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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 Predestiny

anchored on:science fiction

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories about venturing into space to explore — survey missions, astronauts, and the frontier of the unknown beyond Earth.
  • Stories 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 driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories about rising against rulers — uprisings, resistance movements, and revolutions and their aftermaths.
  • 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.

                • K
                  Kairos

                  series · 11 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult+1 more

                  The Time Quintet is a science fantasy series of five young adult novels written by American author Madeleine L'Engle and made up of A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989).

                • Cover of Change War
                  Change War

                  series · 16 books · 1958

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictiontime travel

                  The Big Time is Fritz Leiber's Hugo Award-winning novel set in his Change War future history, where two rival powers called the Spiders and the Snakes recruit soldiers out of history to fight by altering past events, with the novel itself confined to a neutral recovery station suspended outside normal time. Leiber followed it with a string of shorter Change War stories, later gathered into collections such as Changewar, exploring other soldiers and other flashpoints in the same endless, mutable conflict.

                • Cover of Pathfinder Trilogy
                  Pathfinder Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2010

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adulttime travel

                  The Pathfinder series is a completed series of novels by Orson Scott Card that is notable for its unusual fusion of the themes of science fiction and fantasy, with some elements of historical fiction. One significant aspect of the Pathfinder series is its uniquely complex but well documented set of time travel rules.

                • Cover of Riverworld
                  Riverworld

                  series · 37 books · 1965

                  similar byscience fiction

                  The Riverworld series consists of five science fiction novels (1971–1983) by American author Philip José Farmer (1918–2009). The Riverworld is an artificial, or heavily terraformed, planet where all humans who ever lived throughout history have been resurrected. The novels explore interactions of resurrected individuals from many different cultures and time periods. The underlying theme is quasi-religious. The motivations and ethics of the unknown intelligences that created the Riverworld and its inhabitants are explored.

                • Cover of Infinity Ring
                  Infinity Ring

                  series · 8 books · 2012

                  similar byscience fictiontime travel+1 more

                  Infinity Ring is a series of young adult science fiction adventure novels written by multiple authors, including James Dashner, Lisa McMann, Matt de la Peña, Matthew J. Kirby, and Jennifer A. Nielsen, in a similar fashion to The 39 Clues. It is focused on the adventures of Dak Smyth, Sera Froste, and Riq Jones as they try to fix changes in time through time travel.

                • Cover of Flatland
                  Flatland

                  series · 2 books · 1884

                  similar byscience fiction

                  Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions imagines a two-dimensional world of geometric beings, using its narrator's brush with higher dimensions as both a mathematical thought experiment and a satire of Victorian social rank. Ian Stewart's 2001 Flatterland follows a descendant of that narrator on a tour of stranger geometries, from curved and multidimensional space to relativity, as a knowing homage to Abbott's original. Together they pair a Victorian mathematical classic with its modern sequel.

                • Cover of Mortal Engines Prequels
                  Mortal Engines Prequels

                  series · 3 books · 2009

                  part of Mortal Engines Universe

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult

                  The Fever Crumb series is the title of a series of novels written by British author, Philip Reeve, and is the prequel series to his Mortal Engines Quartet. The series consists of three books: Fever Crumb (2009), A Web of Air (2010), and Scrivener's Moon (2011). The books follow a young woman known as Fever Crumb, and her adventures set around the time of the creation of the first traction cities that become prevalent in the Mortal Engines series. While Reeve stated in 2011 that he had always envisaged a quartet for the series, assuring readers of a fourth installment, by 2020 he said that "too much time has passed", making it difficult to revisit the series, and that he did not intend to finish and publish a fourth book.

                • Cover of Justice Trilogy
                  Justice Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 1978

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult

                • Cover of Orion
                  Orion

                  series · 14 books · 1977

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictiontime travel

                • Cover of Restoree
                  Restoree

                  Anne McCaffrey · standalone novel · 1967

                  similar byscience fiction

                  Torn from Earth by a bizarre and nameless black force, Sara has no idea where she is or why she inhabits a beautiful new body. Controlled by brutal guards and tamed by terror, she can not comprehend her role as a nurse for a man who appears to be an idiot. She discovers that the planet she had been brought to was Lothar and that the man she was caring for was its Regent, Sara knows the restorees had to escape. When they do, they become fugitives on a world of multiple evils. (adapted from the back cover of the Baen edition)

                • Cover of Barsoom
                  Barsoom

                  series · 53 books · 1917

                  similar byscience fiction

                  Barsoom is a fictional representation of the planet Mars created by American pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first Barsoom tale was serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912 and published compiled as a novel as A Princess of Mars in 1917. It features John Carter, a late-19th-century American Confederate veteran who is mysteriously transported from Earth to the dying world of Mars where he meets and romances the beautiful Martian princess Dejah Thoris. Ten sequels followed over the next three decades, further extending his vision of Barsoom and adding other characters.

