More like Undermountain
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- Birthgrave
series3 books1975
completed
Tanith Lee's Birthgrave trilogy (The Birthgrave, Vazkor Son of Vazkor, Quest for the White Witch, 1975-1978) opens with an amnesiac woman waking inside a volcano with no memory of who she is, and follows her journey through a brutal, quasi-medieval world in search of her identity, wielding strange powers she doesn't understand along the way. She eventually learns she is one of the last of the Old Ones, an ancient, nearly extinct people, and must reckon with the harm her own vanished civilization once did.
- Barsoom
series53 books1917
similar byscience fiction
Barsoom is a fictional representation of the planet Mars created by American pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs. The first Barsoom tale was serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in pulp magazine The All-Story from February to July 1912 and published compiled as a novel as A Princess of Mars in 1917. It features John Carter, a late-19th-century American Confederate veteran who is mysteriously transported from Earth to the dying world of Mars where he meets and romances the beautiful Martian princess Dejah Thoris. Ten sequels followed over the next three decades, further extending his vision of Barsoom and adding other characters.
- Incarceron
series2 books2007
similar by+1 more
Incarceron follows two teenagers on opposite sides of an impossible prison: Finn, trapped inside the vast penal structure of Incarceron with no memory of how he got there, and Claudia, the warden's daughter living in a rigidly controlled world outside who comes to suspect Incarceron is more than a building. Catherine Fisher's 2007 novel blends fantasy and science fiction as the two search for a way to breach the boundary between them. The 2008 sequel, Sapphique, continues both characters' stories.
- Dream Cycle
series26 books1919
The Dream Cycle is a series of short stories and novellas by author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). Written between 1918 and 1932, they are about the "Dreamlands", a vast alternate dimension that can only be entered via dreams. The Dreamlands are described as lying deeper than space, matter and time, and are a "limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity".
- The Bone World Trilogy
series3 books2007
similar byscience fiction+1 more
The Bone World Trilogy is a trilogy for young adults by Irish author Peadar Ó Guilín. The series has elements of science fiction and fantasy.
- Cavor
series2 books1901
similar byscience fictionunderground & caves
H. G. Wells's 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon is narrated by the businessman Bedford, who joins the reclusive scientist Cavor after Cavor invents cavorite, a gravity-blocking substance that carries the two men to the Moon. There they discover a vast underground civilization of insect-like Selenites, and the expedition that began as a hunt for lunar minerals turns into an encounter with an alien society. It is a standalone novel; later editions crediting Stephen Baxter add an introduction or afterword rather than a continuing story.
- Kairos
series11 books1962
completed
similar byscience fiction
The Time Quintet is a science fantasy series of five young adult novels written by American author Madeleine L'Engle and made up of A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Many Waters (1986), and An Acceptable Time (1989).
- Riverworld
series37 books1965
similar byscience fiction
The Riverworld series consists of five science fiction novels (1971–1983) by American author Philip José Farmer (1918–2009). The Riverworld is an artificial, or heavily terraformed, planet where all humans who ever lived throughout history have been resurrected. The novels explore interactions of resurrected individuals from many different cultures and time periods. The underlying theme is quasi-religious. The motivations and ethics of the unknown intelligences that created the Riverworld and its inhabitants are explored.
- The Night Land
series5 books1912
The Night Land is William Hope Hodgson's 1912 novel, set in an unimaginably distant future after the sun has died, where the last of humanity shelters inside a colossal pyramid called the Last Redoubt against unseen things that hunt in the surrounding dark. Framed as a seventeenth-century narrator's vision of that future, the story follows his far-future self on a journey out into the night to find a woman he believes is his lost love reincarnated. James Stoddard later produced The Night Land, A Story Retold (2011), a modernized retelling that adds conventional dialogue and character names to make Hodgson's dense, archaic prose more approachable.
- Flatland
series2 books1884
similar byscience fiction
Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions imagines a two-dimensional world of geometric beings, using its narrator's brush with higher dimensions as both a mathematical thought experiment and a satire of Victorian social rank. Ian Stewart's 2001 Flatterland follows a descendant of that narrator on a tour of stranger geometries, from curved and multidimensional space to relativity, as a knowing homage to Abbott's original. Together they pair a Victorian mathematical classic with its modern sequel.
