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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 The Timerman

anchored on:science fictionalternate historynorth america

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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 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 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 Saint Leibowitz
                  Saint Leibowitz

                  series · 6 books · 1955

                  completed

                  similar byscience fictionnorth america+1 more

                  Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), assembled from three novellas he had published earlier in the decade, follows the monks of a Catholic monastery in the post-nuclear American Southwest as they preserve fragments of scientific knowledge across centuries, watching civilization slowly rebuild itself and edge back toward the mistakes that destroyed it. Miller's posthumous sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, completed by Terry Bisson from his notes after his death and published in 1997, returns to the same abbey and its world decades later. Together the two novels form a sparse, decades-spanning series about memory, faith, and the cycles of civilization.

                • Cover of Time and Again
                  Time and Again

                  series · 2 books · 1970

                  completed

                  similar bynorth americascience fiction+1 more

                  Time and Again (1970) follows Si Morley, a commercial artist recruited into a secret government project that sends him back to Manhattan in 1882, where he falls for a woman named Julia while weighing whether he can, or should, alter the past; Jack Finney illustrates the story with period photographs and engravings. The sequel, From Time to Time (1995), continues Si's story with a further trip into the past.

                • Cover of Bring the Jubilee
                  Bring the Jubilee

                  Ward Moore · standalone novel · 1953

                  similar byreflectivewarnorth americascience fictionalternate history

                  From the flaps of the Farrar, Straus and Young first edition: ""Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921." So Hodge Backmaker begins his story of the harsh and curious world he lived in, a world in which the South won the Civil War and the all-powerful Confederacy dominated the poor and backward North; a North that had neither a transcontinental railroad, and where television was undreamed of. Like most Northerners, Hodge was poor - but he had ambition. A printer's handyman in 1938, he had since become an eminent historian. Hodge's special interest was the American past, when the States had been united and had seemed to be on the brink of prosperity and technical progress. And then he was offered an opportunity no historian could resist - he could go back in time. Hodge chsoe to return to a certain field near Gettysburg on a day in July, 1863... Bring the Jubilee is a novel of curious events, of adventures and reflection, of passions and comment. It at time Hodge's world, its horse-carriages and gas-lights, minibles and tinugraphs and the Great Emperors' War of 1914 faintly resembles our own, it is perhaps, because that world might well become a reality: on the battlefield of Gettysburg there is a small hill called Little Round Top. One July morning in 1863 the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory in a battle which - in the view of many historians - was the turning point of the Civil War."

                • Cover of Beyond This Horizon
                  Beyond This Horizon

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1948

                  similar byreflectivenorth americascience fiction+1 more

                  From the front flap of a 2001 Baen reprint: "Utopia has been achieved. For centuries, disease, hunger, poverty, and war have been things found only in the history tapes. And applied genetics has given men and women the bodies of athletes and a lifespan of over a century. They should all have been very happy... But Hamilton Felix is bored. And he is the culmination of a star line, each of his last thirty ancestors chosen for superior genes. Hamilton is, as far as genetics can produce one, the ultimate man. And this ultimate man can see no reason why the human race should survive, and has no intention of continuing the pointless comedy. However, Hamilton's life is about to become less boring. A secret cabal of revolutionaries who find utopia not just boring, but desperately in need of leaders who know just What Needs to be Done, are planning to revolt and put themselves in charge. Knowing of Hamilton's disenchantment with the modern world, they have recruited him to join their Glorious Revolution. Big mistake! The revolutionaries are about to find out that recruiting a superman was definitely not a good idea..."

                • Cover of Dune
                  Dune

                  series · 20 books · 1963

                  part of Dune Universe

                  similar bypolitical intriguescience fiction+1 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 Culture
                  Culture

                  series · 15 books · 1987

                  completed

                  part of The Culture

                  similar byscience fiction+3 more

                  The Culture series is a science fiction series written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks and released from 1987 until 2012. The stories centre on The Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main themes of the series are the dilemmas that an idealistic, more-advanced civilization faces in dealing with smaller, less-advanced civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds barbaric. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of the Culture in its plans to civilize the galaxy. Each novel is a self-contained story with new characters, although reference is occasionally made to the events of previous novels.

                • Cover of Roma Eterna
                  Roma Eterna

                  series · 11 books · 1989

                  similar byalternate history+3 more

                  Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna imagines an alternate history in which the Roman Empire never fell and endures into the present day, tracing its long, uneven survival through a sequence of pivotal moments across two millennia. Rather than one continuous plot, the book is a fix-up of ten linked stories, most first published in Asimov's Science Fiction over a fourteen-year span, each set in a different era of this unbroken Rome. It reads as the chronicle of a civilization rather than a story following a single cast of characters.

