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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 Storm Wind

anchored on:science fictionspace colonizationrebellion and revolutionother star systemsfar futurewar+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 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 about mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 Dune Universe
                  Dune Universe

                  universe · 78 books · 1963

                  Start hereDune · Start here

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systems+2 more

                  Arrakis. Dune. The desert planet, where empire runs on a single substance: the spice melange, which folds space, prolongs life, and unlocks prescience, and which exists nowhere else in the known universe. Frank Herbert's saga is a meditation dressed as an adventure — feudal houses and a secret sisterhood, engineered messiahs and the patient ecology of a world without water, all turning on the terrible gravity of who commands the spice. It reads like scripture and schemes like a war room, ten thousand years hence, among people who have outlawed the thinking machine and made instruments of themselves instead. At its heart stand Herbert's original six — Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune — a single deepening arc across millennia, arguing the whole way between prophecy and free will. Around that spine his son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have raised a vast prequel architecture: Prelude to Dune, tracing the great houses a generation before Paul; Legends of Dune, reaching back to the crusade that broke the machines; the Schools of Dune cycle on the founding of Bene Gesserit, Mentat, and Navigator; the Caladan Trilogy and Heroes of Dune filling years the originals left in shadow. Many hands, dozens of volumes, one desert. What sets Dune apart is its refusal of the simple: religion is manufactured, heroes are hazards, and the sand itself — worm, water, ecology — acts as a political power. Begin where the universe did, with Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), and read the original six in order; you need nothing else to feel the full weight. The prequels are a country to explore afterward, taken by era. Beginnings are delicate times.

                • Cover of Dune
                  Dune

                  series · 20 books · 1963

                  part of Dune Universe

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systems+2 more

                  Frank Herbert's Dune Chronicles opens with 1965's Dune, set on the desert planet Arrakis where House Atreides takes control of the only source of the vital spice melange and young Paul Atreides is pulled into a struggle over its politics and religion. Herbert carried the story forward across five further novels — Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune — following Paul's line over the following millennia, before Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson later extended the saga. Many other editions of these six novels are omnibus and box-set repackagings rather than separate stories.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games
                  The Hunger Games

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  part of The Hunger Games Universe

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futurerebellion and revolutiondark+1 more

                  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 Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)
                  Berserker (Fred Saberhagen)

                  series · 59 books · 1963

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futurespacewarother star systems+1 more

                  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.

                • Cover of Red Rising
                  Red Rising

                  series · 13 books · 2014

                  similar byscience fictionfar futuretensedarkrebellion and revolution+3 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 Armor
                  Armor

                  John Steakley · standalone novel · 1984

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futureother star systemsdarkwar

                  Armor is a military science fiction novel by John Steakley. It features the military use of exoskeletons and insect-like alien enemies but concentrates on the psychological effects of violence on human beings.

                • Cover of Embedded
                  Embedded

                  Dan Abnett · standalone novel · 2011

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futureother star systemsspace colonizationwar+1 more

                  The colony planet of Eighty-Six looks as dull as all its fellow new worlds to veteran journalist Lex Falk. But when a local squabble turns violent, and the media get the runaround from the military high command, his interest is seriously piqued. Forbidden from approaching the battlezone, Falk gets himself chipped inside the head of a combat veteran - and uncovers the story of a lifetime.

                • Cover of The Dosadi Experiment
                  The Dosadi Experiment

                  Frank Herbert · standalone novel · 1977

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futureother star systems+2 more

                  From the flaps of the Berkley Putnam first edition: "In his first new work of science fiction since the best-selling Children of Dune, Frank Herbert returns to his world of Whipping Star, and involves Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary, in a new intrigue. In Whipping Star, McKie discovered that some of the stars in the universe are actually intelligent, super-powerful beings, and was able to befriend one of them, the star Alcyone - affectionately known as Fannie Mae. As The Dosadi Experiment opens, McKie is assigned to investigate the planet Dosadi, which is isolated from the rest of the galaxy by a "god-wall," a barrier set up by one of the intelligent stars. Dosadi is rumored to be an experimental planet, and the experimenters are the froglike Gowachin, whose culture is founded upon a strange legal system in which McKie is the only human ever trained. He learns that humans and Gowachin have been placed on Dosadi, without their consent, for an experiment that could last centuries: an experiment in extreme overcrowding. But this monstrous plot is apparently out of control, and it seems the Gowachin may be prepared to destroy Dosadi rather than expose its secret, thus breaking the peace among the races, and starting the first interstellar war. But this is just the beginning. When McKie finally reaches Dosadi he discovers that the Dosadis have taken control of their own evolution and produced a competitive, highly evolved elite, of both humans and Gowachin, who have been able to extrapolate the existence of a universe beyond the god-wall and hate whoever has imprisoned them like this. They plan to break out and avenge themselves on the galaxy."

