OpenFictionBeta
Explore characters, series and universes across the fiction you love.
No spoilers beyond this point.
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Characters
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Universes
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The Therin Continent
1 series
The world of Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard sequence, centred on the city-states of the Therin Throne's former empire - among them Camorr, Tal Verrar, and Karthain - built atop the ruins and elderglass structures left by a vanished people called the Eldren. The continent's city-states are defined by their commerce, their political intrigue, and the criminal hierarchies that operate beneath their official structures. Lynch's world-building is dense with historical texture and mercantile detail, and the mystery of the Eldren civilisation provides a mythological underpinning whose full implications remain unexplored across the published novels.
The Wheel of Time
1 series
The world of Robert Jordan's epic sequence has no canonical name - its inhabitants simply call it the world - but it is one of the most elaborately constructed secondary worlds in fantasy fiction. Shaped by the Wheel of Time itself, which spins the Pattern of Ages and weaves the lives of men and women into its design, it is a world haunted by a previous Age of legend and by the knowledge that the Dark One, imprisoned at the moment of creation, is weakening his bonds. The one Power, the various nations of the Westlands, the Aiel Waste, and the continent of Seanchan together form a geography of extraordinary depth and internal consistency.
All-World
1 series
The vast multiverse conceived by Stephen King across the Dark Tower series, encompassing not only Roland Deschain's dying world but the many parallel universes connected by the Dark Tower at the centre of existence. All-World is the term Roland's people use for their own reality - a world that has moved on, its technology failing, its geography distorted, its population dwindling - but the universe extends far beyond it to include versions of our own world and countless others. The Tower itself is the linchpin of all realities, and its threatened collapse is the central concern of the entire sequence.
Realm of the Elderlings
5 series1 book
The Realm of the Elderlings is the creation of Robin Hobb, a secondary world fantasy universe built across five trilogies and a standalone novel published between 1995 and 2017. Set primarily in the Six Duchies, the Bingtown Trader coast, and the Rain Wilds, it is a universe defined less by its world-building than by the depth and honesty of its character work - Hobb's sustained examination of what it costs to live an exceptional life in a world that does not reward exceptionalism cleanly. Magic in this universe takes several forms - the Skill, a telepathic ability used by the Farseer royal line; the Wit, a bond between humans and animals regarded with suspicion and fear; and the mysterious transformative power of the Rain Wilds that shapes both its human inhabitants and the living ships of the Bingtown Traders. Dragons, Elderlings, and the ancient civilisation that preceded the current world provide a mythological depth that reveals itself gradually across the full sequence.
His Dark Materials
2 series
A multiverse of parallel worlds connected by invisible threads of Dust - elementary particles that accumulate around conscious beings and that different cultures variously interpret as sin, dark matter, or the physical substrate of the soul. The universe is most fully realised through the world of Lyra Belacqua, an alternative Earth where the Catholic Church never lost its grip on European civilisation and every human is accompanied by a daemon - an animal-shaped external manifestation of their soul that can speak, feel, and change form until the onset of adulthood fixes its shape permanently. Pullman's universe is distinguished by the seriousness with which it treats its central questions - consciousness, free will, the nature of growing up, and the institutional tendency to confuse authority with truth. Built across six novels spanning several decades of Lyra's life, it is one of the richest and most philosophically engaged secondary world constructions in contemporary fiction.
Sherlock Holmes
2 series
The Sherlock Holmes universe is the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle, comprising four novels and fifty-six short stories published between 1887 and 1927. Set primarily in late Victorian and Edwardian London, it follows the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr John Watson across a career spanning several decades. The universe is defined by its central dynamic - Holmes's extraordinary powers of observation and deductive reasoning applied to cases ranging from the mundane to the genuinely bizarre - and by Watson's role as narrator and audience surrogate, whose admiring but grounded perspective mediates Holmes's more alien qualities for the reader. London itself functions as a character, its fog, gaslight, and social stratification providing both atmosphere and the conditions that make Holmes's work necessary. The fixed, closed canon and its public domain status have made it one of the most studied and adapted fictional universes in existence.