                • Cover of Starman Jones
                  Starman Jones

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1953

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult+1 more

                  Starman Jones, a 1953 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, features a farm boy who wants to go to the stars. Charles Scribner's Sons published the book as part of the Heinlein juveniles series.

                • Cover of Time Patrol
                  Time Patrol

                  series · 24 books · 1955

                  similar byscience fictiontime travel

                  Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories follow Manson Everard, recruited in 1957 into a secret organization that polices time travel, hunting down unauthorized travelers and anyone who would alter history. The series ranges from the waterfall that once refilled the dry Mediterranean basin to Gothic-era Ukraine and Phoenician Tyre, treating each era as a crime scene the Patrol must protect from tampering.

                • Cover of Seeker
                  Seeker

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult+1 more

                  Quin Kincaid has spent her life training to take her Oath and join the Seekers, an ancient order sworn to protect the weak — but the night of her initiation reveals that her family, her order, and the boy she loves are not what she believed. Arwen Elys Dayton's trilogy (Seeker, Traveler, Disruptor) follows Quin and her companions as the order's true, morally compromised history comes into focus.

                • Cover of Tellus World
                  Tellus World

                  series · 3 books · 2014

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult

                • Cover of Alliance-Union Universe
                  Alliance-Union Universe

                  universe · 173 books · 1976

                  Start hereCompany Wars · The central sequence

                  similar byscience fiction

                  The dark between the stars belongs to no one, and everyone who lives out here knows it: the merchanter Families hauling cargo between stations that cannot feed themselves, the Earth Company clutching at colonies it can no longer supply, the Union breeding its cloned azi to settle worlds faster than birth allows. C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union is a future history of humankind's spread across the third and fourth millennia, told from inside the pressure — no clean empires, only stations, ships, treaties, and the people caught in the machinery of who holds the jump-points. The sequence runs from the first laborious pre-FTL stations through the Company Wars, the independence struggle that breaks over Pell in Downbelow Station (Hugo, 1981), to the genetics and cold politics of Union's homeworld in Cyteen (Hugo, 1988) and its sequel Regenesis. Around that spine cluster the merchanter novels of trader Families, the Faded Sun trilogy of human envoys among the martial alien Mri, and the Chanur books, narrated from the hierarchical, whiskered viewpoint of the hani. On the isolated world of Merovin, the Merovingen Nights anthologies open the setting to other hands — Mercedes Lackey, Janet and Chris Morris, Nancy Asire — a shared world braided into the whole. What sets it apart is intimacy at scale. Cherryh drops you without a map into a single skull and lets you assemble the politics from what that person fears and bargains for; the aliens are genuinely alien, loyalty is always provisional, and the real antagonist is usually logistics. Most books stand alone, in her words, "like real history." The surest way in is Downbelow Station — the war seen from one besieged station — then Cyteen, for the mind that shaped the other side.

                • Cover of Culture
                  Culture

                  series · 15 books · 1987

                  completed

                  part of The Culture

                  similar byscience fiction

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

                • Cover of Insider
                  Insider

                  series · 2 books · 2010

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                • Cover of The Internment Chronicles
                  The Internment Chronicles

                  series · 5 books · 2013

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult

                • Cover of Windhaven
                  Windhaven

                  series · 4 books · 1975

                  similar byscience fiction

                  George R.R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle's Windhaven is set on a storm-wracked ocean world settled by shipwrecked colonists, whose descendants have adapted lightweight metal wings salvaged from their crashed ship into gliders used by a hereditary caste of flyers who carry messages and news between isolated island communities. The novel follows a commoner who fights to win a set of wings for herself against a tradition that says they should only pass down through flyer bloodlines. It was assembled as a fix-up from three novellas the authors wrote together across the 1970s.

                • Cover of The Courier's Daughter Trilogy
                  The Courier's Daughter Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar byscience fictionyoung adult

                  The Courier's Daughter Trilogy is C. J. Redwine's YA fantasy series: Defiance (2012), Deception and Deliverance. Set in a walled, post-collapse city ruled by rigid survival laws, it follows a young woman searching for her missing father against the city's authorities and the monstrous forces beyond its walls. The trilogy follows one continuous search and its fallout across all three books.

                • Cover of Roadmarks
                  Roadmarks

                  Roger Zelazny · standalone novel · 1979

                  similar byscience fictiontime travel

                  Roadmarks is a science fantasy novel by American author Roger Zelazny, written during the late 1970s and published in 1979.

                • Cover of Green Sky
                  Green Sky

                  series · 3 books · 1975

                  completed

                  similar byscience fiction+1 more

                • Cover of Anathem
                  Anathem

                  Neal Stephenson · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar byscience fiction

                  On a planet where quasi-monastic academic institutions have existed alongside the secular world for thousands of years, a young scholar from one such institution becomes part of a planetwide effort to muster an appropriate reaction to a shocking discovery.