                • Cover of The Hunger Games Universe
                  The Hunger Games Universe

                  universe · 5 books · 2008

                  Start hereThe Hunger Games · Start here

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futuredarkrebellion and revolution+1 more

                  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 Honor Harrington
                  Honor Harrington

                  series · 14 books · 1993

                  part of Honorverse

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futurewarspaceother star systems

                  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 Janissaries
                  Janissaries

                  series · 4 books · 1979

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futureother star systemswar+1 more

                  Janissaries are an American series of military and political-based science fiction novels are set in an interstellar confederation of races, in which humans are a slave race entrusted with military affairs and law enforcement. They were written by Jerry Pournelle, with Roland J. Green co-authoring the second two books.

                • Cover of Worldburner Suite
                  Worldburner Suite

                  series · 2 books · 2016

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futureother star systems+3 more

                • Cover of Moties
                  Moties

                  series · 4 books · 1974

                  part of CoDominium

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systemsspace+2 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 The Outposter
                  The Outposter

                  Gordon R. Dickson · standalone novel · 1972

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futurespace colonizationother star systemsspace

                  From the flap of the Lippincott first edition: "Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief - the lottery played no favorites. If your number came up, you joined the rest of the losers marked for exile from overcrowded Earth. Shipped to a raw new outpost in space, you were officially called a colonist. But your whispered name was "garbage," your destination was oblivion, and you had few illusions about your chances of survival. The Outposters - a token band of specially trained personnel - were given the impossible task of guiding and protecting these outcasts in their harsh new environment. Will indifferent support from Earth, supply lines ran thin and raids by hostile aliens were increasing unchecked. Only one young Outposter, Mark Ten Roos, dared to challenge the system and change the odds. To help him, Mark hand-picked a strange assortment of allies from the new shipment of colonists: a brash opportunist, every instinct honed for personal survival; a midget woman with a professorship in philosophy; a widowed mathematician, expert in position astrophysics; an ex-marine with a dishonorable discharge. And help came to Mark from a source he had not expected - the daughter of the Outer Navy's ranking officer. When Mark Ten Roo put his plan into action, he knew he was also putting his life on the line."

                • Cover of Company Wars
                  Company Wars

                  series · 7 books · 1981

                  part of Alliance-Union Universe

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futurespace+1 more

                  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 Vatta's War
                  Vatta's War

                  series · 6 books · 2003

                  part of Vatta

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futurewarother star systemsspace

                  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 Old Man's War
                  Old Man's War

                  series · 16 books · 2005

                  similar byscience fictionfar futureother star systemswarspace+2 more

                  The Old Man's War series is a series of science fiction novels by John Scalzi. The first book in the series, Old Man's War, was first published in 2005 by Tor Books, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006. In 2026 it was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Series.

                • Cover of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
                  The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar byscience fictionfar futurerebellion and revolutionspace colonization+1 more

                  A technician discovers that the massive computer that operates everything on Luna (a prison colony) has become self-aware. He befriends it, but when he accompanied a beautiful girl to a dissident meeting, he encounters people who want to throw off the yoke of their Earth rulers.

                • Cover of Chaos Walking
                  Chaos Walking

                  series · 5 books · 2008

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futuredarkother star systems+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 Death's Head (David Gunn)
                  Death's Head (David Gunn)

                  series · 3 books · 2007

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futuredarkwarspace+1 more

                  Death's Head is a noir military science fiction series written by David Gunn. The series follows the antihero Sven Tveskoeg, an ex-sergeant of The Legion, in service to the Octovian Empire.

                • Cover of Man-Kzin Wars
                  Man-Kzin Wars

                  series · 84 books · 1986

                  part of Known Space

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futurewarspaceother star systems

                  The Man–Kzin Wars is the name of a series of military science fiction anthologies as well as the name of the first book in the series. The short stories detail the eponymous conflicts between mankind and the Kzinti, set in Larry Niven's Known Space universe. However, Niven himself has written only a small number of the stories; most were written by other science fiction writers, as Niven opened this part of the Known Space to collaboration in the form of a shared universe. The cover art for the books in the series is created by Stephen Hickman.

                • Cover of Forever War
                  Forever War

                  series · 10 books · 1972

                  similar byscience fictionfar futurespace+4 more

                  Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1974) follows a soldier conscripted into a centuries-long interstellar war against the alien Taurans, using relativistic space travel so that months spent in transit correspond to years or decades passing back on Earth. Haldeman later returned to the same conflict in Forever Peace (1997), a thematically connected but separate story, and Forever Free (1999), a direct sequel set years after the original war's end. The first novel won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and is considered a foundational work of military science fiction.

                • Cover of The Eyes of Heisenberg
                  The Eyes of Heisenberg

                  Frank Herbert · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futuredarkrebellion and revolution

                  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 The Sardonyx Net
                  The Sardonyx Net

                  Elizabeth A. Lynn · standalone novel · 1981

                  similar byscience fictiontensefar futuredarkrebellion and revolutionspaceother star systems

                  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."