                • Cover of The Smithsonian Institution
                  The Smithsonian Institution

                  Gore Vidal · standalone novel · 1998

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                  The Smithsonian Institution is an alternate history novel by Gore Vidal, first published in 1998.

                • Cover of Imperial Earth
                  Imperial Earth

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1975

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                  Imperial Earth is a science fiction novel by British writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1975 by Gollancz Books. The plot follows the protagonist, Duncan Makenzie, on a trip to Earth from his home on Titan, in large part as a diplomatic visit to the U.S. for its quincentennial in 2276, but also to have a clone of himself produced. The book was published in time for the U.S. bicentennial in 1976.

                • Cover of Orange County
                  Orange County

                  series · 3 books · 1984

                  similar bynorth americascience fiction+1 more

                  The Three Californias Trilogy is a series by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson that depicts three possible futures of Orange County, California. The novels that make up the trilogy are, "The Wild Shore", 'The Gold Coast", and "Pacific Edge". Each novel describes the life of young people in one of the three near-future worlds; each novel begins with an exposition that tells the reader about the fictional world.

                • Cover of The Shape of Things to Come
                  The Shape of Things to Come

                  H. G. Wells · standalone novel · 1933

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                  The Shape of Things to Come is a science fiction novel written by the British writer H. G. Wells published in 1933. It takes the form of a future history that ends in 2106.

                • Cover of Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
                  Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

                  Robert Charles Wilson · standalone novel · 2009

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                  Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America is a dystopian speculative fiction novel written by Robert Charles Wilson, and an expansion of Wilson's 2006 novella Julian: A Christmas Story.

                • Cover of For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs
                  For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 2004

                  similar bypolitical intriguenorth americascience fiction+1 more

                  For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was written in 1938 and published for the first time in 2003. Heinlein admirer and science fiction author Spider Robinson titled his introductory essay "RAH DNA", as he believes this first, unpublished novel formed the DNA of Heinlein's later works.

                • Cover of Stranger in a Strange Land
                  Stranger in a Strange Land

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1961

                  similar byreflectivenorth americascience fiction

                  Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by the American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, and explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.

                • Cover of Pelbar Cycle
                  Pelbar Cycle

                  series · 7 books · 1981

                  completed

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                • Cover of New York 2140
                  New York 2140

                  Kim Stanley Robinson · standalone novel · 2017

                  similar byreflectivepolitical intriguenorth americascience fiction

                  New York 2140 is a 2017 climate fiction novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The novel is set in a New York City that has been flooded and altered by rising water.

                • Cover of Library of America P. K. Dick Collection
                  Library of America P. K. Dick Collection

                  series · 9 books · 1962

                  completed

                  similar byscience fiction+1 more

                • Cover of Lincoln's Dreams
                  Lincoln's Dreams

                  Connie Willis · standalone novel · 1987

                  similar byreflectivenorth americascience fiction+1 more

                  Lincoln's Dreams is a 1987 novel by American author Connie Willis about a historical researcher studying the U.S. Civil War who meets a young woman who seems to be dreaming General Lee's dreams. The book is about parapsychology, metaphysical speculations, death, and love.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games
                  The Hunger Games

                  series · 3 books · 2008

                  part of The Hunger Games Universe

                  similar bynorth americascience fiction+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 Yukon Confederacy
                  Yukon Confederacy

                  series · 2 books · 2004

                  similar bywarscience fictionalternate history+3 more

                • Cover of Atlas Shrugged
                  Atlas Shrugged

                  Ayn Rand · standalone novel · 1957

                  similar bypolitical intriguenorth americascience fiction+1 more

                  Atlas Shrugged is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand. It is her longest novel, the fourth and final one published during her lifetime, and the one she considered her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing. She described the theme of Atlas Shrugged as "the role of man's mind in existence" and it includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance. The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism, including reason, property rights, individualism, rational egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism and depicts what Rand saw as the evil of altruism and governmental coercion. Of Rand's works of fiction, it contains her most extensive statement of her philosophical system.

                • Cover of The Hunger Games Universe
                  The Hunger Games Universe

                  universe · 5 books · 2008

                  Start hereThe Hunger Games · Start here

                  similar bynorth americascience fiction+2 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 Teixcalaan
                  Teixcalaan

                  series · 2 books · 2019

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                  Arkady Martine's space opera duology follows Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the small, independent Lsel Station, as she arrives in the vast Teixcalaanli Empire to investigate her predecessor's death and finds herself caught up in the empire's own succession crisis. A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace pair court intrigue with Mahit's conflicted, outsider fascination with an empire she can't help admiring.

                • Cover of The Guns of the South
                  The Guns of the South

                  Harry Turtledove · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bywarnorth americascience fictionalternate history+1 more

                  The Guns of the South is an alternate history science fiction novel set during the American Civil War by Harry Turtledove. It was released in the United States on September 22, 1992.