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- Apprentice Adept
series7 books1980
similar by+2 more
Apprentice Adept is a heptalogy of fantasy and science fiction novels written by English American author Piers Anthony. The series takes place on Phaze and Proton, two worlds occupying the same space in two different dimensional planes. Phaze is a lush planet of magic, where Proton is a barren mining planet of science. As the series opens, each person born on Phaze and Proton has an alternate self living on the other world. But if a person on either world lacks a duplicate, he can cross to the other through an energy "curtain" that circumscribes each frame.
- The Change / The Event
series41 books1998
similar byscience fiction+1 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.
- Red Queen
series14 books2015
similar byrebellion and revolutiontensesecondary world
Red Queen is set in a world split between Reds, an oppressed servant class, and Silvers, a ruling class with superhuman abilities, where a Red girl discovers she has Silver-like powers of her own and is forced into the royal court to hide what she is. Victoria Aveyard's debut novel opens a four-book main sequence - Red Queen, Glass Sword, King's Cage, War Storm - plus the interstitial novella Cruel Crown and the epilogue novella Broken Throne. It's YA dystopian fantasy built around a class-based magic system and a slow-burn political rebellion.
- The Lost Regiment
series9 books1990
similar byscience fictiontensesecondary world+1 more
William R. Forstchen's Lost Regiment series begins with Rally Cry, in which a Civil War Union regiment is swept onto a distant world where humans transplanted from many eras and cultures are farmed as food by an alien race. Arriving with nineteenth-century gunpowder weapons and organized tactics, the regiment's survivors fight to build a defensible nation and turn the war back on their captors, a conflict that escalates across nine novels of technology, politics, and generations.
- Majipoor
series29 books1980
similar by+1 more
The Majipoor series is a series of novels and shorter works by American writer Robert Silverberg, set on the planet Majipoor. The setting is a mixture of science fiction and fantasy elements.
- Dune Universe
universe78 books1963
Start hereDune · Start here
similar byscience fiction+1 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.
- Legends of Saint Camber
series3 books1976
part of Deryni
similar bytensesecondary world
Legends of Saint Camber tells the story of Camber MacRorie, a Deryni lord who helps restore a persecuted human dynasty to the throne of Gwynedd and is venerated as a saint after his death, at a cost the trilogy gradually reveals. Camber of Culdi, Saint Camber, and Camber the Heretic were published as the fourth Deryni novel onward but are set two centuries before Katherine Kurtz's original Chronicles of the Deryni trilogy. They lay the groundwork - persecution of Deryni magic-users - that shapes the political and religious world of everything published earlier in reading order.
- Iron Widow
series2 books2021
similar byrebellion and revolutionsecondary world+2 more
Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow reimagines the rise of Chinese Empress Wu Zetian as a mecha-piloting heroine in Huaxia, a futuristic reinvention of Medieval China. Heavenly Tyrant continues the story as the second book in this young-adult science-fantasy duology.
- Incarceron
series2 books2007
similar by+4 more
Incarceron follows two teenagers on opposite sides of an impossible prison: Finn, trapped inside the vast penal structure of Incarceron with no memory of how he got there, and Claudia, the warden's daughter living in a rigidly controlled world outside who comes to suspect Incarceron is more than a building. Catherine Fisher's 2007 novel blends fantasy and science fiction as the two search for a way to breach the boundary between them. The 2008 sequel, Sapphique, continues both characters' stories.
- The Courier's Daughter Trilogy
series3 books2012
similar byscience fictiontensesecondary world+1 more
The Courier's Daughter Trilogy is C. J. Redwine's YA fantasy series: Defiance (2012), Deception and Deliverance. Set in a walled, post-collapse city ruled by rigid survival laws, it follows a young woman searching for her missing father against the city's authorities and the monstrous forces beyond its walls. The trilogy follows one continuous search and its fallout across all three books.
- Who Fears Death
series5 books2010
similar bysecondary world
Nnedi Okorafor's award-winning novel is a work of science fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic Africa, engaging directly with themes of race and ethnicity through a speculative lens; it won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award. The Book of Phoenix, published five years later, serves as a prequel exploring the earlier origins of that same world.
- The Tribe (Ambelin Kwaymullina)
series3 books2012
similar byscience fictiontensesecondary world+1 more
- The Fey
series12 books1995
similar bysecondary world+2 more
Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an American writer and editor. She writes under various pseudonyms in multiple genres, including science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, and mainstream.
- Pit Dragon
series5 books1980
completed
similar byscience fiction
Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon Chronicles follows Jakkin, born into indentured servitude in the dragon barns of Master Sarkkhan on the planet Austar IV, who steals a hatchling in hopes of raising and fighting it to win his freedom in the dragon pits. Dragon's Blood traces that bond between boy and dragon from theft to the pits; the sequels, Heart's Blood and A Sending of Dragons, follow Jakkin further as the stakes around the dragons and his own status widen. It's science-fantasy that treats its dragons as bred, owned animals rather than magical companions.