- Dungeon Robotics
series17 books2019
- His Dark Materials Universe
universe13 books1995
Start hereHis Dark Materials · Start here
In a world like ours and unlike it, every human soul walks outside the body in the shape of an animal — a daemon, who speaks, who cannot be lied to, and who settles into one fixed form only when childhood ends. This is the country of His Dark Materials: a company of parallel worlds across which an invisible dust of consciousness drifts down upon the waking mind; where a Church that calls itself the Magisterium would sooner sever a child's soul than let that Dust be understood; and where a golden instrument, the alethiometer, answers true questions for anyone with the patience to read it. Philip Pullman's design stands in two trilogies and a scatter of shorter tales. His Dark Materials — Northern Lights (published in America as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass — carries Lyra Belacqua from the rooftops of a shadow Oxford across the borders between worlds. The Book of Dust returns to that same territory: La Belle Sauvage looks back to Lyra as an infant carried through a great flood, while The Secret Commonwealth follows her grown and less certain into adulthood, with a concluding volume closing the arc. Around them sit slim companion books — Lyra's Oxford, Once Upon a Time in the North, Serpentine — and Nicholas Wright's stage adaptation, made with Pullman's blessing. The register is grave and luminous at once, its title lifted from Milton and its quarrel drawn from Blake: a story that takes the side of curiosity, love, and the physical world against any authority that would forbid them. It reads as adventure — armoured bears, aeronauts, knife-cut windows between skies — yet reasons like philosophy. Begin with Northern Lights / The Golden Compass and read the first trilogy through before turning to The Book of Dust, which deepens everything the first has already made you feel.
- Stephen King multiverse
universe46 books1967
Start hereThe Gunslinger · Start here
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. So begins the long walk of Roland Deschain, last of an order of knight-errant pistoleers, across a land that has "moved on" — where the compass points drift, dead machines rot toward sentience, and the weave of what's real wears thin. His quest is the Dark Tower itself: a spire standing at the hub of every world that exists, the linchpin that holds all of them back from ruin. Roland's road runs eight volumes, from The Gunslinger through the closing Dark Tower, with the later, interleaved tale The Wind Through the Keyhole folding a story-within-a-story back into his youth. Along the way he draws a ka-tet — a fellowship bound by fate, not choosing — through doorways between worlds: a heroin-shackled New Yorker, a woman of two minds, a boy who dies twice. The Tower is also the secret axle around which the wider shelf of King's work turns; threads from The Stand, 'Salem's Lot and beyond wind quietly toward it. Expect a mongrel of Western, high fantasy, horror and decayed science fiction, told in a dusty, incantatory dialect all its own — ka, thankee-sai, the world that has moved on. This is King at his most mythic and most personal, a decades-spanning circle that rewards a patient reader. Begin at the beginning: The Gunslinger, then walk forward in publication order. There are other worlds than these — but this door opens first.
- His Dark Materials
series8 books1995
part of His Dark Materials Universe
similar by+1 more
His Dark Materials is a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman consisting of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). It follows the coming of age of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series of parallel universes. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Carnegie Medal in 1995 for Northern Lights and the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year for The Amber Spyglass. In 2003, the trilogy was ranked third on the BBC's The Big Read poll.
- Walter Goodwin
series3 books1918
completed
similar by+2 more
The Moon Pool (1919) and The Metal Monster (1920) are connected fantasy-adventure novels by A. Merritt, both narrated by the same character, Dr. Walter Goodwin, as he encounters hidden ancient civilizations and forces beyond ordinary science. The Moon Pool began as two related stories serialized in All-Story Weekly before being combined into a novel, and its success led Merritt to send Goodwin into a second, similarly strange discovery in The Metal Monster the following year. The two books follow Goodwin from one uncanny expedition to the next rather than forming a tightly plotted continuing saga.
- The Stars My Destination
Alfred Besterstandalone novel1956
similar byscience fiction+1 more
When a passing spaceship refuses to rescue the lone survivor from the drifting wreck of another ship, he dedicates his life to discovering who made that decision and exacting his revenge, in the process altering human history and his own character.
