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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 Roll Call

anchored on:science fictionmystery & detectivemurder investigationeuropenear futureyoung adult+6 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 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 Unwise Child
                  Unwise Child

                  Randall Garrett · standalone novel · 1962

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                  "When a super-robot named Snookums discovers how to build his own superbombs, it becomes obvious that Earth is by no means the safest place for him to be. And so Dr. Fitzhugh, his designer, and Leda Crannon, a child psychologist acting as Snookums' nursemaid, agree to set up Operation Brainchild, a plan to transport the robot to a far distant planet. "... once into space, the Branchell becomes the scene of some frightening events—the medical officer is murdered, and Snookums appears to be the culprit. Mike the Angel indulges himself in a bit of sleuthing, and the facts he turns up lead to a most unusual climax." (From Project Gutenberg's version of the 1962 Doubleday edition, published 2007.)

                • Cover of Pastworld
                  Pastworld

                  Ian Beck · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar bynear futuremysterioustensescience fictionmurder investigationyoung adultmystery & detectivebritish isles+2 more

                  What if all of London were really an amusement park—a whole city returned to Victorian times to entertain visitors from the twenty-first century? That's the wildly original premise of Ian Beck's Pastworld, a high-stakes mystery set in a simulated past. Eve is a lifelong resident of Pastworld who doesn’t know she’s living in a theme park until a mysterious threat forces her to leave home. Caleb is a visiting tourist who finds the lawlessness of the past thrilling—until he suddenly becomes a fugitive from an antiquated justice system. And in the midst of it all, in the thick London fog a dark and deadly figure prowls, claiming victim after victim. He’s the Fantom, a creature both of the past and of the present, in whose dark purpose Caleb and Eve will find their destinies combined. Page-turning, complex, and haunting, Pastworld masterfully exposes the human experience of the past, of violence, of technology, and of entertainment.

                • Cover of Lock In
                  Lock In

                  series · 3 books · 2014

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                  Lock In imagines a near-future pandemic that leaves a fraction of survivors fully conscious but completely paralyzed, able to interact with the world only through robotic surrogates or by borrowing the bodies of rare people whose brains can host another person's consciousness. John Scalzi's series follows a rookie FBI agent investigating crimes that exploit this new class of disability and technology, across the novels Lock In and Head On plus the interstitial oral history Unlocked. It's science-fiction police procedural more than space opera.

                • Cover of Great North Road
                  Great North Road

                  Peter F. Hamilton · standalone novel · 2012

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                  Great North Road is a science fiction novel by Peter F. Hamilton. It was first published in 2012 by Macmillan. Jonathan Wright of SFX magazine said, "Peter F Hamilton’s latest novel may be a standalone tale, but it’s a thuddingly imposing 1,100 pages in length. Not that it seems that way when you’re reading it. Balancing a multi-stranded plot, different exotic locales and a huge cast of characters, Hamilton plunges us straight into a murder mystery set in a near-future Newcastle, a city now adjacent to a portal to another world, the tropical St Libra."

                • Cover of The Spare Man
                  The Spare Man

                  Mary Robinette Kowal · standalone novel · 2022

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                  The Spare Man is a 2022 science fiction murder mystery novel by Mary Robinette Kowal. The novel was a finalist for the 2023 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2023 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

                • Cover of The Night Sessions
                  The Night Sessions

                  Ken MacLeod · standalone novel · 2008

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                  The Night Sessions is a 2008 novel by Scottish writer Ken MacLeod. Set in the year 2037, the novel follows Edinburgh police officers investigating the murder of a priest in a world in which religious believers are a small and marginalized minority. The novel won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel in 2008.

                • Cover of The Jackpot Trilogy
                  The Jackpot Trilogy

                  series · 2 books · 2014

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                  William Gibson's Jackpot sequence begins with The Peripheral (2014), a science-fiction thriller cross-cutting between a near-future American town and a devastated London seventy years on. Gibson continued the same world in Agency (2020), set slightly later in the near-future timeline.

