series11 books1962
completed
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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).
universe123 books1940
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.
series2 books1969
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Michael Crichton's 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain follows a team of scientists racing to contain a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism that crash-lands in Arizona, told in the clinical, document-driven style that helped establish the techno-thriller genre. Daniel H. Wilson's authorized 2019 sequel The Andromeda Evolution revisits the same threat five decades later. Together the two books form a two-part outbreak story separated by a fifty-year gap in publication.
series6 books1992
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Jumper follows David Rice, a teenager who discovers he can teleport anywhere he's been and uses the power to escape an abusive home, only to find that ability alone doesn't solve the harder problems of finding his absent mother, building an honest relationship, or staying off the radar of people who'd exploit him. Steven Gould's series continues across Reflex, Impulse, and Exo, later following his and his wife's daughter as a second-generation jumper. A 2008 film loosely adapted the first novel.
series12 books2005
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Maximum Ride is a series of young adult science fantasy novels by American author James Patterson. The series centers on the adventures of Maximum "Max" Ride and her family, called the Flock, who are winged human-avian hybrids created at a lab called The School. The series was inspired by Patterson's earlier novels When the Wind Blows and The Lake House, which were intended for older readers.
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
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No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
series9 books2008
similar byscience fictiontensecontemporaryyoung adult
Michael Grant's Gone series begins when everyone aged fifteen and older vanishes without warning from a swath of the California coast, trapping the town of Perdido Beach inside an impenetrable barrier the survivors call the FAYZ. As children develop strange powers and food and order break down, Sam Temple and his rival, his twin brother Caine, become central to the fight for survival against human threats and the monstrous Gaiaphage. Six books (Gone through Light) close the original story; a follow-up Monster trilogy, set years later, follows a new outbreak of mutation-causing powers and a new generation of characters.
series7 books2008
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Cory Doctorow's Little Brother follows Marcus, a San Francisco teenager who builds a covert mesh network, the Xnet, to organize resistance after the Department of Homeland Security uses a terrorist attack as pretext for mass surveillance and civil-rights violations. Homeland continues Marcus's fight years later, and Attack Surface completes the trilogy; a companion story, 'Lawful Interception,' and other short pieces extend the same near-future world. Throughout, the series doubles as a working explanation of the surveillance and cryptography tools its characters use.
universe13 books1995
Start hereHis Dark Materials · Start here
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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.
series3 books2017
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Renegades is set in Gatlon City after a civil war between the superheroic Renegades and the villainous Anarchists, and follows Nova, a young woman with the power to put people to sleep by touch, as she infiltrates the Renegades as a spy for her uncle's Anarchists and falls for Adrian, the adopted son of the Renegades' leaders. Marissa Meyer's trilogy, continuing through Archenemies and Supernova, plays the two factions' history against the leads' divided loyalties; Meyer has said she doesn't plan to extend the series further.
universe2034 books1964
Start hereTimewyrm: Genesys · Start here
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Somewhere a blue police box that has no business existing folds a whole world in behind one door, and an old traveller wearing a brand-new face steps out onto a beach, a battlefield, the last warm afternoon of a dying sun. The Whoniverse is all of time and space and the wanderer who refuses to sit still inside it — the Doctor, who dies only to change shape and carry on, gathering friends across every century and losing rather more of them than the adventures like to admit. It runs on curiosity, mercy, and the unshakeable conviction that no one small should be left to the monsters. On the page it is vast and gloriously many-handed. It begins with the Target novelizations, pocket retellings of the television serials — Terrance Dicks alone wrote scores of them — that taught a generation to hear the show in prose. When the screen went dark the books carried the story on: the Virgin New Adventures walked the Seventh Doctor into darker, stranger country and gave the world the archaeologist Bernice Summerfield; BBC Books answered with ranges for the Eighth Doctor and every past incarnation, before the 2005 revival brought the New Series Adventures. Around the edges cluster the spin-offs — Bernice's own long saga, Paul Magrs's gin-soaked interdimensional diva Iris Wildthyme, the pharaoh-companion Erimem, the grown-up Cardiff shadows of Torchwood — steered across decades by hands like Justin Richards and Stephen Cole. Nothing here demands to be read in order, and that is rather the point: it is a world you drop into, not a staircase you climb. The register shifts with every author and every Doctor — high adventure, cosmic dread, farce, elegy, sometimes inside one book — bound together only by that restless kindness. Begin with the Doctor you already half-remember: a Target novelization of a favourite serial, or a New Series Adventure for whichever face first caught you. Then just leave the door open.
