Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

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 Split Image

anchored on:science fictioncontemporary

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 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 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 My Teacher Is an Alien
                  My Teacher Is an Alien

                  series · 4 books · 1989

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporarymiddle gradealiensadventurous+2 more

                  My Teacher Is an Alien is a four-book science fiction children's book series authored by Bruce Coville. The titles include:My Teacher Is an Alien (1989) My Teacher Fried My Brains (1991) My Teacher Glows in the Dark (1991) My Teacher Flunked the Planet (1992)

                • Cover of Flowers for Algernon
                  Flowers for Algernon

                  Daniel Keyes · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of agenorth americacontemporaryidentity

                  A man with a low IQ becomes the subject of an experimental medical procedure which raises his IQ well over genius level.

                • K
                  Kairos

                  series · 11 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar byscience fiction+3 more

                  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).

                • Cover of Airhead
                  Airhead

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  similar byscience fictionnorth americacontemporaryidentity+2 more

                • Cover of The Clone Chronicles (M. E. Castle)
                  The Clone Chronicles (M. E. Castle)

                  series · 4 books · 2012

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporarymiddle grade+5 more

                • Cover of Lost in Cyberspace
                  Lost in Cyberspace

                  series · 2 books · 1995

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of agelightheartedcontemporarymiddle grade+2 more

                • Cover of Stranger in a Strange Land
                  Stranger in a Strange Land

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of agenorth americaaliensidentity

                  Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by the American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, and explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.

                • Cover of Ormingat Trilogy
                  Ormingat Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2000

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of agecontemporarymiddle gradealiens+2 more

                • Cover of Smart Dog
                  Smart Dog

                  Vivian Vande Velde · standalone novel · 1998

                  similar byscience fictionnorth americacontemporarymiddle gradeadventurous+2 more

                  Fifth grader Amy finds her life growing complicated when she meets and tries to hide an intelligent, talking dog who has escaped from a university lab.

                • Cover of The Homework Machine
                  The Homework Machine

                  series · 2 books · 2006

                  similar byscience fictionnorth americacontemporarymiddle grade+2 more

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

                  series · 10 books · 2004

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporary+3 more

                • Cover of Andrews Family
                  Andrews Family

                  series · 3 books · 1972

                  completed

                  similar bycoming of agelightheartednorth americacontemporarymiddle grade+1 more

                  Mary Rodgers wrote a loose set of comic novels about one suburban family, each built around a different fantastical role-reversal: a mother and daughter swap bodies for a day in Freaky Friday, a boy discovers a television that shows tomorrow's news in A Billion for Boris, and a father and son trade places in Summer Switch. The books share characters and tone rather than a continuing plot.

                • Cover of The Return of Captain Conquer
                  The Return of Captain Conquer

                  Mel Gilden · standalone novel · 1986

                  similar byscience fictionnorth americacontemporaryaliensadventurous+2 more

                  Thirteen-year-old Watson Congruent and a group of fans dedicated to an old science fiction television series discover an alien plot to conquer the world.

                • Cover of I Was a 6th Grade Alien
                  I Was a 6th Grade Alien

                  series · 12 books · 1999

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporarymiddle gradealiens+2 more

                • Cover of Buttheads from Outer Space
                  Buttheads from Outer Space

                  Jerry Mahoney · standalone novel · 2018

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporarymiddle gradealiens+3 more

                  Hoping to become famous, sixth-graders Josh and Lloyd write a blog inviting extraterrestrials to Earth, but soon realize they have made a very big mistake.

                • Cover of TJ and the Time Stumblers
                  TJ and the Time Stumblers

                  series · 6 books · 2011

                  similar byscience fictionnorth americacontemporarymiddle grade+2 more

                • Cover of Danny Dunn
                  Danny Dunn

                  series · 15 books · 1956

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionadventurous+3 more

                  Danny Dunn is the young protagonist of a long-running mid-century American juvenile science fiction series by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams, starting in 1956. Each book sends Danny and his friends into an adventure built around a specific piece of speculative technology — anti-gravity paint, a homework machine, weather control — that goes predictably wrong or is misused by someone else. Aimed squarely at young readers, the fifteen-book run treats gadget-driven science fiction as a springboard for comic mishap and light moralizing rather than hard extrapolation.

                • Cover of Agent to the Stars
                  Agent to the Stars

                  John Scalzi · standalone novel · 2005

                  similar byscience fictionnorth americacontemporaryaliens+1 more

                  "The space-faring Yherajk have come to Earth to meet us and to begin humanity's first interstellar friendship. There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish. Gaining humanity's trust isn't easy when you look like a B-movie terror. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal. Thomas Stein knows all about closing deals - he's one of Hollywood's hottest young agents who's just closed the biggest deal of his career. But it's one thing to sell your client when she's a hot young starlet. It's another thing entirely when your client is an entire alien species, depending on you to pull off the greatest introduction in this history of man. Stein's going to need all his smarts, all his skills, and all his wits to earn his percentage and his place in history." [Source: front dust jacket flap of Subterranean Press edition]

                • Cover of Jumper
                  Jumper

                  series · 6 books · 1992

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryadventurous+3 more

                  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.

                • Cover of Alien Agent
                  Alien Agent

                  series · 6 books · 2008

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporarymiddle gradealiensadventurous+1 more

                • Cover of The Dark Side of Nowhere
                  The Dark Side of Nowhere

                  Neal Shusterman · standalone novel · 1997

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of agenorth americacontemporaryaliensidentity

                  The Dark Side of Nowhere is a children's book written by Neal Shusterman and published by Little Brown and Company in 1997. It was released in paperback and on audio cassettes.

                • Cover of Daniel X
                  Daniel X

                  series · 6 books · 2008

                  similar byscience fictioncontemporaryaliensadventurous+1 more

                  The Dangerous Days of Daniel X opens James Patterson's science-fiction series, co-written with Michael Ledwidge, marking Patterson's return to genre science fiction in a similar vein to his Maximum Ride series. Released in 2008, it became the first of six books following the same teenage protagonist. Patterson's later collaborators on the sequels include Chris Grabenstein, Ned Rust, and Adam Sadler.

                • Cover of Alien in My Pocket
                  Alien in My Pocket

                  series · 8 books · 2014

                  similar byscience fictionnorth americacontemporarymiddle gradealiens+2 more

                • Cover of The Girl Who Owned a City
                  The Girl Who Owned a City

                  O. T. Nelson · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar byscience fictioncoming of agenorth americacontemporarymiddle grade

                  A plague has struck Earth, killing all adults. Lisa and her younger brother Todd are working to survive in a very dangerous world. Other children along Grand Avenue are in a similar plight. They band together to find food, shelter, and protection from dangerous gangs invading their neighborhood.