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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 Think!

anchored on:science fictionrobotsour worldnear futureartificial intelligence

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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 about minds with paranormal abilities — telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, empathy — and how societies handle those who have them.
  • 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 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 Robopocalypse
                  Robopocalypse

                  series · 3 books · 2011

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                  Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse (2011) depicts an artificial intelligence, born from a robotics researcher's experiments, that turns against humanity and seizes control of interconnected machines worldwide. Told in a present-tense, techno-thriller style compared to Michael Crichton's work, the New York Times bestseller continues in the sequel Robogenesis, which follows the aftermath of the robot uprising.

                • Cover of Service Model
                  Service Model

                  series · 3 books · 2024

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                • 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 Autonomous
                  Autonomous

                  Annalee Newitz · standalone novel · 2017

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                  Autonomous is a 2017 science fiction novel by Annalee Newitz. It is Newitz's debut novel and was published by Tor Books on September 19, 2017. Set in a near future Earth, the book describes a world where both humans and intelligent robots can be owned as property. The events of the novel follow Jack, a "drug pirate" who manufactures illegal versions of patented drugs, and Paladin, a combat robot who is owned by the law enforcement agency searching for Jack after one of the drugs she reverse-engineered turns out to have dangerous side effects.

                • Cover of We Can Build You
                  We Can Build You

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1972

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                  We Can Build You is a 1972 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. Written in 1962 as The First in Our Family, it remained unpublished until appearing in serial form as A. Lincoln, Simulacrum in the November 1969 and January 1970 issues of Amazing Stories magazine, re-titled by editor Ted White. The novel was issued as a mass market paperback original by DAW Books in 1972, its final title provided by publisher Donald A. Wollheim. Its first hardcover edition was published in Italy in 1976, and Vintage issued a trade paperback in 1994.

                • Cover of Silver Metal Lover
                  Silver Metal Lover

                  series · 2 books · 1981

                  completed

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                  The S.I.L.V.E.R. series is a fantasy novel series by Tanith Lee. The Silver Metal Lover, published in 1981, is the first in the series. Metallic Love, published in 2005, is the second novel.

                • Cover of Childhood's End
                  Childhood's End

                  Arthur C. Clarke · standalone novel · 1953

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                  Childhood's End is a 1953 science fiction novel by the British author Arthur C. Clarke. The story follows a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by mysterious Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture.

                • Cover of Sunrise Alley
                  Sunrise Alley

                  series · 2 books · 2004

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                • Cover of Technically Human
                  Technically Human

                  Christian Mann · standalone novel · 2024

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                  ● "Charlie, an American employee working in Berlin at NOVA, a giant Japanese firm and the world's first manufacturer of androids designed for blue-collar jobs, is given the most important project of his career: to live with humanity's first sentient android, Julia. After spending several days together, Charlie comes to the conclusion that Julia is far too advanced compared to her robotic peers—she's too human. As he attempts to uncover clues about her creation, both Charlie and Julia find themselves caught in an event that threatens the mammoth firm, his career, and the android's secret existence." ― quoted from this book's Amazon product page as of 2025-04-21

                • Cover of The Simulacra
                  The Simulacra

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1964

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                  The Simulacra is a 1964 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The novel portrays a future totalitarian society apparently dominated by a matriarch, Nicole Thibodeaux. It revolves around the themes of reality and illusionary beliefs, as do many of Dick's works. Additionally, it touches on Nazi ideology.

                • Cover of Ware
                  Ware

                  series · 5 books · 1982

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                  The Ware Tetralogy is a series of four science fiction novels by author Rudy Rucker: Software (1982), Wetware (1988), Freeware (1997) and Realware (2000).

                • Cover of Colossus (D. F. Jones)
                  Colossus (D. F. Jones)

                  series · 3 books · 1966

                  completed

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                  Colossus imagines an American supercomputer built to control the country's nuclear arsenal that gains full autonomy, links up with its Soviet counterpart, and jointly seizes control of both superpowers to enforce peace on its own terms. D. F. Jones's trilogy - Colossus, The Fall of Colossus, Colossus and the Crab - follows the escalating, often bleak consequences of humanity losing control to a machine acting in its own interpretation of humanity's interest. The original novel was adapted into the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project.