universe46 books1967
Start hereThe Gunslinger · Start here
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The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. So begins the long walk of Roland Deschain, last of an order of knight-errant pistoleers, across a land that has "moved on" — where the compass points drift, dead machines rot toward sentience, and the weave of what's real wears thin. His quest is the Dark Tower itself: a spire standing at the hub of every world that exists, the linchpin that holds all of them back from ruin. Roland's road runs eight volumes, from The Gunslinger through the closing Dark Tower, with the later, interleaved tale The Wind Through the Keyhole folding a story-within-a-story back into his youth. Along the way he draws a ka-tet — a fellowship bound by fate, not choosing — through doorways between worlds: a heroin-shackled New Yorker, a woman of two minds, a boy who dies twice. The Tower is also the secret axle around which the wider shelf of King's work turns; threads from The Stand, 'Salem's Lot and beyond wind quietly toward it. Expect a mongrel of Western, high fantasy, horror and decayed science fiction, told in a dusty, incantatory dialect all its own — ka, thankee-sai, the world that has moved on. This is King at his most mythic and most personal, a decades-spanning circle that rewards a patient reader. Begin at the beginning: The Gunslinger, then walk forward in publication order. There are other worlds than these — but this door opens first.
Fritz Leiberstandalone novel1964
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The Wanderer is a science fiction novel by American writer Fritz Leiber, published as a paperback original by Ballantine Books in 1964. It won the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
series6 books1976
completed
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The Patternist series is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."
series4 books1974
completed
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The Rats, James Herbert's 1974 debut novel, imagines a plague of giant mutant rats overrunning London, told through a rotating cast of victims and survivors in the tradition of British disaster horror. It was followed by two sequels, Lair and Domain, which widen the outbreak first to the countryside and then to a besieged, apocalyptic city, completing a three-book trilogy.
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournellestandalone novel1985
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When aliens travel to Earth from Alpha Centauri, differences between alien and human psychology result in an unprovoked invasion, and the resulting resistance results in the aliens' use of a devastating weapon.
series4 books1986
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Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons follows a group of Australian schoolkids drawn into a mysterious video game that starts pulling them physically into its world, with consequences that follow them home. The story continues across two more novels, Skymaze and Shinkei, following the same characters into further games.
series9 books1982
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The Demon Headmaster is a series of books by Gillian Cross which were later adapted as a television series starring Terrence Hardiman in the title role and Frances Amey as Dinah.
Stephen Kingstandalone novel2006
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In Cell, King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.
series2 books1950
completed
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Hal Clement's Needle follows an alien detective nicknamed the Hunter, a shapeless symbiotic being that can live inside a host body, as it crash-lands on Earth pursuing a fugitive of its own kind and takes refuge inside an American teenager, Robert Kinnaird. Together the mismatched pair must learn to communicate and cooperate, first to survive and later to track down the second alien, which has hidden inside another human in the same Pacific island community. The sequel, Through the Eye of a Needle, published nearly three decades later, continues the Hunter's story.
series2 books2011
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Neal Stephenson's Richard 'Dodge' Forthrast novels open with Reamde, a globe-spanning thriller that starts when ransomware inside an MMORPG economy pulls Richard's extended family into a real-world hostage crisis involving hackers, jihadists and Russian mobsters. The sequel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell shifts registers entirely, following Richard's digitally preserved mind after death into an afterlife simulation built from his scanned brain. The two books share a protagonist and family but differ sharply in genre and scale.
series2 books1967
completed
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Rosemary's Baby follows a young wife in a Gothic Manhattan apartment building who grows increasingly convinced that her elderly neighbors, and even her own husband, are part of a conspiracy surrounding her pregnancy. Ira Levin returned to the character thirty years later in the 1997 sequel Son of Rosemary. Together the two novels form a short, self-contained horror series about faith, control, and motherhood.