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 The Eclipse Trilogy

anchored on:science fictioncyberpunktotalitarianismnear futuredystopiarebellion and revolution+3 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 structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of The Shockwave Rider
                  The Shockwave Rider

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1975

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictioncyberpunksurveillancetotalitarianismbig city+2 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 The Handmaid's Tale
                  The Handmaid's Tale

                  series · 3 books · 1985

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictiondystopiarebellion and revolution+2 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 A Song Called Youth / Eclipse
                  A Song Called Youth / Eclipse

                  series · 3 books · 1985

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictioncyberpunkrebellion and revolutionsurveillancetotalitarianism+3 more

                  The Eclipse Trilogy is a series of three English language cyberpunk science fiction novels by John Shirley consisting of Eclipse (1985), Eclipse Penumbra (1988), and Eclipse Corona (1990).

                • Cover of The Children of Men
                  The Children of Men

                  P. D. James · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictionrebellion and revolutionour worlddystopia+1 more

                  "The human race has become infertile, and under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiatt, the Warden of England the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably, as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind." (pdjames.co.uk)

                • Cover of A Clockwork Orange
                  A Clockwork Orange

                  series · 4 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar bynear futuredarktotalitarianismscience fictionour worldbig citydystopiasurveillance

                  Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel is narrated by Alex, a teenage gang leader in a near-future Britain gripped by a youth subculture of extreme violence, recounting his crimes in Nadsat, an invented slang blending English with Russian-derived words. After his crimes catch up with him, Alex is made the subject of a controversial state program meant to forcibly reform his behavior, and the novel uses his ordeal to question whether imposed goodness is worth the loss of free will. It is a standalone novel.

                • Cover of Moxyland
                  Moxyland

                  Lauren Beukes · standalone novel · 2008

                  similar bynear futuredarktensecyberpunksurveillancetotalitarianismbig cityscience fiction+1 more

                  Moxyland is a cyberpunk dystopian novel written by South African author, Lauren Beukes. The book was published in 2008.

                • Cover of Stand on Zanzibar
                  Stand on Zanzibar

                  John Brunner · standalone novel · 1968

                  similar bynear futuredarkscience fictionsurveillanceour worldbig citydystopia+2 more

                  Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first in part published in New Worlds magazine in 1967 and in book form in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award.

                • Cover of Blade Runner Universe
                  Blade Runner Universe

                  series · 6 books · 1968

                  similar bynear futuredarkscience fictionbig citycyberpunk+3 more

                  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 Sprawl Trilogy
                  Sprawl Trilogy

                  series · 10 books · 1981

                  similar bynear futuretensedarkcyberpunkscience fictionbig city

                  The Sprawl Trilogy is William Gibson's foundational cyberpunk sequence: Neuromancer (1984), in which hacker Case is drawn into a high-stakes heist alongside an artificial intelligence and a damaged ex-soldier, followed by Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), which widen the same near-future world of corporate power and networked cyberspace to new characters. Johnny Mnemonic, an early short story set in the same fictional milieu, predates the novels and introduces the courier Molly Millions before her role in the trilogy. Together these works established much of cyberpunk's visual and thematic vocabulary.

                • Cover of The Circle (Eggers)
                  The Circle (Eggers)

                  series · 2 books · 2013

                  similar bynear futuredarktensesurveillancetotalitarianismbig cityscience fictiondystopia+1 more

                  Mae Holland lands a coveted job at the Circle, a Silicon Valley tech company whose relentless, cheerful push toward total transparency -- 'secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft' -- gradually reveals itself as something closer to soft totalitarianism. Dave Eggers's The Circle follows Mae's rise inside the company as she buys further and further into its ideology, at increasing cost to her own privacy and the people around her. The 2021 follow-up, The Every, picks up with Mae now running the merged tech giant and a new employee questioning it from the inside.

                • Cover of Shadrach in the Furnace
                  Shadrach in the Furnace

                  Robert Silverberg · standalone novel · 1976

                  similar bynear futuredarkscience fictiontotalitarianismour worlddystopia+4 more

                  Shadrach in the Furnace is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, first published as a serial in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine in the August, September, and October 1976 issues. It was subsequently published by Bobbs Merrill in 1976. The novel was nominated in 1976 for the Nebula Award, and in 1977 for the Hugo Award.

                • Cover of Make Room! Make Room!
                  Make Room! Make Room!

                  Harry Harrison · standalone novel · 1966

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictionour worldbig citydystopia

                  Make Room! Make Room! is a 1966 science fiction novel written by Harry Harrison exploring the consequences of both unchecked population growth on society and the hoarding of resources by a wealthy minority. It was originally serialized in Impulse magazine.

                • Cover of The Future
                  The Future

                  Naomi Alderman · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictiontotalitarianismour worlddystopia+1 more

                  The Future is a 2023 science fiction novel by English writer Naomi Alderman, published by Simon & Schuster. The novel is set in a future dystopia where the world has been altered by environmental crisis and a powerful technocracy.

