969

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionscience fantasyother star systems

                  Creatures of Light and Darkness is a 1969 science fiction novel by American writer Roger Zelazny. Long out of print, it was reissued in April 2010. The novel is set in the far future, with humans on many worlds. Some humans have god-like powers or perhaps are actually gods—the names and aspects of various Egyptian gods are used. Elements of horror and technology are mixed, and the novel shares elements with cyberpunk.

                • Cover of The Penultimate Truth
                  The Penultimate Truth

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1964

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionunderground & caves+1 more

                  The Penultimate Truth is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story is set in a future where the bulk of humanity is kept in large underground shelters. The people are told that World War III is being fought above them, when in reality the war ended years ago. The novel is based on Dick's 1953 short story "The Defenders". Dick also drew upon two of his other short stories for the plot of the novel: "The Mold of Yancy" and "The Unreconstructed M".

                • Cover of Takeshi Kovacs
                  Takeshi Kovacs

                  series · 3 books · 2002

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                  Takeshi Kovacs is a former elite soldier turned freelance troubleshooter in a future where human consciousness can be digitized and transferred between bodies, or sleeves, making death an inconvenience for those who can afford new ones. Richard Morgan's trilogy - Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies - moves Kovacs through noir-inflected mysteries on different worlds, using the resleeving premise to interrogate class, violence, and what, if anything, survives a person's original body. It became the basis for a Netflix series.

                • Cover of Sun Eater
                  Sun Eater

                  series · 36 books · 2018

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionwar+1 more

                  The Sun Eater is a science fiction novel series written by American author Christopher Ruocchio. Not including short stories and novellas, the series consists of the following novels: Empire of Silence (2018), Howling Dark (2019), Demon in White (2020), Kingdoms of Death (2022), Ashes of Man (2022), Disquiet Gods (2024), and Shadows Upon Time (2025).

                • Cover of Dune
                  Dune

                  series · 20 books · 1963

                  part of Dune Universe

                  similar byfar futurescience fictionother star systems+2 more

                  Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles opens with 1965's Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis where House Atreides takes control of the only source of the vital spice melange and young Paul Atreides is pulled into a struggle over its politics and religion. Herbert carried the story forward across five further novels — Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune — following Paul's line over the following millennia, before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson later extended the saga. Many other editions of these six novels are omnibus and box-set repackagings rather than separate stories.

                • Cover of Life During Wartime
                  Life During Wartime

                  Lucius Shepard · standalone novel · 1987

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                  Life during Wartime is a science fantasy novel written by American author Lucius Shepard. His second novel, it was published by Bantam Books in 1987, in which year it was nominated for the Philip K Dick Award. In 1990, it won the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis for Foreign Work.

                • Cover of The Gate to Women's Country
                  The Gate to Women's Country

                  Sheri S. Tepper · standalone novel · 1988

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionwar

                  The Gate to Women's Country is a post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Sheri S. Tepper, published in 1988. It describes a world set three hundred years into the future after a catastrophic war which has fractured the United States into several nations.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games
                  The Hunger Games

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  part of The Hunger Games Universe

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fiction+1 more

                  The Hunger Games is a series of young adult dystopian novels written by American author Suzanne Collins. The series consists of a trilogy that follows teenage protagonist Katniss Everdeen, as well as two prequels. The Hunger Games universe is a dystopia set in Panem, a post-apocalyptic North American country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and 12 districts in varying states of poverty. As punishment for rebellion, the Capitol hosts an annual battle royale competition called The Hunger Games. Each of the 12 districts must send two children between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate, and the last surviving child is dubbed the victor.

                • Cover of Death's Head (David Gunn)
                  Death's Head (David Gunn)

                  series · 3 books · 2007

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionwar+1 more

                  Death's Head is a noir military science fiction series written by David Gunn. The series follows the antihero Sven Tveskoeg, an ex-sergeant of The Legion, in service to the Octovian Empire.

                • Cover of The Fade
                  The Fade

                  Chris Wooding · standalone novel · 2007

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionwarunderground & cavesother star systems

                  A subterranean world of vast caverns, underground seas, crystalline forests. A civilisation born of darkness, living in darkness, protected by shadows. On the moon of Callespa, in a hostile binary system, humankind has adapted to the bizarre environment - the majority live underground in vast cavern cities illuminated by shinestones, while a minority brave the sunlight on the surface. The human race has splintered into tribes and for many years the nations of Eskara and the Gurta have been at war, a battle fought back and forth through vast subterranean chambers. Massima Leithka Orna is an assassin, spy and soldier bonded for life to the Clan Caracassa. During a brutal battle her forces are betrayed and her husband is killed. Taken prisoner to a Gurta fortress, Orna lives only to escape and find her son, now serving on the front lines.

                • Cover of Chaos Walking
                  Chaos Walking

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionother star systems+1 more

                  Chaos Walking is a young adult science fiction series written by American-British novelist Patrick Ness. It is set in a dystopian world where all living creatures can hear each other's thoughts in a stream of images, words, and sounds called Noise. The series is named after a line in the first book: "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking." The series consists of a trilogy of novels and three short stories.

