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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 Secrets

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 in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of Foundation Universe
                  Foundation Universe

                  universe · 123 books · 1940

                  Start hereFoundation · Start here

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                  There is a science that reads the future of quadrillions the way an astronomer reads the orbits of stars. It is called psychohistory, and its equations foresee something the ruling Galactic Empire cannot admit: the throne is rotting, and thirty thousand years of barbarism are coming. One man, Hari Seldon, cannot stop the fall. He can only shorten it — by seeding a Foundation of scholars at the rim of the galaxy, a fragile institution built to carry knowledge across the dark and cut the interregnum to a single millennium. This is a universe told in the register of history itself: the long view, the calm of deep time, empires measured in centuries and men measured against them. The spine is Asimov's original trilogy — Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation — followed decades later by the sequels Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth and the prequels Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. Late in life Asimov braided this in with his other future histories: the Robot novels of detective Elijah Baley and his humaniform partner R. Daneel Olivaw (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) and the early Galactic Empire novels (Pebble in the Sky and its kin), until one continuous chronicle ran from the first thinking robots to the Second Empire. Other hands extend it — the Second Foundation Trilogy by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin, and shared-world spinoffs such as Robot City — so the corpus sprawls beyond a single author's tidy shelf. What distinguishes it is that the drama is intellectual: crises resolved by insight, nerve, and dialogue rather than fleets and blades, each turn hinging on the hidden logic of the Seldon Plan. Begin where readers have always begun — with Foundation, and the original trilogy in publication order. The rest opens outward from there.

                • Cover of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
                  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

                  series · 16 books · 1979

                  part of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Universe

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                  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a radio sitcom broadcast over two series on BBC Radio 4 between 1978 and 1980, it was soon adapted to other formats, including both novels and comic books, a 1981 BBC television series, a 1984 text adventure game, stage shows and a 2005 feature film.

                • Cover of The City and the Stars
                  The City and the Stars

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1956

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                  The City and the Stars is a science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1956. This novel is a complete rewrite of Clarke's earlier Against the Fall of Night, his first novel, which had been published in Startling Stories magazine in 1948 after being rejected by the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, according to the author.

                • 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 The Themis Files
                  The Themis Files

                  series · 3 books · 2015

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                  Sylvain Neuvel's Themis Files opens when a girl falls into a hole in South Dakota and lands on the palm of a giant metal hand buried underground; the trilogy picks up years later as she leads the team trying to determine what the hand is part of and why it's there. Sleeping Giants and its sequels are told almost entirely through interview transcripts conducted by an unnamed, evasive interrogator, giving the series a documentary, oral-history feel unusual for first-contact SF. The mystery escalates from an archaeological puzzle into a question of who else is looking for the same answer.

                • Cover of The Door Into Summer
                  The Door Into Summer

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1957

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                  From the first page of the Signet 6th printing: "An electronics engineer invents a wizard robot... only to find himself shanghaied by his ruthless partner and his gold-digging fiancee. The crafty pair forces him to submit to the "long sleep" - suspended animation for thirty years. But when he wakes up in the year 2000 A.D. the inventor makes a startling discovery. He learns that it is possible now to twist time forwards or backwards. And so he returns to the past bent on a mission... of revenge."

                • Cover of Six Million Dollar Man
                  Six Million Dollar Man

                  series · 10 books · 1972

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                • Cover of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame
                  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame

                  series · 11 books · 1895

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                • Cover of Terminator 2
                  Terminator 2

                  series · 16 books · 1991

                  part of Terminator

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                • Cover of Nova
                  Nova

                  Samuel R. Delany · standalone novel · 1968

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                  Nоva is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany published in 1968. The plot concerns the spaceship captain Lorq Von Ray's search for a nova, which will produce the essential power source Illyrion, and his vendetta with the Red family, who seek to kill him. Nominally space opera, it explores the politics and culture of a future where cyborg technology is universal, yet making major decisions can involve using tarot cards. It has strong mythological overtones, relating to both the Grail Quest and Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece.

                • Cover of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing / The Carls
                  An Absolutely Remarkable Thing / The Carls

                  series · 2 books · 2018

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                • 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 City
                  City

                  series · 19 books · 1944

                  completed

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                  City is Clifford D. Simak's fix-up novel, assembling eight linked stories originally published in Astounding Science Fiction during the 1940s and framed as legends dogs tell about a half-mythical creature called Man. It follows humanity's gradual abandonment of its cities and eventual departure from Earth, while the dogs left behind are surgically uplifted into a peaceable, speaking civilization of their own. The book won the International Fantasy Award in 1952.