                • Cover of Gun, with Occasional Music
                  Gun, with Occasional Music

                  Jonathan Lethem · standalone novel · 1994

                  similar bynear futuremurder investigationtensescience fictionmystery & detectivefirst personbig city

                  Conrad Metcalf has problems. He has a monkey on his back, a rabbit in his waiting room and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. (Maybe evolution therapy is not such a good idea.) He's been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an affluent Oakland urologist. Maybe falling in love a little with her at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, Metcalf finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the Inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse. (adapted from the blurb accompanying the first edition)

                • Cover of A Death of Honor
                  A Death of Honor

                  Joe Clifford Faust · standalone novel · 1987

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                  A Death of Honor is a science fiction mystery novel by American author Joe Clifford Faust. It was published in 1987 by Del Rey Books.

                • Cover of Have Space Suit - Will Travel
                  Have Space Suit - Will Travel

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1958

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                  From the back cover of the Del Rey 9th printing: "Skyjacked - Everything happened at once. One minute Kip Russell was walking about in his own backyard, testing out an old space suit and dreaming about going to the moon - and the next he was out cold and the captive of an insidious space pirate. The whole thing seemed like a very bad dream until he discovered he wasn't the only prisoner on board. Then the reality of the situation became inescapable. He - along with the daughter of a world-renowned scientist and a beautiful creature from an alien planet - had been skyjacked by a monstrous extraterrestrial and they were on their way to the Moon... a journey toward a fate worse than death!"

                • Cover of Greg Mandel
                  Greg Mandel

                  series · 5 books · 1993

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                  Greg Mandel is a former special-forces soldier with a psychic 'gland' implant for reading emotions, working as a private investigator in a near-future Britain recovering from an authoritarian climate-crisis government. Peter F. Hamilton's original trilogy - Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, The Nano Flower - follows his cases as ordinary detective work keeps sliding into conspiracies with much bigger stakes; The Suspect Genome revisits an older Mandel decades later. It was Hamilton's first fiction, blending noir detective plotting with hard SF.

                • Cover of Halting State
                  Halting State

                  series · 2 books · 2007

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                  Charles Stross's Halting State opens as a near-future police procedural: a bank robbery inside a massively multiplayer online game turns out to mask a much larger cybercrime, investigated through shifting narrators using augmented-reality glasses and always-on networks. Its loose sequel, Rule 34, follows an Edinburgh police officer investigating a string of deaths linked by nothing but an obscure internet meme, in the same near-future Scotland. Both are standalone technothrillers connected by setting and tone rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of In Death
                  In Death

                  series · 77 books · 1995

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                  The ...in Death series of novels and novellas is written by Nora Roberts under her pseudonym J. D. Robb. Set in a mid-21st-century New York City, they feature NYPSD lieutenant Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke. The stories also regularly feature other characters, including Captain Ryan Feeney, Detective Delia Peabody, Detective Ian McNab and Dr. Charlotte Mira.

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

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                  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 Hummingbird Salamander
                  Hummingbird Salamander

                  Jeff VanderMeer · standalone novel · 2021

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                  Hummingbird Salamander is a 2021 novel by American author Jeff VanderMeer. It is set in a near-future dystopia affected by climate change, and narrated by a corporate security consultant, "Jane Smith," who is drawn into a mystery incited by her receipt of a taxidermied hummingbird from an extinct species.

                • Cover of Less Than Human
                  Less Than Human

                  Maxine McArthur · standalone novel · 2004

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                  Less Than Human is a 2004 science fiction novel by Maxine McArthur. It follows the story where a factory worker is killed by a robot in mysterious circumstances and a group of teenagers appear to have committed group suicide.

