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- Thursday Next
series8 books2001
similar bycontemporary+1 more
Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels follow a literary detective in an alternate England who can jump physically into the world of books to solve crimes against literature itself. Beginning with The Eyre Affair, the series mixes metafiction, wordplay and parody across increasingly personal plots as Thursday balances family life with adventures inside classic novels. Fforde has extended the sequence across eight books and several decades, with further installments in the works.
- Whileaway
series4 books1972
completed
similar bycontemporary+2 more
Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) is a single feminist science fiction novel, not a multi-book series, built around four women from parallel timelines with very different gender arrangements. One of them, Janet, comes from Whileaway, an all-female utopian Earth ten centuries in the future where men died out in a plague; the other three come from realities closer to Russ's own, and their collisions are used to interrogate what womanhood and equality could mean under different social rules.
- The Merchant Princes
series14 books2004
similar byalternate historyour worldcontemporary
The Merchant Princes is a science fantasy and alternate history series of nine novels by British writer Charles Stross. In the series, there exist a number of parallel worlds, all of which are on the same geographical Earth but with different societies at different points of development. Members of a certain bloodline can travel between these worlds along with their immediate possessions. The series largely follows Miriam Beckstein, a technology journalist raised in a familiar "normal" Earth, who discovers she was born in a parallel world and is a member of this bloodline. She quickly becomes entangled in political maneuvering and assassination plots with her estranged family. Miriam uses modern technology and investigative journalism to attempt to stay a step ahead.
- Operation Chaos
series7 books1956
completed
similar byour world+2 more
Poul Anderson's fix-up novel imagines an alternate United States where magic and technology developed side by side, following a werewolf soldier and his witch wife as they're called on to stop an enemy from unleashing the world's most powerful demon. Assembled from stories written across the 1950s and 60s, Operation Chaos was followed decades later by the direct sequel Operation Luna.
- Neanderthal Parallax
series3 books2002
similar byalternate historycontemporary+1 more
The Neanderthal Parallax is a trilogy of novels written by Robert J. Sawyer and published by Tor. It depicts the effects of the opening of a connection between two versions of Earth in different parallel universes: the world familiar to the reader, and another where Neanderthals became the dominant intelligent hominid. The societal, spiritual, and technological differences between the two worlds form the focus of the story.
- Kairos
series11 books1962
completed
similar by+2 more
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).
- Soon I Will Be Invincible
Austin Grossmanstandalone novel2007
similar bycontemporary+2 more
Soon I Will Be Invincible is a novel by Austin Grossman, published by Pantheon Books and released on June 5, 2007. The novel uses two alternating first person narratives—the first told from the point of view of Fatale, a female cyborg recruited by the superhero group The New Champions as they investigate the disappearance of a superhero named CoreFire. The other narrative is told from the point of view of Dr. Impossible, a supervillain possessing super-human strength and intellect who suffers from Malign Hypercognition Disorder. The plot follows Impossible's thirteenth attempt to take over the world after escaping from prison.
- VALIS
series4 books1981
completed
similar by+3 more
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.
- Noumena
series3 books2020
similar by+2 more
Lindsay Ellis' Noumena series began with Axiom's End (2020), an alternate-history science-fiction novel set in 2007 about a US government cover-up of contact with extraterrestrial life, centered on a young woman named Cora. It continues through Truth of the Divine (2021) and Apostles of Mercy (2024), the third of five planned volumes, following the fallout of that first contact.
- H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
similar by+2 more
No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
- Dracula
universe144 books1897
Start hereDracula · Start here
"Come freely. Go safely. And leave something of the happiness you bring" — so the Count greets his guest at the threshold of the Carpathians, and the great door shuts behind. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) is the wellspring of the modern vampire: the account of a centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman who quits his crumbling castle for the crowded lodging-houses of London, and the handful of ordinary people — a young solicitor, a doctor of the mad, a professor of stranger learning — who must piece together what he is before he makes the whole city his fold. It is told wholly in fragments: journal entries, letters, telegrams, ships' logs, phonograph cylinders, each hand recording only its own sliver of the dark. Around that single novel a whole crypt of continuations has grown, raised by many writers across a century. Fred Saberhagen's Dracula Sequence hands the Count the microphone, retelling the old events from his own wry, aggrieved lips and following him into later intrigues. Robert Lory's brisk 1970s Dracula Horror Series revives him as a reluctant weapon turned against fouler things; Peter Tremayne's trilogy reaches back along his bloodline; and further sequels, a Quincey Morris spin-off, and Dracula's Children carry the shadow onward. This is a loose shared world built upon a public-domain figure, not one governed continuity — each author remakes him as villain, antihero, or sympathetic narrator. Begin, always, with Stoker's original; the letters and the mounting dread stand entirely on their own. From there follow whichever door tempts you — Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape for the monster's own confession, Lory or Tremayne for tales that never glance back at the Borgo Pass again.
- After Such Knowledge
series7 books1953
completed
similar by+2 more
After Such Knowledge is James Blish's loosely linked trilogy on the costs of forbidden or dangerous knowledge. It opens with A Case of Conscience, in which a Jesuit scientist studying a seemingly sinless alien race is forced to weigh what he finds against his own faith, continues with the historical novel Doctor Mirabilis about the medieval friar and scientist Roger Bacon, and closes with the two-part Black Easter, in which a magician is hired to loose Hell's demons upon the world for a single day. The three books share a theme rather than a continuous plot or cast.
- Axis of Time
series7 books2004
similar byalternate history+1 more
The Axis of Time trilogy is an alternative history series of novels written by Australian journalist and author John Birmingham, from Macmillan Publishing.
- The Mouse That Roared
series6 books1955
completed
similar by+1 more
The Mouse That Roared launches Leonard Wibberley's satirical series about the tiny fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick, a European microstate whose leaders declare war on the United States purely to lose quickly and collect the postwar reconstruction aid given to defeated nations. The 1955 novel uses Fenwick's mismatched ambitions to poke fun at Cold War politics and the nuclear arms race, and Wibberley kept the joke going across four more novels into the 1970s. Later entries send the duchy into further absurd confrontations with the wider world, including a race to the Moon and a scheme on Wall Street.
- Crash
J. G. Ballardstandalone novel1973
similar byour worldcontemporaryliterary & general
Crash is a novel by J. G. Ballard, first published in 1973 with a cover designed by Bill Botten. It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents.
- Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishigurostandalone novel2005
similar byalternate historyour worldliterary & general
Never Let Me Go is a 2005 science fiction novel by the British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005. It included the novel in its '100 Best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME'. It also received an ALA Alex Award in 2006. A film adaptation directed by Mark Romanek was released in 2010.
