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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 Termination

anchored on:science fictiontime traveleuroperenaissance and early moderntensehistorical fantasy+4 more

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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 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 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 Mircea Basarab
                  Mircea Basarab

                  series · 1 book · 2014

                  part of Cassandra Palmer

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                • Cover of Gloriana, or, the Unfulfill'd Queen
                  Gloriana, or, the Unfulfill'd Queen

                  Michael Moorcock · standalone novel · 1978

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                  Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen is a work of literary fantasy by British novelist Michael Moorcock. It was first published in 1978 and has remained in print ever since.

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

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                  Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he tracks escaped androids through an irradiated, near-abandoned San Francisco, using the hunt to probe questions of empathy and what separates human from machine. The novel became the basis for Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, and Marvel Comics later published an illustrated adaptation of that film. Together the two trace the story's path from prose original to screen and comic-page adaptation.

                • Cover of Under the Dome
                  Under the Dome

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2009

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                  A small town in Maine finds itself suddenly cut off from the outside world by an impenetrable barrier, and the clash of personalities of the trapped people takes its inexorable devastating course.

                • Cover of When the Sleeper Wakes
                  When the Sleeper Wakes

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1899

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                  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 Fawkes
                  Fawkes

                  Nadine Brandes · standalone novel · 2018

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                  In 17th century England, Thomas Fawkes is infected with the Stone Plague, and the only cure is to join his father's Gunpowder Plot to assassinate the king of England. The problem: Doing so will destroy the family of the girl Thomas loves. But backing out of the plot will send his father and the other plotters to the gallows.

                • Cover of D. O. D. O. (Department of Diachronic Operations)
                  D. O. D. O. (Department of Diachronic Operations)

                  series · 2 books · 2017

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                  Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's D.O.D.O. novels center on the Department of Diachronic Operations, a covert U.S. government agency that discovers magic vanished from the world in the nineteenth century and sets out to use time travel to bring it back. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (2017) is followed by Master of the Revels, continuing the pair's earlier collaboration on The Mongoliad.

                • Cover of Navola
                  Navola

                  Paolo Bacigalupi · standalone novel · 2024

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                  "In Navola, a bustling city-state dominated by a handful of influential families, business is power, and power is everything. For generations, the di Regulai family-merchant bankers with a vast empire-has nurtured tendrils that stretch to the farthest reaches of the known world. And though they claim not to be political, their staggering wealth has bought cities and toppled kingdoms. Soon, Davico di Regulai will be expected to take the reins of power from his father and demonstrate his mastery of the games of Navolese diplomacy: knowing who to trust and who to doubt, and how to read what lies hidden behind a smile. But in Navola, strange and ancient undercurrents lurk behind the gilt and grandeur-like the fossilized dragon eye in the family's possession, a potent symbol of their raw power and a talisman that seems to be summoning Davico to act. As tensions rise and the events unfold, Davico will be tested to his limits. His fate depends on the eldritch dragon relic and on what lies buried in the heart of his adopted sister, Celia di Balcosi, whose own family was destroyed by Nalova's twisted politics. With echoes of Renaissance Italy, The Godfather, and Game of Thrones, Navola is a stunning feat of world-building and a mesmerizing depiction of drive and will"--

                • Cover of The Familiar
                  The Familiar

                  Leigh Bardugo · standalone novel · 2024

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                  The Familiar is a historical fantasy novel written by Leigh Bardugo, published by Flatiron Books on April 9, 2024. The novel follows Luzia Cotado, a scullion with a gift for "little miracles", who must use her magic to survive and gain favor in the royal court all while hiding the truth about her ancestry. The book is not part of a series.

                • Cover of Heirs of Alexandria
                  Heirs of Alexandria

                  series · 7 books · 2002

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                  Heirs of Alexandria is an alternate history/historical fantasy series introduced in 2002 and set primarily in the Republic of Venice in the 1530s. The books are written by three authors, Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer. The books combine elements from the styles of all three authors, such as Lackey's approach to tolerance and magic and Flint's sense of history alteration.

                • Cover of The Company Man
                  The Company Man

                  Joe Clifford Faust · standalone novel · 1988

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                  The main character in The Company Man, Andrew Birch, questions his loyalty to Astradyne--the megacorporation replacing governments on Earth--, which had been unfaltering until he realized he has been used as a company pawn in a twisted plot and decided to strike back.

                • Cover of The 48
                  The 48

                  Donna Hosie · standalone novel · 2018

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                  Twins Charlie and Alex Taylor are the newest time travelers recruited to the Forty-Eight, a clandestine military group in charge of manipulating history. The brothers arrive in 1536 feeling confident, but the Tudor court is not all banquets and merriment: it is a deep well of treachery, torture, lust, intrigue, and suspicion.

