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 Starchild

anchored on:science fictiondystopiarebellion and revolutiontotalitarianismfar futuretense+2 more

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 about minds with paranormal abilities — telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, empathy — and how societies handle those who have them.
  • 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 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 driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories about rising against rulers — uprisings, resistance movements, and revolutions and their aftermaths.
  • 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 Starchild
                  Starchild

                  series · 3 books · 1964

                  completed

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fictiontotalitarianismdystopiasurveillance+1 more

                  The Starchild Trilogy is a series of three science fiction novels written by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. In the future depicted in this series, mankind is ruled by a brutal totalitarian government known as the Plan of Man, enforced by a computerized surveillance state.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games
                  The Hunger Games

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  part of The Hunger Games Universe

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictiondystopiarebellion and revolutiontotalitarianism

                  The Hunger Games is a series of young adult dystopian novels written by American author Suzanne Collins. The series consists of a trilogy that follows teenage protagonist Katniss Everdeen, as well as two prequels. The Hunger Games universe is a dystopia set in Panem, a post-apocalyptic North American country consisting of the wealthy Capitol and 12 districts in varying states of poverty. As punishment for rebellion, the Capitol hosts an annual battle royale competition called The Hunger Games. Each of the 12 districts must send two children between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate, and the last surviving child is dubbed the victor.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games Universe
                  The Hunger Games Universe

                  universe · 5 books · 2008

                  Start hereThe Hunger Games · Start here

                  similar bytensefar futuredystopiascience fictionrebellion and revolutiontotalitarianism

                  Panem, they call it now — a nation raised on the drowned bones of North America, a glittering Capitol ringed by twelve districts it once starved into obedience. Every year the Capitol collects its debt in children: two tributes from each district, drawn by lottery, dropped into an engineered arena, and made to kill one another on live television while the whole country is required to watch. This is the Hunger Games — entertainment, punishment, and government at once. Suzanne Collins tells it in a compact, unified body of work. The founding trilogy — The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay — follows Katniss Everdeen, a girl from the coal-mining District 12 who volunteers in her sister's place and becomes something the Capitol never scripted. Two prequels reach back into the same machinery: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes traces a young Coriolanus Snow long before he is President, and Sunrise on the Reaping returns to District 12 a generation ahead of Katniss. Begin with the trilogy, in order — it is Katniss's voice, close and present-tense, that makes Panem breathe, and the prequels land hardest once you know how her story ends. Beneath the spectacle sits one steady, uncomfortable question: who profits when we agree to look away.

                • Cover of This Perfect Day
                  This Perfect Day

                  Ira Levin · standalone novel · 1970

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictiondystopiatotalitarianismrebellion and revolution+1 more

                  This Perfect Day is a science fiction novel by American writer Ira Levin, about a technocratic dystopia. Levin won a Prometheus Award in 1992 for this novel. This Perfect Day is one of two Levin novels yet to be adapted to film.

                • Cover of When the Sleeper Wakes
                  When the Sleeper Wakes

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1899

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictiondystopiarebellion and revolutiontotalitarianism

                  Graham, an insomniac Englishman in 1890s London, takes a course of sleep-inducing drugs and falls into a coma that lasts two centuries. He wakes in the year 2100 to find his investments have compounded, through a ruling body called the White Council, into effective ownership of most of the world's wealth and power, making him, on paper, humanity's master, and in practice, its prisoner, held under guard while the Council governs in his name. A rebel faction led by a man named Ostrog frees him, hoping to use his symbolic authority to spark an uprising against the Council. An early H. G. Wells dystopia about inherited power and manufactured consent.

                • Cover of The Handmaid's Tale
                  The Handmaid's Tale

                  series · 3 books · 1985

                  similar bytensedystopiatotalitarianismscience fictionrebellion and revolution+1 more

                  The Handmaid's Tale is Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel set in Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy that has overthrown the United States and forces fertile women into reproductive servitude as Handmaids; it is narrated by one such woman, Offred. Atwood returned to the world in her 2019 sequel The Testaments, set fifteen years later and narrated by three women, including the regime's Aunt Lydia. Together the two novels move from Gilead's grip on power toward the first cracks in it.