                • Cover of This Perfect Day
                  This Perfect Day

                  Ira Levin · standalone novel · 1970

                  similar bydarktensetotalitarianismscience fictionrebellion and revolutionour worlddystopia+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 bydarktensescience fictionrebellion and revolutiontotalitarianismour worlddystopiapolitical intrigue

                  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 Shade's Children milieu
                  Shade's Children milieu

                  series · 2 books · 1997

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictionrebellion and revolutiondystopia+1 more

                  Shade's Children is set on an Earth where all adults vanished overnight fourteen years earlier, leaving children to be harvested at puberty by the machines that now run the world, unless they escape into hiding with Shade, a mysterious AI-like protector. Garth Nix's 1997 novel is a single, self-contained book rather than a series, though its bleak post-apocalyptic premise has drawn comparisons to his other work.

                • Cover of Resurrection, Inc.
                  Resurrection, Inc.

                  Kevin J. Anderson · standalone novel · 1988

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictionour worldbig citycyberpunkdystopia

                  It is the future--and the dead walk the streets, resurrected by technology to become servants to the living. Resurrection, Inc. found a profitable way to do it: a microprocessor brain, a synthetic heart, artificial blood--and anyone with money could buy a Servant with no mind of its own, trained to obey any command. But for every Servant created a living worker was out of a job, and suddenly the profits of Resurrection, Inc. became everyone else's loss. Some take to rioting in the streets, their rampages ruthlessly ended by heavily armed Enforcers, eager for the kill. Others join the ever-growing cult of Neo-Satanism, seeking Heaven in the depths of Hell. Only one man tries to save the world. His name is Danal, and he is the last hope of the living. He is dead, but he remembers everything.

                • Cover of Space Merchants
                  Space Merchants

                  series · 2 books · 1953

                  completed

                  similar bynear futuredarkscience fictiondystopia+3 more

                  The Space Merchants (1953) is a satirical science fiction novel by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth that follows an advertising executive navigating a future where aggressive consumer capitalism has swallowed politics and daily life. The authors reunited three decades later for a direct sequel, The Merchants' War (1984), returning to the same satirical world. Together the two books form a compact bookend pair rather than an ongoing series.

                • Cover of Shadow Children
                  Shadow Children

                  series · 7 books · 1998

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictiondystopia+2 more

                  Shadow Children is a series of seven books by Margaret Peterson Haddix about a dystopian country which suffers food shortages due to a drought and the effects of the government's totalitarian attempts to control resources as a way to solidify its power. The Population Police enforce the government's Population Law, killing or imprisoning "shadow children," any child born after their first two siblings. In some cases, a parent may choose to forge a child's identification card so a shadow child can live a normal life.

                • Cover of One
                  One

                  David Karp · standalone novel · 1953

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictionsurveillanceour worlddystopia

                  One is a dystopian novel by David Karp first published in 1953. It was also published under the title, Escape to Nowhere.

                • Cover of The Windup Universe
                  The Windup Universe

                  series · 3 books · 2005

                  similar bynear futuredarkscience fictionour worlddystopia+2 more

                • Cover of The World Jones Made
                  The World Jones Made

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1956

                  similar bynear futuredarktensescience fictiondystopiapolitical intrigue+2 more

                  The World Jones Made is a 1956 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, examining notions of precognition, humanity, and politics. It was first published by Ace Books as one half of Ace Double D-150, bound dos-à-dos with Agent of the Unknown by Margaret St. Clair.The story takes place after a nuclear war in which society is dominated by relativism, which rejects absolute truths and preaches tolerance as the highest principle. The mutant Floyd Jones, who can see into the future, plans to overthrow the system and colonise space. The story ends with the defeat of Jones, whose plans fail despite his ability to see the future due to the immutability of fate.

                • Cover of Islands in the Net
                  Islands in the Net

                  Bruce Sterling · standalone novel · 1988

                  similar bynear futuretensescience fictionsurveillanceour worldcyberpunkpolitical intrigue+1 more

                  Islands in the Net is a 1988 science fiction novel by American writer Bruce Sterling. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1989, and was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus Awards that same year. It offers a view of an early 21st century world, apparently peaceful, with delocalised, networking corporations. The protagonist, swept up in events beyond her control, finds herself in places that are off the net, from a datahaven in Grenada, to a Singapore under terrorist attack, to the poorest and most disaster-struck parts of Africa.

                • Cover of Hazards of Time Travel
                  Hazards of Time Travel

                  Joyce Carol Oates · standalone novel · 2018

                  similar bynear futuredarktensetotalitarianismscience fictionsurveillancedystopia+1 more

                  Hazards of Time Travel is a 2018 dystopian, social science fiction novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It tells the story of Adriane Strohl, a 17-year-old living in a dystopian America in 2039. After her incendiary graduation speech, she is sent back to re-education in the year 1959. Oates began writing it in 2011.