                • Cover of Sam and the Killer Robot
                  Sam and the Killer Robot

                  Judith Rossell · standalone novel · 2007

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                • Cover of The Eyes of Heisenberg
                  The Eyes of Heisenberg

                  Frank Herbert · standalone novel · 1966

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                  Tens of thousands of years in the future, Earth is ruled by the Optimen, a genetically engineered aristocracy that has made itself functionally immortal, while ordinary people, the Folk, live under strict reproductive control. When Harvey and Lizbeth Durant arrive to have their embryo genetically screened, the examining doctor finds something in the child no one has seen in a very long time: real potential for both fertility and life span, traits the Optimen have arrogated to themselves. Rather than destroy the embryo as policy demands, the doctor hesitates, setting off a chain of surveillance, suspicion and resistance. A tightly wound Frank Herbert thriller about genetic caste and rebellion.

                • Cover of Frankenstein
                  Frankenstein

                  universe · 128 books · 1818

                  Start hereFrankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus · Start here

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                  Light a candle against the November dark and consider what a single spark, rightly applied to dead matter, might wake. In a laboratory at Ingolstadt a student named Victor Frankenstein learns the secret of animating lifeless flesh, assembles a being from the harvest of charnel houses and graves, and, at the moment it draws breath, flees the thing he has made. What he abandons does not stay abandoned. This is the world Mary Shelley opened in 1818 with Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: the story of a maker and his unmothered creation, and the long ruin each works upon the other. Shelley's novel arrives as a nest of confessions, an explorer's letters from the frozen north enclosing Victor's account, which in turn encloses the Creature's own, an articulate and wounded voice that has read Milton and wants only not to be alone. From that single volume two centuries of other hands have built outward, not as one continuity but as a gathering of independent returns to the same fire. Dean Koontz transplants the myth to modern New Orleans across a five-book cycle, Prodigal Son through The Dead Town, where the original Creature, now called Deucalion, hunts a Victor who never died. Donald F. Glut's New Adventures and Frank Schildiner's Quest of Frankenstein run the monster through pulp adventure; the mid-century French novels published as Benoit Becker chase him across a ruined Europe; Scott Sonneborn's Frankenstein Journals and the comic Frankenstein's Aunt turn the legend toward younger and lighter readers. What binds them is the question the book asks and never settles: which is the monster, the forsaken creature who kills, or the man whose ambition and cowardice made and abandoned him? Expect little comfort and few clean villains; the abiding note is grief, sublime and articulate, set against Alpine ice and candlelit hubris. Begin where it began, with Shelley's own novel; the later cycles reward you only once you have heard the Creature speak for himself.

                • Cover of Forge of God
                  Forge of God

                  series · 2 books · 1987

                  completed

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                  The Forge of God (1987) is Greg Bear's science fiction novel about Earth's discovery that it is the target of an incomprehensible, overwhelming alien attack, following scientists and ordinary people as they try to understand what is destroying the planet. Its 1992 sequel, Anvil of Stars, follows a group of young survivors sent on a mission of interstellar retaliation, continuing directly from the first book's ending.

                • Cover of Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot
                  Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot

                  series · 9 books · 2000

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                  Dav Pilkey's Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot books follow a small mouse named Ricky and his giant robot friend as they defend their city from a rotating cast of alien and mutant villains, told in short illustrated chapters aimed at early readers. Each volume is a self-contained adventure following the same comic formula, with villains like the Voodoo Vultures from Venus or the Mutant Mosquitoes from Mercury. The series ran from 2000 through the mid-2010s.

                • Cover of The Killer Thing
                  The Killer Thing

                  Kate Wilhelm · standalone novel · 1967

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                  A robot destroys its inventor and programs itself to kill all life. How much must be sacrificed to stop it?

                • QL
                  Quantum Logic

                  series · 7 books · 1990

                  completed

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                • Cover of Dangerous Visions
                  Dangerous Visions

                  series · 7 books · 1967

                  completed

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                  Dangerous Visions (1967), Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), and the posthumously finished The Last Dangerous Visions (2024) are Harlan Ellison's landmark science fiction anthologies of original, previously unpublished stories, each conceived to push past the genre's conventional boundaries of its time. Ellison edited and introduced all three, though his death in 2018 left the final volume to be completed and published by others years later. The three books form a loosely connected set of era-defining anthologies spanning nearly six decades rather than a continuous story.

                • Cover of Frank Einstein
                  Frank Einstein

                  series · 11 books · 2014

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                • Cover of 2312
                  2312

                  Kim Stanley Robinson · standalone novel · 2012

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                  In the eponymous year, when Earth's ecology is degraded and humanity has settled throughout the solar system by terraforming and genetic engineering, mysterious disasters strike some human communities and an assortment of human types from throughout the system seek to find and eliminate the cause.

                • Cover of Franny K. Stein, Mad Scientist
                  Franny K. Stein, Mad Scientist

                  series · 10 books · 2004

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