Devices & motifs
The recurring devices of the genre — finer-grained than themes. The generation ship, the time loop, the AI that wakes up wrong. Find the one where…
28 tropes
The frontier of a new planet — settlers, hardship, and the price of a fresh start.
4 booksA crew that ventures out and doesn't all come back, if any do.
3 booksA perfect society with a rotten secret propping it up.
3 booksEarth under assault from beyond, whether by fleets, spores, or things wearing our faces.
2 booksA future ruled by the boot, the screen, or the pill — order bought with freedom.
2 booksHumanity meets the alien and it goes badly — through malice, misunderstanding, or sheer incompatibility.
2 booksThe world after the bombs — mutants, ruins, and the long shadow of the blast.
2 booksAn inscrutable relic of a vanished civilization, dangerous to touch and impossible to ignore.
1 bookTwo minds trade bodies — or a mind is poured into a new one entirely.
1 bookFrozen for the long haul, waking into a future that moved on without you.
1 bookA machine that longs, loves, or grieves — and asks whether that makes it a person.
1 bookThe thinking machines we built decide they no longer need us — or never did.
0 booksThe classic pulp menace: a grotesque alien horror stalking the hero or heroine.
0 booksShips that cheat the light barrier, opening the galaxy to human reach.
0 booksA star-spanning polity, its intrigues, its fall, or the rebels who'd topple it.
0 booksA voyage so long the travellers live and die aboard; their descendants forget it's a ship at all.
0 booksMany bodies, one will — the swarm, the collective, the loss of the self.
0 booksThe final survivor of humanity, alone on a dead Earth or adrift among the stars.
0 booksGenius unbound by conscience, and the creation that gets away from its maker.
0 booksStep in here, step out light-years away — with the horrors that implies.
0 booksA world beside our own where one choice, or one law of physics, went differently.
0 booksTelepathy, telekinesis, precognition — the mind reaching beyond the body's limits.
0 booksA whole world that thinks, dreams, or judges the humans crawling on it.
0 booksRadiation or evolution births the next step past Homo sapiens.
0 booksRemaking a hostile world in Earth's image — an act of creation and hubris both.
0 booksA stretch of time repeating, the protagonist doomed to live it again until something changes.
0 booksMeddling with the past ties history into knots the traveller can't untangle.
0 booksA creature raised to human intelligence, and what we owe the minds we make.
0 books