                • Cover of Takeshi Kovacs
                  Takeshi Kovacs

                  series · 3 books · 2002

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                  Takeshi Kovacs is a former elite soldier turned freelance troubleshooter in a future where human consciousness can be digitized and transferred between bodies, or sleeves, making death an inconvenience for those who can afford new ones. Richard Morgan's trilogy - Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies - moves Kovacs through noir-inflected mysteries on different worlds, using the resleeving premise to interrogate class, violence, and what, if anything, survives a person's original body. It became the basis for a Netflix series.

                • Cover of Mirror Mirror
                  Mirror Mirror

                  Gregory Maguire · standalone novel · 2003

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                  Mirror, Mirror is a fantasy novel by American writer Gregory Maguire, published in 2003. The novel is a revisionist version of the tale of Snow White set in rural Italy and featuring the historical Borgia family, with Lucrezia Borgia in the role of the Evil Queen.

                • Cover of The Monk
                  The Monk

                  Matthew Gregory Lewis · standalone novel · 1796

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                  The Monk: A Romance is a Gothic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796 across three volumes. Written early in Lewis's career, it was published anonymously when he was 20. It tells the story of a virtuous Catholic monk who gives in to his violent and lustful urges, setting off a chain of events that leave him damned. It is a prime example of the type of Gothic that specializes in horror.

                • Cover of The Echo Wife
                  The Echo Wife

                  Sarah Gailey · standalone novel · 2021

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                  The Echo Wife is a 2021 science fiction thriller novel by Sarah Gailey, published by Tor Books. It follows Doctor Evelyn Caldwell, an accomplished scientist researching cloning, who has discovered that her husband, Nathan, has used her research to create Martine, a clone of Evelyn who is his ideal wife. When Martine kills Nathan in self-defense, Evelyn must assist in covering up the murder.

                • Cover of The Conqueror's Trilogy
                  The Conqueror's Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2016

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                • TF
                  The First History

                  series · 8 books · 1999

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                • Cover of The Terminal Man
                  The Terminal Man

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1972

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                  The Terminal Man is a novel by American writer Michael Crichton. It is his second novel under his own name, his 12th overall, and is about the dangers of mind control. It was published in April 1972 and also serialized in Playboy in March, April, and May 1972. In 1974, it was made into a film of the same name.

                • Cover of Fatherland
                  Fatherland

                  Robert Harris · standalone novel · 1992

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                  Twenty years after Nazi Germany won the Second World War, Berlin is preparing to celebrate Adolf Hitler's seventy-fifth birthday when detective Xavier March is called to investigate a body pulled from a lake, ostensibly an accident, but one that leads him to a string of suspiciously staged deaths among senior Nazi officials. Ordered off the case by the Gestapo but quietly told to keep going by his own superior, March teams up with an American journalist, Charlie Maguire, and starts following a trail toward Swiss bank accounts and a secret the regime has spent two decades burying. Robert Harris's alternate-history debut novel.

                • Cover of Lent
                  Lent

                  Jo Walton · standalone novel · 2019

                  similar byrenaissance and early modernidentitypolitical intrigueeuropehistorical fantasy

                  "Young Girolamo's life is a series of miracles. It's a miracle that he can see demons, plain as day, and that he can cast them out with the force of his will. It's a miracle that he's friends with Pico della Mirandola, the Count of Concordia. It's a miracle that when Girolamo visits the deathbed of Lorenzo "the Magnificent," the dying Medici is wreathed in celestial light, a surprise to everyone, Lorenzo included. It's a miracle that when Charles VIII of France invades northern Italy, Girolamo meets him in the field, and convinces him to not only spare Florence but also protect it. It's a miracle than whenever Girolamo preaches, crowds swoon. It's a miracle that, despite the Pope's determination to bring young Girolamo to heel, he's still on the loose...and, now, running Florence in all but name. That's only the beginning. Because Girolamo Savanarola is not who--or what--he thinks he is. He will discover the truth about himself at the most startling possible time. And this will be only the beginning of his many lives." - publisher

                • Cover of Bitter Greens
                  Bitter Greens

                  Kate Forsyth · standalone novel · 2012

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                  "After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition. Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does"--Amazon.com.

                • Cover of A Matter of Time
                  A Matter of Time

                  Glen Cook · standalone novel · 1985

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                  A Matter of Time is a novel by Glen Cook, combining elements of science fiction, crime fiction and spy thriller. In regard to the last, the novel in particular takes up and expands the theme of American prisoners of war being brainwashed in Communist China and their loyalties reversed – a theme made famous through the novel The Manchurian Candidate and film made on its basis.

                • Cover of This Perfect Day
                  This Perfect Day

                  Ira Levin · standalone novel · 1970

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                  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.