More like Sky Masters
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- H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
similar byscience fiction+2 more
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.
- Galactic Milieu
series10 books1981
completed
similar bytensescience fiction+2 more
Galactic Milieu is a series of science fiction novels by Julian May. It is linked to her previously published series, the Saga of Pliocene Exile; and through the fantastical device of time-travel, acts as both a prequel and a sequel to this earlier series. The "Galactic Milieu" of the title is an interplanetary federation, and Earth's membership of it is a central plot concern.
- Shane Schofield
series5 books1998
similar byadventurousour worldtense+2 more
Shane 'Scarecrow' Schofield is a US Marine captain who leads his unit through single-location, high-body-count action thrillers set in an Antarctic ice station, a disputed Pacific island, and a maximum-security prison built into a mountain, among others. Matthew Reilly's series opens with Ice Station (1998) and keeps escalating its set-pieces across Area 7, Scarecrow, Hell Island, and Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves. It's fast, gleefully over-the-top military action rather than realistic technothriller territory.
- The Long Earth
series7 books2012
similar byadventurousnear futurescience fiction+1 more
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's Long Earth series (five novels, 2012-2016) begins when a cheap, simple device called a Stepper lets people step sideways into a vast, possibly infinite chain of parallel Earths, none of which developed human civilization. The books follow a natural stepper and an AI that believes itself the reincarnation of a Tibetan repairman as they travel millions of steps out along the chain, encountering other hominid species and the dangers, ecological and social, of an endless open frontier.
- Silver Tower
Dale Brownstandalone novel1988
similar bywartechno-thrillernear futuretensescience fiction+1 more
The first permanent U.S. space station plays a pivotal role in deciding the outcome of a crisis in the Middle East.
- Reckoners
series6 books2013
similar byadventurousnear futuretensescience fiction+1 more
The Reckoners is a series of young adult superhero novels written by American author Brandon Sanderson. The series consists of Steelheart (2013), Firefight (2015), Calamity (2016) and Lux (2021). The series depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which the appearance of an orbiting cosmic phenomenon known as Calamity has given random people superhuman powers in apparent defiance of known physical laws, turning them into "Epics". These Epics prey upon or enslave the rest of humanity, causing the collapse of traditional governments. One young man orphaned by a High Epic joins a group that is killing Epics.
- Wargames
David Bischoffstandalone novel1983
similar bywartechno-thrillerour worldtensescience fiction+1 more
Deep in the control room the nation's chiefs watch with alarm as their computers show an imminent missile attack. Could this be it? Or is the truth funnier, thought almost as alarming? This is the story, based on the successful movie, WarGames, of how one young computer freak sent the nation's defence into turmoil - and nearly caused World War III.
- Temporal Regulatory Authority / Jason Thanou
series6 books2006
similar byadventuroustensescience fiction+2 more
- Childe Cycle
series19 books1957
similar bywarscience fiction+2 more
The Childe Cycle is an unfinished series of science fiction novels by American writer Gordon R. Dickson. The name Childe Cycle is an allusion to "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", a poem by Robert Browning, which provided inspiration for elements in the work. The series is sometimes referred to as the Dorsai series, after the Dorsai people who are central to it. The related short stories and novellas all center on the Dorsai, primarily members of the Graeme and Morgan families.
- The Themis Files
series3 books2015
similar byour worldtensescience fiction+2 more
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.
- The Gone-Away World
Nick Harkawaystandalone novel2008
similar bywaradventurousour worldnear futurescience fiction
The Gone-Away World is the debut novel of British author Nick Harkaway, a science fiction story set in a post-apocalyptic world crippled by the 'Go-Away War'. The book was first published in June 2008 by Heinemann.
- Footfall
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournellestandalone novel1985
similar bywarour worldtensescience fiction+1 more
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.
- Five Children Universe
series27 books1902
completed
similar by+2 more
Two separate modern continuations of E. Nesbit's Psammead stories were written decades apart by different authors: Helen Cresswell's The Return of the Psammead (1992) brings the wish-granting sand fairy back for a new set of children, while Kate Saunders's Five Children on the Western Front (2014) follows the now-grown Lamb and his siblings as the First World War arrives, in a more somber sequel to Nesbit's original trilogy. Neither book is by Nesbit herself, and the two have no direct connection to each other beyond both drawing on her creation. Later writers have kept returning to Nesbit's premise long after her own trilogy ended.