                • Cover of Red Rising
                  Red Rising

                  series · 13 books · 2014

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fiction+2 more

                  Pierce Brown's Red Rising follows Darrow, a lowborn 'Red' miner on a colonized Mars who discovers his caste's suffering is a lie sustained by the ruling Gold elite, and infiltrates their ranks to destroy the system from within. The series expands from a single-protagonist revenge story into a sprawling multi-book war across the solar system, eventually following an ensemble cast beyond Darrow alone, and combines Roman-inspired factional politics with brutal, competition-driven action set pieces.

                • Cover of The Stellar Legion
                  The Stellar Legion

                  E. C. Tubb · standalone novel · 1954

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionwarother star systems

                  "Wilson, a waif of the war of unity, spends his boyhood in forced labour. When he is sent to the penal world of Stellar, he survives, winning promotion in the Stellar Legion, a brutal military system. Laurance, Director of the Federation of Man, wants to dissolve the Legion. He pits his wits against its commander, Hogarth. He's terrified lest the human wolves, trained and hardened in blood and terror, should ravage the defenceless galaxy ..."--Publisher description.

                • Cover of The Exile Waiting
                  The Exile Waiting

                  Vonda N. McIntyre · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionother star systemsunderground & caves

                  From the front flap of the Gollancz first printing: The time is the distant future and Earth has been rendered uninhabitable for much of the year by terrible storms during which its only city, Center, constructed around a natural cave system, is closed off from the outside. Mischa, a young thief whose capabilities are enhanced by hereditary mutation, is trying to escape with her drug-addicted brother from the dominance of her uncle. So when a starship arrives commanded by the twin alien pseudosibs, Subone and Subtwo, Mischa seizes her chance. She is soon assigned for training to Jan Hikaru, who quickly realises that Mischa has immense abilities. All goes well until Subone, in a moment of cruelty, lures Mischa's brother into a fight and then kills him. Mischa attacks Subone and both she and Jan have to flee the wrath of the brothers and take refuge n the deep cave system underneath the city.

                • 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 Xan-Sskarn War
                  Xan-Sskarn War

                  series · 1 book · 2010

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionwarother star systems

                • Cover of Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)
                  Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)

                  series · 59 books · 1963

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                  The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels by Fred Saberhagen, in which robotic self-replicating machines strive to destroy all life.

                • Cover of Dune Universe
                  Dune Universe

                  universe · 78 books · 1963

                  Start hereDune · Start here

                  similar byfar futurescience fictionother star systems+1 more

                  Arrakis. Dune. The desert planet, where empire runs on a single substance: the spice melange, which folds space, prolongs life, and unlocks prescience, and which exists nowhere else in the known universe. Frank Herbert's saga is a meditation dressed as an adventure — feudal houses and a secret sisterhood, engineered messiahs and the patient ecology of a world without water, all turning on the terrible gravity of who commands the spice. It reads like scripture and schemes like a war room, ten thousand years hence, among people who have outlawed the thinking machine and made instruments of themselves instead. At its heart stand Herbert's original six — Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune — a single deepening arc across millennia, arguing the whole way between prophecy and free will. Around that spine his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have raised a vast prequel architecture: Prelude to Dune, tracing the great houses a generation before Paul; Legends of Dune, reaching back to the crusade that broke the machines; the Schools of Dune cycle on the founding of Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator; the Caladan Trilogy and Heroes of Dune filling years the originals left in shadow. Many hands, dozens of volumes, one desert. What sets Dune apart is its refusal of the simple: religion is manufactured, heroes are hazards, and the sand itself — worm, water, ecology — acts as a political power. Begin where the universe did, with Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), and read the original six in order; you need nothing else to feel the full weight. The prequels are a country to explore afterward, taken by era. Beginnings are delicate times.

                • Cover of Thorns
                  Thorns

                  Robert Silverberg · standalone novel · 1967

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionother star systems

                  From the back cover of the Ballantine first edition: "Lona Kelvin - naive orphan. And at seventeen, mother of one hundred children. Minner Burris - starman. Whose butchered body had been put together by aliens, with artificial and alien replacements. Horror stalked just beneath the surface of these two lonely creatures. Duncan Chalk - a vulture, carrion eater of other people's emotions, feeding on pain, fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, terror; typifying in the appetites of his vast body the sick delight that millions took in the tragedies he skillfully arranged. Lona Kelvin - Minner Burris - Duncan Chalk - Surely the strangest triangle the worlds had ever seen."

                • Cover of This Perfect Day
                  This Perfect Day

                  Ira Levin · standalone novel · 1970

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionidentity

                  This Perfect Day is a science fiction novel by American writer Ira Levin, about a technocratic dystopia. Levin won a Prometheus Award in 1992 for this novel. This Perfect Day is one of two Levin novels yet to be adapted to film.

                • Cover of The Artificial Kid
                  The Artificial Kid

                  Bruce Sterling · standalone novel · 1980

                  similar bydarkfar futurescience fictionother star systems+1 more

                  WorldCat: A popular home-video star and ultimate warrior on a planet dangerously divided by class and wealth distinctions discovers the lethal truth about his world and its origins in this satiric science fiction masterwork Founded centuries ago by the enigmatic genius Moses Moses, the planet Reverie can either be heaven or hell, depending on whether you live on or above it.