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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 VALIS

anchored on:science fictionfaith and religionnorth americalate 20th centurychallengingidentity+3 more

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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 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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 VALIS
                  VALIS

                  series · 4 books · 1981

                  completed

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                  The VALIS trilogy is a set of science fiction/philosophical novels by author Philip K. Dick which include VALIS (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). Dick's first novel about the VALIS concept originally titled "VALISystem A", was published as Radio Free Albemuth after Dick's death in 1985.

                • Cover of Dhalgren
                  Dhalgren

                  Samuel R. Delany · standalone novel · 1975

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                  Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe. It is number 33 on the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction list.

                • 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 Eye in the Sky
                  Eye in the Sky

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1957

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                  Eight visitors touring a particle-accelerator facility are caught in a catastrophic malfunction, a collapsing platform, a burst of radiation, that leaves them all unconscious. When protagonist Jack Hamilton, an engineer recently fired over Red Scare-era suspicions about his wife's politics, comes to, the world around him is subtly, then not so subtly, wrong: physics bends to fit one fellow victim's religious convictions, then to another's paranoid fears, as the group cycles through what turn out to be shared hallucinations built from each other's private belief systems. Philip K. Dick's early novel about how differently people actually see the same world.

                • Cover of Time Out of Joint
                  Time Out of Joint

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1959

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                  Time Out of Joint is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in novel form in the United States in 1959. An abridged version was also serialised in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds Science Fiction in several installments from December 1959 to February 1960.

                • Cover of Radio Free Albemuth
                  Radio Free Albemuth

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1986

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                  Radio Free Albemuth is a dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, written in 1976 and published posthumously in 1985. Originally titled VALISystem A, it was his first attempt to deal in fiction with his experiences of early 1974. When his publishers at Bantam requested extensive rewrites he canned the project and reworked it into the VALIS trilogy. Arbor House acquired the rights to Radio Free Albemuth in 1985. They then published an edition under the current title, prepared from the corrected typescript given by Dick to his friend Tim Powers.

                • Cover of American Psycho
                  American Psycho

                  Bret Easton Ellis · standalone novel · 1991

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                  American Psycho is a horror novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first-person by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy, narcissistic, and vain Manhattan investment banker who lives a double life as a serial killer. Alison Kelly of The Observer notes that while "Some countries [deem it] so potentially controversial that it only to be sold as shrink-wrapped", "critics rave about it" and "academics revel in its transgressive and postmodern qualities".

                • Cover of Infinite Jest
                  Infinite Jest

                  David Foster Wallace · standalone novel · 1996

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                  Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by American writer David Foster Wallace. Often considered Wallace’s magnum opus, the book has been categorized as an encyclopedic novel due to its unconventional narrative structure and hundreds of extensive endnotes, some with footnotes of their own.

                • Cover of Flowers for Algernon
                  Flowers for Algernon

                  Daniel Keyes · standalone novel · 1966

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                  A man with a low IQ becomes the subject of an experimental medical procedure which raises his IQ well over genius level.

                • Cover of Lucifer's Hammer
                  Lucifer's Hammer

                  Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle · standalone novel · 1977

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                • Cover of The Einstein Intersection
                  The Einstein Intersection

                  Samuel R. Delany · standalone novel · 1967

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                • Cover of The Stepford Wives
                  The Stepford Wives

                  Ira Levin · standalone novel · 1972

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                • Cover of The Body Snatchers
                  The Body Snatchers

                  Jack Finney · standalone novel · 1955

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                • Cover of Our Lady of Darkness
                  Our Lady of Darkness

                  Fritz Leiber · standalone novel · 1977

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                • Cover of Friday
                  Friday

                  Robert A. Heinlein · standalone novel · 1982

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                  Friday is a 1982 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It is the story of a female "artificial person", the eponymous Friday, genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally better than normal humans. Artificial humans are widely resented, and much of the story deals with Friday's struggle both against prejudice and to conceal her enhanced attributes from other humans. The story is set in a Balkanized 21st century, in which the nations of the North American continent have been split up into a number of smaller states.

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

                  series · 9 books · 1962

                  completed

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                • Cover of Southern Reach Trilogy
                  Southern Reach Trilogy

                  series · 4 books · 2014

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                • Cover of The Cosmic Puppets
                  The Cosmic Puppets

                  Philip K. Dick · standalone novel · 1957

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                • Cover of Galatea 2.2
                  Galatea 2.2

                  Richard Powers · standalone novel · 1995

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                • Cover of HARM
                  HARM

                  Brian W. Aldiss · standalone novel · 2007

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                • Cover of An Exaltation of Larks
                  An Exaltation of Larks

                  Robert Reed · standalone novel · 1995

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                  From the front flap of the Tor first edition: "It's 1978 and you're a college senior. You see a cigar-store Indian who then mystifyingly vanishes. You are seduced by the literal woman of your dreams, and a turtle assures you that you are an integral part of some secret cosmic plan from the end of time. You're not crazy. Your name is Jesse Aylesworth, and your life as a coed magnet and the editor of the college newspaper is about to spin drastically out of control... It begins when an enigmatic woman named Sully appears out of the swirling snow one winter night and offers Jesse a ride. Then radios and televisions cease functioning. Peculiar events continue to occur with startling frequency. A changed of cosmic proportions is coming -- one that will both transform Jesse into an immortal, and remake our reality into a universe of eternal life. The Indian, a member of a time-traveling race, has come to recruit candidates for the giant leap through time. Jesse is their only hope for both the future and the past, but before he agrees to aid them, he wants some answers. Who is sully? Is she manipulating Jesse only to sabotage the Indian's plan, or is she fantasy made flesh -- a peasant maiden from the painted landscape of Jesse's dreams come true? Somehow, the fate of all time depends upon how Jesse answers these questions. An Exaltation of Larks is a poetic, exhilarating ride through the gyre of space and time beyond eternity. Its about love, death, and the lonely distance between the cosmic now and the yawning gulf of forever."

                • Cover of Dying Inside
                  Dying Inside

                  Robert Silverberg · standalone novel · 1972

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                • Cover of Deus Irae
                  Deus Irae

                  Philip K. Dick & Roger Zelazny · standalone novel · 1976

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                  Deus Irae is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel written by two American authors; it was started by Philip K. Dick and finished with the help of Roger Zelazny. It was published in 1976. The novel's title, Deus irae, means 'God of Wrath' in Latin; the title is a play on words on the phrase Dies Irae, meaning 'Day of Wrath' or 'Judgment Day'. The novel was based on Dick's short stories "The Great C" and "Planet for Transients".

                • Cover of A Time of Changes
                  A Time of Changes

                  Robert Silverberg · standalone novel · 1971

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