Anne McCaffreystandalone novel1967
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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)
series2 books1976
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In Inferno, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle send a science fiction writer to his death and drop him into a modern-dress version of Dante's nine circles of Hell, where he must reason his way toward understanding why he has been damned. The 1976 novel was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the authors returned to the same character decades later in a sequel, Escape from Hell. Together the two books form a self-contained pair rather than an open-ended series.
series4 books2000
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The New Crobuzon books are three standalone novels by China Miéville set in and around New Crobuzon, a vast, corrupt industrial city in his invented world of Bas-Lag where magic, biopunk technology, and several sentient species coexist. Perdido Street Station follows a renegade scientist and his lover after an experiment unleashes something monstrous on the city, while The Scar and Iron Council return to the same setting with different casts and only loose continuity between books.
Roger Zelaznystandalone novel1979
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Roadmarks is a science fantasy novel by American author Roger Zelazny, written during the late 1970s and published in 1979.
series53 books1917
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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.
series1 book1964
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Published posthumously in 1964, Robert E. Howard's Almuric is a single planetary-romance novel rather than an ongoing series: Earthman Esau Cairn is transported to the savage world of Almuric, where he fights beast-men and wins the love of Altha, in a story indebted to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books.
Neal Stephensonstandalone novel2008
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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.
series3 books1975
completed
Tanith Lee's Birthgrave trilogy (The Birthgrave, Vazkor Son of Vazkor, Quest for the White Witch, 1975-1978) opens with an amnesiac woman waking inside a volcano with no memory of who she is, and follows her journey through a brutal, quasi-medieval world in search of her identity, wielding strange powers she doesn't understand along the way. She eventually learns she is one of the last of the Old Ones, an ancient, nearly extinct people, and must reckon with the harm her own vanished civilization once did.
Tad Williamsstandalone novel1985
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Tailchaser's Song is a fantasy novel by American writer Tad Williams. First released on November 21, 1985, it is Williams' first published work.
series20 books1996
Ambergris is the fictional, fungus-ridden city Jeff VanderMeer uses as the throughline for a loosely connected cycle of increasingly strange fiction, beginning with the linked stories of City of Saints and Madmen. Shriek: An Afterword recasts the city's history through a historian's biography of her artist brother's disappearance into its underground; Finch turns to a hardboiled detective investigating a murder after the city's balance of power has shifted. Each book changes form and narrator, using the setting itself as the connective tissue rather than a continuing plot.
series3 books1993
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The Iron Dragon's Daughter follows Jane, a human changeling enslaved in a factory that builds part-mechanical, part-magical dragons used as war machines, in a Faerie that runs on industrial-age technology as much as spellcraft. Michael Swanwick wrote it as a deliberately recursive, spiral narrative rather than a straight line, and returned to the same colliding fantasy-industrial world, though not the same plot, in The Dragons of Babel and The Iron Dragon's Mother. The three books share a setting and sensibility more than a continuing story.
Clifford D. Simakstandalone novel1975
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A scholar at a remote university stumbles onto a manuscript that hints at forgotten secrets buried in the Wasteland, a blighted region where magic and monsters still linger at the edge of an otherwise rational world. Setting out to track the manuscript's truth to its source, he gathers a company of odd fellow travelers along the way -- the kind of companions a quest like this tends to attract -- each with their own stake in what they might find. Clifford D. Simak folds his familiar pastoral, faintly melancholy tone into a full-blown fantasy quest, blending scholarly curiosity with old magic. A standalone fantasy novel by Clifford D. Simak.
series5 books2014
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N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy is set on the Stillness, a single supercontinent wracked every few centuries by civilization-ending climate catastrophes called Fifth Seasons. It follows orogenes, people born with the power to move earth and quell earthquakes, who are trained and controlled by the state even as they are feared and despised. The Fifth Season, the opening volume, traces three women revealed to be the same person at different stages of her life, setting up the two sequels that follow her search for her daughter after an orogene shatters the continent.
Jack Vancestandalone novel1966
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The Blue World is a science fiction adventure novel by American writer Jack Vance. The novel is based on Vance's earlier novella The Kragen, which appeared in the July 1964 edition of Fantastic.