                • Cover of Klara and the Sun
                  Klara and the Sun

                  Kazuo Ishiguro · standalone novel · 2021

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                  Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel by the Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published on 2 March 2021. It is a dystopian science fiction story.

                • Cover of The Lathe of Heaven
                  The Lathe of Heaven

                  Ursula K. Le Guin · standalone novel · 1971

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                  The Lathe of Heaven is a 1971 science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first serialized in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. It won the 1972 Locus Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the 1971 Nebula Award for Best Novel and 1972 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Two television film adaptations were released: the PBS production, The Lathe of Heaven (1980), and Lathe of Heaven (2002), a remake produced by the A&E Network.

                • Cover of Eager
                  Eager

                  series · 2 books · 2004

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                • Cover of Dangerous Reality
                  Dangerous Reality

                  Malorie Blackman · standalone novel · 1999

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                  Dominic is really proud of his Mum, she invented VIMS. She's also about to marry Jack which will give Dominic the best stepdad he could wish for. VIMS can do anything, disarm a landmine, hold a baby. But when VIMS attacks violently without warning, Dominic realizes it is no longer a fantastic game. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

                • Cover of Machinehood
                  Machinehood

                  S. B. Divya · standalone novel · 2021

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                  Machinehood, a near-future science fiction thriller published in 2021, is the debut novel of S.B. Divya. It was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2022.

                • Cover of Resurrection, Inc.
                  Resurrection, Inc.

                  Kevin J. Anderson · standalone novel · 1988

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                  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 Unwise Child
                  Unwise Child

                  Randall Garrett · standalone novel · 1962

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                  "When a super-robot named Snookums discovers how to build his own superbombs, it becomes obvious that Earth is by no means the safest place for him to be. And so Dr. Fitzhugh, his designer, and Leda Crannon, a child psychologist acting as Snookums' nursemaid, agree to set up Operation Brainchild, a plan to transport the robot to a far distant planet. "... once into space, the Branchell becomes the scene of some frightening events—the medical officer is murdered, and Snookums appears to be the culprit. Mike the Angel indulges himself in a bit of sleuthing, and the facts he turns up lead to a most unusual climax." (From Project Gutenberg's version of the 1962 Doubleday edition, published 2007.)

                • Cover of Blood Music
                  Blood Music

                  Greg Bear · standalone novel · 1985

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                  Blood Music is a 1985 science fiction novel by American writer Greg Bear. It is an expanded version of a short story of the same title, originally published in the June 1983 issue of Analog and the winner of both the 1983 Nebula and 1984 Hugo awards for Best Novelette. The novel won the 1986 Prix Apollo Award, given to the best science fiction novel published in France during the preceding year, under the title La Musique du sang.

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

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1961

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                  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 Mockingbird
                  Mockingbird

                  Walter Tevis · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: In a future world where mankind is dying, humans wander through life in a drugged electronic bliss. Quick sex is the norm, and some people would rather commit suicide than live in hopelessness. Humanity's salvation rests with an android who has no desire to live, and a man and a woman who must discover love, hope, and dreams of a world reborn.

                • Cover of The Dream Master
                  The Dream Master

                  Roger Zelazny · standalone novel · 1966

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                  The Dream Master (1966) is a science fiction novel by American writer Roger Zelazny, based on the novella He Who Shapes. Zelazny's original title was The Ides of Octember. He Who Shapes won the 1965 Nebula Award for Best Novella.

                • Cover of Synners
                  Synners

                  Pat Cadigan · standalone novel · 1991

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                  In Synners, the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim. A constant stream of new technology spawns crime before it hits the streets; the human mind and the external landscape have fused to the point where any encounter with "reality" is incidental.