                • Cover of Dayworld
                  Dayworld

                  series · 5 books · 1971

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictiondystopiatotalitarianism+2 more

                  Dayworld is a trilogy of science fiction novels by Philip José Farmer, inspired by his own short story "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World". They are set in a dystopian future in which people are allowed to live only one day of the week. For the rest of the six days, they are "stoned", kept in a kind of suspended animation. The novels focus on a man, Jeff Caird, who is a daybreaker: someone who lives more than one day a week. As the series progresses, the main character seems to be suffering from dissociative identity disorder. The novels comprising the trilogy are:Dayworld (1985) Dayworld Rebel (1987) Dayworld Breakup (1990)

                • Cover of The Ferryman
                  The Ferryman

                  Justin Cronin · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictiondystopiasurveillancetotalitarianism

                  The Ferryman is a 2023 dystopian fiction novel by Justin Cronin. The protagonist, Proctor Bennett, is a titular "ferryman", responsible for transporting elderly citizens to be reborn. Proctor gradually realizes that his utopian life is not what it seems. The Ferryman is Cronin's first novel since 2016's The City of Mirrors.

                • Cover of Red Rising
                  Red Rising

                  series · 13 books · 2014

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictionrebellion and revolutiondystopia+1 more

                  Pierce Brown's Red Rising follows Darrow, a lowborn 'Red' miner on a colonized Mars who discovers his caste's suffering is a lie sustained by the ruling Gold elite, and infiltrates their ranks to destroy the system from within. The series expands from a single-protagonist revenge story into a sprawling multi-book war across the solar system, eventually following an ensemble cast beyond Darrow alone, and combines Roman-inspired factional politics with brutal, competition-driven action set pieces.

                • Cover of The Eyes of Heisenberg
                  The Eyes of Heisenberg

                  Frank Herbert · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictionrebellion and revolution+1 more

                  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 Company Wars
                  Company Wars

                  series · 7 books · 1981

                  part of Alliance-Union Universe

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fiction

                  Company Wars gathers the novels C. J. Cherryh set during the breakaway conflict between Earth's colonial Company and the newly independent Union, within her wider Alliance-Union future history. Anchored by the Hugo Award-winning Downbelow Station, the books follow different ships, stations, and crews caught on either side, from merchanter traders to military spacers, rather than a single continuing cast. Read in any order, they build up a picture of the political and economic pressure that reshapes Cherryh's larger Alliance-Union universe.

                • Cover of To the Stars (Harrison)
                  To the Stars (Harrison)

                  series · 3 books · 1980

                  completed

                  similar bytensescience fictionfar futuredystopiarebellion and revolution+1 more

                  The To the Stars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Harry Harrison, first published in 1980 (Homeworld) and 1981. The three books were re-published in an omnibus edition in 1981.

                • Cover of The Shockwave Rider
                  The Shockwave Rider

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar bytensescience fictiondystopiasurveillancetotalitarianism+1 more

                  The Shockwave Rider is a science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. It is notable for its hero's use of computer hacking skills to escape pursuit in a dystopian future, and for the coining of the word "worm" to describe a program that propagates itself through a computer network. It also introduces the concept of a Delphi pool, perhaps derived from the RAND Corporation's Delphi method – a prediction market on world events which bears close resemblance to DARPA's controversial and cancelled Policy Analysis Market.

                • Cover of Moties
                  Moties

                  series · 4 books · 1974

                  part of CoDominium

                  similar byfar futurespacescience fiction+1 more

                  Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye (1974) depicts humanity's first contact with an alien species, the Moties, set within the far-future interstellar setting of Pournelle's codominium future history. The Gripping Hand continues that first-contact crisis years later, and Outies, written by J. R. Pournelle, carries the story forward into a new generation. Together the three books trace an escalating encounter between human and Motie civilizations within the codominium universe.

                • Cover of Honor Harrington
                  Honor Harrington

                  series · 14 books · 1993

                  part of Honorverse

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fiction

                  David Weber's Honor Harrington novels follow the title character's rise through the Manticoran navy in the 'Honorverse,' a space-opera setting built around Age-of-Sail-style naval combat, interstellar politics and a decades-long war between rival star nations. Beginning with On Basilisk Station, the core series runs to fourteen books, alongside spin-off subseries, prequels and shared-world anthologies also set in the Honorverse. It's one of the longest-running modern military science fiction series, published by Baen.

                • Cover of Chaos Walking
                  Chaos Walking

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictiondystopia+2 more

                  Chaos Walking is a young adult science fiction series written by American-British novelist Patrick Ness. It is set in a dystopian world where all living creatures can hear each other's thoughts in a stream of images, words, and sounds called Noise. The series is named after a line in the first book: "The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking." The series consists of a trilogy of novels and three short stories.

                • Cover of The Penultimate Truth
                  The Penultimate Truth

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1964

                  similar byfar futurescience fictiondystopiatotalitarianismsurveillance

                  The Penultimate Truth is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story is set in a future where the bulk of humanity is kept in large underground shelters. The people are told that World War III is being fought above them, when in reality the war ended years ago. The novel is based on Dick's 1953 short story "The Defenders". Dick also drew upon two of his other short stories for the plot of the novel: "The Mold of Yancy" and "The Unreconstructed M".