                • Cover of Flashforward
                  Flashforward

                  Robert J. Sawyer · standalone novel · 1999

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                  Flashforward is a science fiction novel by Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer first published in 1999. The novel is set in 2009. At CERN, the Large Hadron Collider accelerator is performing a run to search for the Higgs boson. The experiment has a unique side effect; the entire human race loses their consciousness for about two minutes. During that time, nearly everyone sees themselves roughly twenty-one years and six months in the future. Each individual experiences the future through the senses of their future self. This "flashforward" results in countless deaths and accidents involving vehicles, aircraft, and any other device needing human control at the time of the experiment. The novel was adapted into the 2009 television series FlashForward.

                • Cover of Rat Runners
                  Rat Runners

                  Oisin McGann · standalone novel · 2013

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                  "Four young thieves, one simple mission: Steal a black-leather box from the daughter of a murdered scientist without anyone noticing. But WatchWorld controls London now, and the organization knows everything. Every major street is monitored with heat-sensitive and X-ray cameras. Microphones record voices from hundreds of feet away, and drones watch from the sky. Patrolling the streets are Safe-Guards--part human and part robot, they can see through walls, hear your heartbeat, and analyze your sweat. But staying hidden is what Nimmo, Scope, Manikin, and FX do best. Using the city's blind spots, they navigate the criminal underworld until they're caught in a rat run of murder and deceit that might not let them out alive."--Back cover.

                • Cover of Traces
                  Traces

                  series · 7 books · 2005

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                • Cover of Days of Atonement
                  Days of Atonement

                  Walter Jon Williams · standalone novel · 1991

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                  Loren Hawn is a traditional Western peace officer walking the streets of 21st Century New Mexico, and seemingly unaware that times have changed. And when a dying man named Randal falls out of a bullet-riddled car and dies in Loren’s arm, Loren finds he isn’t the only man living in the wrong time--- because he remembers pulling Randal’s dead body out of a wrecked car twenty years before. He knows the car belongs to a scientist who works at the high-security laboratory built on the outskirts of town, and he knows that if he doesn’t work fast, all evidence of a crime will disappear into national security vaults. In order to bring justice back to his community, Loren will have to risk everything, his life, his job, his faith, and his family.

                • Cover of Technically Human
                  Technically Human

                  Christian Mann · standalone novel · 2024

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                  ● "Charlie, an American employee working in Berlin at NOVA, a giant Japanese firm and the world's first manufacturer of androids designed for blue-collar jobs, is given the most important project of his career: to live with humanity's first sentient android, Julia. After spending several days together, Charlie comes to the conclusion that Julia is far too advanced compared to her robotic peers—she's too human. As he attempts to uncover clues about her creation, both Charlie and Julia find themselves caught in an event that threatens the mammoth firm, his career, and the android's secret existence." ― quoted from this book's Amazon product page as of 2025-04-21

                • Cover of Death Tolls
                  Death Tolls

                  John E. Stith · standalone novel · 1987

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                  Man on terraformed Mars tries to find out if brother's death was murder.

                • Cover of Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer
                  Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

                  Katie Alender · standalone novel · 2013

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                  While in Paris, France on a class trip, Colette Iselin enlists the help of her charming French tour guide to help uncover a possible connection between Marie Antoinette, a series of gruesome murders, and perhaps her own family history, and he also gives her insights into herself. While in Paris on a class trip, Colette Iselin enlists the help of her charming French tour guide to help uncover a possible connection between Marie Antoinette, a series of gruesome murders, and perhaps her own family history.

                • Cover of Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

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                  The Sprawl Trilogy is William Gibson's foundational cyberpunk sequence: Neuromancer (1984), in which hacker Case is drawn into a high-stakes heist alongside an artificial intelligence and a damaged ex-soldier, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which widen the same near-future world of corporate power and networked cyberspace to new characters. Johnny Mnemonic, an early short story set in the same fictional milieu, predates the novels and introduces the courier Molly Millions before her role in the trilogy. Together these works established much of cyberpunk's visual and thematic vocabulary.