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Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

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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 Total Eclipse

anchored on:our world

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 Psy-Changelings
                  Psy-Changelings

                  series · 38 books · 2006

                  similar byparanormal romanceour world+4 more

                  Nalini Singh's long-running paranormal romance series imagines a future where the emotion-suppressing Psy, animal-shifting Changelings, and ordinary humans share an uneasy world. It opens with Slave to Sensation, pairing a Psy telepath and a Changeling leopard alpha as a string of murders pushes their two peoples toward war, while a slower arc across the books tracks the Psy's emotional-control system fraying. The series has grown across two decades into more than twenty novels plus spin-off novellas.

                • Cover of Phoenix Pack
                  Phoenix Pack

                  series · 8 books · 2013

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+5 more

                • Cover of Alpha and Omega
                  Alpha and Omega

                  series · 15 books · 2007

                  part of Mercy Thompson

                  similar bycontemporarynorth america+2 more

                  Alpha and Omega follows Anna Latham, a rare and instinctively calming "Omega" werewolf rescued from an abusive pack, and Charles Cornick, the enforcer who polices North America's werewolves on his father's behalf, as their partnership becomes both a working relationship and a slow-building romance. Patricia Briggs runs the series alongside her Mercy Thompson books in the same shared world — the opening novella overlaps the events of Mercy's first book, Moon Called — before Cry Wolf and its sequels branch into their own cases.

                • Cover of Key Trilogy
                  Key Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 2003

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+5 more

                  Nora Roberts's Key Trilogy follows three modern women recruited to recover a set of lost keys that can free the trapped souls of three demigoddesses, opening with Key of Light. Each book pairs one woman's quest with a developing romance, while the larger mystery of the keys and the ancient bargain behind them threads through all three volumes. The series sits within Roberts's broader body of contemporary paranormal-romance trilogies.

                • Cover of The Lair of the Wolven
                  The Lair of the Wolven

                  series · 3 books · 2021

                  part of Black Dagger

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+5 more

                • Cover of The Dark Artifices
                  The Dark Artifices

                  series · 4 books · 2016

                  part of The Mortal Instruments

                  similar byfound familycontemporaryemotionalnorth america+2 more

                  The Dark Artifices is a trilogy written by Cassandra Clare. The series is chronologically the fourth series in The Shadowhunter Chronicles and a sequel to The Mortal Instruments. It is set in Los Angeles. The series consists of three books: Lady Midnight, Lord of Shadows and Queen of Air and Darkness, in that particular order. Centered around the protagonist, Emma Carstairs, the series follows her journey as a Shadowhunter at the Los Angeles Institute, and her life with her best-friend and parabatai, Julian Blackthorn, and his family. The series is about a sacred bond of "parabatai", two bonded Shadowhunters, and it is more valuable than any bond in this world. This bond makes the two more powerful and strong, but there is only one drawback - it is forbidden to fall in love with your parabatai. It so happens that Emma and Julian, two parabatai, have fallen in love. The Dark Artifices is a trilogy about their struggle against their enemies and how the two protagonists deal with their forbidden love and the resulting consequences. The series is told from the point-of-view of the various different characters in the story.

                • Cover of Forsaken Chronicles
                  Forsaken Chronicles

                  series · 3 books · 2018

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+1 more

                • Cover of Dark-Hunter
                  Dark-Hunter

                  series · 65 books · 2000

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+3 more

                  Dark-Hunter is a term from a paranormal romance and fantasy series by Sherrilyn Kenyon. Kenyon began writing the series in 1986 in horror, fantasy and science fiction magazines.

                • Cover of Shifting Circle
                  Shifting Circle

                  series · 3 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldemotionalshapeshifters+4 more

                • Cover of Anita Blake
                  Anita Blake

                  series · 42 books · 1993

                  similar bycontemporarytensenorth america+1 more

                  Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a series of urban fantasy novels, short stories, and comic books by Laurell K. Hamilton. The books have sold more than six million copies; many have made The New York Times Best Seller list.

                • Cover of Shifters / Werecats
                  Shifters / Werecats

                  series · 7 books · 2007

                  similar bycontemporarytenseour worldshapeshifters+2 more

                • Cover of Seven
                  Seven

                  series · 10 books · 2013

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+1 more

                • Cover of Shifters Unbound
                  Shifters Unbound

                  series · 29 books · 2010

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour worldshapeshifters+3 more

                • Cover of Blood Destiny (Helen Harper)
                  Blood Destiny (Helen Harper)

                  series · 5 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporaryour world+3 more

                • Cover of Talon Pack
                  Talon Pack

                  series · 11 books · 2015

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+1 more

                • Cover of Westwood Pack
                  Westwood Pack

                  series · 12 books · 2021

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world

                • Cover of Alpha Pack
                  Alpha Pack

                  series · 9 books · 2011

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+3 more

                • Cover of Shadow (Christine Feehan)
                  Shadow (Christine Feehan)

                  series · 8 books · 2016

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporary+5 more

                  Christine Feehan's Shadow Riders series follows the Ferraro siblings, a family bound by inherited psychic gifts and old debts to the Chicago underworld, as each finds a partner able to match their abilities across eight books, Shadow Rider through Shadow Dance. It runs as its own paranormal romantic-suspense line, separate from Feehan's longer-running Carpathian series.

                • PP
                  Pack / Pride Universe

                  series · 20 books · 2006

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryshapeshifters+3 more

                  Shelly Laurenston's Pride novels, beginning with The Mane Event, are paranormal romances set among shapeshifter clans — lions, hyenas, wolves, and more — who mix pack politics with broad comedy and romantic pairings across a sprawling ensemble cast. The connected Pack books extend the same shared world with a different cluster of characters.

                • Cover of Carpathian
                  Carpathian

                  series · 48 books · 1999

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryemotionalour world

                  Carpathian is Christine Feehan's long-running paranormal romance series about an ancient, near-immortal species who slowly lose color and feeling until they find a lifemate who restores both. Starting with Dark Prince in 1999, each book pairs a different Carpathian hunter with a human or gifted heroine, moving between the Carpathian Mountains and modern settings worldwide as the couple confronts vampires and other supernatural threats. It has grown to dozens of novels and novellas and is still being added to.

                • Cover of Breeds
                  Breeds

                  series · 35 books · 2003

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryemotionalour worldshapeshifters+1 more

                • FT
                  Fixed / The Others

                  series · 23 books · 2003

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+3 more

                • Cover of River Pack Wolves
                  River Pack Wolves

                  series · 3 books · 2015

                  similar byparanormal romancecontemporaryour world+1 more

                • Cover of Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)
                  Otherworld (Kelley Armstrong)

                  series · 100 books · 1996

                  similar bycontemporaryour worldnorth america+2 more

                  Women of the Otherworld is Kelley Armstrong's long-running urban fantasy series about werewolves, witches, sorcerers, and other supernatural beings trying to pass as ordinary people in the contemporary world, told across thirteen novels plus assorted novellas published between 2001 and 2012. Each book tends to follow a different member of this hidden community while slowly building a shared, continuing world.