                • Cover of Vatta's War
                  Vatta's War

                  series · 6 books · 2003

                  part of Vatta

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fiction

                  Vatta's War is a science fiction series by American writer Elizabeth Moon, comprising five books: Trading in Danger (2003), Marque and Reprisal, Engaging the Enemy (2006), Command Decision (2007), and Victory Conditions (2008). They have been characterized as military science fiction similar in style to the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, David Weber and Walter Jon Williams.

                • Cover of Against a Dark Background
                  Against a Dark Background

                  Iain M. Banks · standalone novel · 1993

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fiction

                  The daughter of an impoverished noble house and her squad of soldiers become thieves of antiquities; long after their retirement and separation she must assemble them again in order to find and steal the most powerful weapon ever created, or pay with her life.

                • Cover of Pushing Ice
                  Pushing Ice

                  Alastair Reynolds · standalone novel · 2005

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fiction

                  When Saturn's moon Janus suddenly takes off into interstellar space, an ice mining spaceship sent to investigate finds itself swept along into distant space until it ends up trapped in a gigantic alien structure, wherein the crew must prepare to reside for the foreseeable future.

                • Cover of Our Friends from Frolix 8
                  Our Friends from Frolix 8

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1970

                  similar bytensefar futurescience fictiondystopiarebellion and revolution

                  Our Friends from Frolix 8 is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was written from 1968 to 1969 and was published in 1970 by Ace Books. The novel is set in the 22nd century, when humanity is ruled by mutated humans, "New Men" and "Unusuals", while normal "Old Men" are discriminated against. The story follows Nick Appleton, a low-class Old Man worker who becomes a subversive to the system, and Willis Gram, the Unusual ruler of the Earth. Separately, resistance leader Thors Provoni has left the planet to find an ally to the Old Men, finally returning with an alien from far away in space. The novel is best known for a single scene where the characters discuss the dead body of God having been found in space.

                • Cover of Space Beagle
                  Space Beagle

                  series · 5 books · 1939

                  completed

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fiction

                  The Voyage of the Space Beagle is a 1950 fix-up novel by A. E. van Vogt, stitched together from four previously published pulp stories into a single continuous account of the exploration ship Space Beagle's encounters with a series of dangerous alien life forms. Its episodic, crew-versus-monster structure reads as a loose sequence of adventures rather than one continuous plot.

                • Cover of The Sardonyx Net
                  The Sardonyx Net

                  Elizabeth A. Lynn · standalone novel · 1981

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fictionrebellion and revolution

                  From the flaps of the Putnam first edition: "The Sardonyx Net, also known as the Yago Net: a vast starship owned and operated by the Family Yago, captained by Zed Yago. It visits all planets in the Sardonyx Sector of space, picking up special cargo - convicted felons who will serve our their terms as dorazine-drugged slaves to the wealthy land and factory owners on the planet Chabad. But often their ordeal begins even before the are sold, for Zed Yago is a man with a taste for sadism. The slave trade is the most lucrative business on Chabad. It is controlled totally by the Family Yago, headed by Zed's older sister Rhani, who is the only woman Zed has truly loved. Rhani is a shrewd businesswoman with only one weakness: a heart as compassionate as her brother's is perverse. While the authorities of the Sector's other planets look away, the Families of Chabad purchase dorazine from representatives of a secret, unlocatable source known as The Pharmacy, and use it to keep their slave-based economy healthy. Not one protests, for Chabad's illegal and inhumane activities keep prisons empty, criminals under control, and Chabad's valuable exports flowing. Despite constant underground revolutionary activity, the situation has maintained. But he long-lived stability of this sanctioned trade in illegal drugs and human beings is now threatened by two unexpected events: a worsening shortage of dorazine which is sparking more rebellion, and the arrival of Starcaptain Dana Ikoro. Dana, as drug smuggler, is captured by the Net and delivered from Zed's hands to Rhani. He is to be her bodyguard, but becomes much more. Against this incredible background, Lynn tells an irresistible story of adventure, intrigue, revolution and romance. It is a story of people snared in a net of warring passions, a net which will prove to be even stronger than the power of the Sardonyx Net."

                • Cover of Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)
                  Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)

                  series · 59 books · 1963

                  similar bytensefar futurespacescience fiction

                  The Berserker series is a series of space opera science fiction short stories and novels by Fred Saberhagen, in which robotic self-replicating machines strive to destroy all life.