- Time and Time Again
Ben Eltonstandalone novel2014
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Time and Time Again is a 2014 novel by Ben Elton. In a fictional 2024, former soldier and University of Cambridge graduate Hugh Stanton is summoned to go back in time and prevent the outbreak of World War I. A review of the book in The Guardian notes that it "has the makings of a decent Young Adult novel" A book review in the Irish Examiner was of the opinion that "the novel that started with such a bang, ended with a fizzle."
- The Change / The Event
series41 books1998
similar byadventurousscience fiction+3 more
The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth is a shared-world anthology of stories set in the years right after a mysterious global event instantly disables gunpowder, electricity, and combustion engines, the founding premise of S. M. Stirling's Emberverse. Sixteen different authors, coordinated by Stirling, each contribute stories set in various corners of the suddenly de-industrialized world as survivors scramble to rebuild. It's a companion volume to the Change/Emberverse novels rather than a novel itself.
- Shannara
universe50 books1977
Start hereWord and the Void · The very beginning of the timeline
similar by+2 more
Long after the world we know has burned itself to slag in the Great Wars, the Four Lands rise green over the bones of the old age. Science is a forbidden memory; magic has come back into the world, and with it the old divisions — Men, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and Gnomes, each Race a splinter of what humanity became. This is the far-future Earth of Shannara, where the ruins buried beneath the soil are ours, and the only keepers of the vanished knowledge are the Druids of Paranor, who wake once a generation to meet the darkness rising again. Terry Brooks opened the Four Lands in 1977 with The Sword of Shannara and has charted its history for four decades since — a legendarium ordered not by throne but by a single bloodline, the Ohmsfords, each generation inheriting an Elfstone, a blade, or a wishsong when the age demands a hero. The original trilogy gives way to the Heritage of Shannara, the Voyage of the Jerle Shannara, the High Druid, Dark Legacy, Defenders, and the concluding Fall of Shannara; the Genesis of Shannara books reach back to the apocalypse itself, and the Word and the Void trilogy back further still, into a demon-haunted version of our own present that is the root of everything after. In 2025 Brooks passed the histories to Delilah S. Dawson to carry forward. What sets these books apart is their long memory: a world where every triumph is provisional, where the same evil returns wearing a fresh shape each age, and magic always exacts its price. The reading is warm and headlong — questing companies, old talismans, journeys across a mapped and named wilderness — shadowed by the knowledge that all of it stands on the wreckage of a former world. Enter as readers first did: with The Sword of Shannara, then onward in publication order. The chronological path, beginning with Word and the Void, rewards a second journey, once the Four Lands already feel like home.
- Tin Men
Christopher Goldenstandalone novel2015
similar bywarour worldnear futuretensescience fiction+1 more
"In the near future, the U.S. has deployed the Remote Infantry Corps: thousands of robots remote-piloted by soldiers whose bodies lie hidden in underground bases. But the worst occurs when anarchists set off a global pulse that shorts out electrical connections. In Damascus, Private Danny Kelso, Corporal Kate Wade, and their platoon realize they are trapped inside the Tin Men--something the government never warned them could happen. In Athens, the G20 Summit comes under fire, and a band of security soldiers and advisors risk everything in an effort to shepherd the President to safety. As chaos descends, and with anarchist Bot Killers on their trail, the Tin Men must survive a gauntlet of violence on the road from Damascus to the heart of Europe, half of them determined to stay true to their mission and save their president, half of them hellbent to save themselves.."--
- The Return
John Barnes & Buzz Aldrinstandalone novel2000
similar bytechno-thrillernear futuretensescience fiction+2 more
From the flaps of the Forge first edition: "When a tragic Shuttle accident kills a world-famous basketball player on his trip into space, a trip that had been planned as a PR coup for the space program, former astronaut Scott Blackstone is out of a job. Worse, he and his "Citizen Observer" program are vilified in the media, and he's being sued for a billion dollars. His older brother, Nick, research chief for a major aerospace firm, persuades Scott's estranged wife, Thalia - a top-ranked attorney - to take on Scott's defense. Gradually, it begins to appear that the "accident" might not have been an accident at all. Meanwhile, as long feared, India and Pakistan go to war - and worse, Pakistan deploys a nuclear device high in the upper atmosphere, putting the crew of the orbiting International Space Station in imminent danger of destruction by radiation exposure. While the world's space vehicles are all grounded by the radiation storm set off by the detonation, only a few weeks remain to rescue the crew, and there's no way to do it. Save, perhaps, for a secret project of Nick's..."