Salman Rushdiestandalone novel1975
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After drinking a mysterious fluid that grants him immortality, the young Axona man Flapping Eagle sets out on a centuries-long search for his vanished sister, drifting through identities and eras as the decades pass without aging him. The trail eventually leads him to a hidden dimension reachable through the Mediterranean, and to Calf Island, a refuge for immortals who have grown weary of endless life but cannot bring themselves to give it up, ruled by a strange and rigid order all its own. Salman Rushdie's first novel, an early, genre-inflected departure from the realism of his later, more famous work.
Christopher Prieststandalone novel1974
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A city travels slowly along tracks laid by the residents ahead of the city and pulled up from behind the city, through territory where other people live.
series14 books2015
Red Queen is set in a world split between Reds, an oppressed servant class, and Silvers, a ruling class with superhuman abilities, where a Red girl discovers she has Silver-like powers of her own and is forced into the royal court to hide what she is. Victoria Aveyard's debut novel opens a four-book main sequence - Red Queen, Glass Sword, King's Cage, War Storm - plus the interstitial novella Cruel Crown and the epilogue novella Broken Throne. It's YA dystopian fantasy built around a class-based magic system and a slow-burn political rebellion.
China Miévillestandalone novel2012
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Railsea is a young adult novel written and illustrated by English writer China Miéville, and published in May 2012. Miéville described the novel as "weird fiction", io9 labelled its mix of fantasy and steampunk elements as "salvagepunk" and the story has been seen as an "affectionate parody" of Herman Melville's classic 1851 novel Moby-Dick, also drawing on Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure novels Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
Henry Kuttnerstandalone novel1965
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The Dark World is a science fantasy novel credited to Henry Kuttner, although his wife C. L. Moore may have been an uncredited collaborator, or possibly even the author. The novel was first published in the July 1946 issue of Startling Stories, then reprinted in the Winter 1954 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine. Its first book edition was issued by Ace in 1965, followed by a British edition by Mayflower Books in 1966. A French translation appeared in 1972. The novel was reprinted in full in Issue #5 of Amberzine in 1992, and also collected in a 1997 paperback omnibus, The Startling Worlds of Henry Kuttner. Roger Zelazny, author of The Chronicles of Amber, credits this book as being one of his primary influences during his youth.
universe13 books1995
Start hereHis Dark Materials · Start here
In a world like ours and unlike it, every human soul walks outside the body in the shape of an animal — a daemon, who speaks, who cannot be lied to, and who settles into one fixed form only when childhood ends. This is the country of His Dark Materials: a company of parallel worlds across which an invisible dust of consciousness drifts down upon the waking mind; where a Church that calls itself the Magisterium would sooner sever a child's soul than let that Dust be understood; and where a golden instrument, the alethiometer, answers true questions for anyone with the patience to read it. Philip Pullman's design stands in two trilogies and a scatter of shorter tales. His Dark Materials — Northern Lights (published in America as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass — carries Lyra Belacqua from the rooftops of a shadow Oxford across the borders between worlds. The Book of Dust returns to that same territory: La Belle Sauvage looks back to Lyra as an infant carried through a great flood, while The Secret Commonwealth follows her grown and less certain into adulthood, with a concluding volume closing the arc. Around them sit slim companion books — Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine — and Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation, made with Pullman's blessing. The register is grave and luminous at once, its title lifted from Milton and its quarrel drawn from Blake: a story that takes the side of curiosity, love, and the physical world against any authority that would forbid them. It reads as adventure — armoured bears, aeronauts, knife-cut windows between skies — yet reasons like philosophy. Begin with Northern Lights / The Golden Compass and read the first trilogy through before turning to The Book of Dust, which deepens everything the first has already made you feel.
Angela Carterstandalone novel1972
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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, published in the United States as The War of Dreams, is a 1972 novel by Angela Carter. This picaresque novel is heavily influenced by surrealism, Romanticism, critical theory, and other branches of Continental philosophy. Its style is an amalgam of magical realism and postmodern pastiche. The novel has been called a theoretical fiction, as it clearly engages in some of the theoretical issues of its time, notably feminism, mass media and the counterculture.
series3 books2015
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Jim Butcher's Cinder Spires series opens with The Aeronaut's Windlass (2015), a steampunk fantasy set among tower-dwelling city-states where airships duel with etheric weapons and intelligent cats share the world with humans. Continuing with Warriorborn and The Olympian Affair, it marks a departure in setting from Butcher's contemporary-fantasy Dresden Files while keeping his fast-paced adventure style.