Series
View all →The Wheel of Time
by Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan
Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is one of the most ambitious and influential epic fantasy series ever written - 14 novels spanning over four million words, thousands of named characters, and a richly detailed world built on mythology from dozens of cultures. The story begins with five young people from a remote village drawn into a struggle against the Dark One, the embodiment of evil imprisoned since the creation of the world, and follows them as they discover their roles in a prophecy that may save or destroy civilisation. Jordan published the first eleven books between 1990 and 2005 before his death in 2007 from a rare blood disease. Working from Jordan's extensive notes and outlines, Brandon Sanderson completed the final three volumes, bringing the series to its conclusion in 2013. The Wheel of Time has sold over 90 million copies worldwide and has been adapted as an Amazon Prime Video television series.
The Expanse
by James S. A. Corey
Nine novels following the crew of the Rocinante - a salvaged Martian warship captained by James Holden - across more than four decades of solar system politics, war, and first contact. The series spans three loose acts: a conspiracy thriller set within the solar system, an expansion through alien gates to a thousand new worlds, and a final reckoning with whatever destroyed the civilisation that built them. Written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name James S.A. Corey, the series won the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2020 and is complete at nine books.
The Culture
by Iain M. Banks
The Culture series is a science fiction series written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks and released from 1987 until 2012. The stories centre on The Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main themes of the series are the dilemmas that an idealistic, more-advanced civilization faces in dealing with smaller, less-advanced civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds barbaric. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of (or non-members of) the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of Culture (knowing and unknowing) in its plans to civilize the galaxy. Each novel is a self-contained story with new characters, although reference is occasionally made to the events of previous novels.
The Dark Tower
by Stephen King
Eight novels written by Stephen King between 1982 and 2012, following Roland Deschain - the last gunslinger - on his quest across a dying world toward the Dark Tower, the nexus of all realities. The series defies easy categorisation: it is a western, a horror novel, a post-apocalyptic epic, and a high fantasy quest, held together by King's mythology of ka - fate - and a cast that grows from a lone figure in the desert to a fully realised fellowship. Begun when King was nineteen and completed over four decades, it is widely regarded as his magnum opus. Inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, it eventually grew to connect with much of King's wider fiction, though the eight core novels stand entirely on their own.
Rincewind / The Wizards
by Terry Pratchett
Rincewind is the Disc's most useless wizard - he can't even spell "wizzard," and his most notable talent is running away very fast. Beginning with The Colour of Magic, these were Pratchett's earliest Discworld novels, initially written as parodies of fantasy before evolving into broader satire. The other wizards of Unseen University aren't much better, spending more time studying the common room biscuit tin than mystical tomes, though they occasionally stretch to some magic between elevenses. Across eight books, Rincewind is dragged into adventures spanning the entire Disc - from the Counterweight Continent to ancient civilisations to XXXX - while the Unseen University faculty, led by Archchancellor Ridcully, provide a recurring ensemble. Unseen Academicals shifts focus almost entirely to the university itself. The series establishes much of Discworld's cosmology, geography, and the Luggage - Rincewind's homicidal travelling companion.
The City Watch
by Terry Pratchett
The City Watch series is one of the major story lines that make up 8 of the Discworld books. It focuses on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, formerly the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch, in particular the captain, and later commander of the Watch, Samuel Vimes, usually when he is being manipulated by Lord Vetinari. The books tend to be whodunit in nature and often feature conspiracies aimed at toppling regimes.
Books
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Fool's Assassin
by Robin Hobb
The opening novel of the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy returns to FitzChivalry Farseer decades after the conclusion of the Tawny Man Trilogy, finding him settled into a quiet life at Withywoods with Molly. Hobb takes her time with the opening - the novel's first half is deliberately unhurried, documenting the texture of an older Fitz's domestic life with a patience that makes what follows considerably more devastating. The arrival of a mysterious child and the reappearance of threads from across the full sequence draw Fitz back into a world he believed he had left behind. Fool's Assassin introduces Bee Farseer, Fitz's unexpected daughter, as a major point of view character whose perspective on the world is among the most distinctive in the sequence. The novel's second half is among the most upsetting in the Elderlings universe.
Dragon Keeper
by Robin Hobb
The opening novel of the Rain Wild Chronicles returns to the world of the Liveship Traders, following a group of misfit dragon keepers tasked with accompanying a flight of damaged and diminished dragons upriver to find the lost Elderling city of Kelsingra. The dragons, hatched from cocoons buried in the Rain Wild riverbed, are stunted and malformed, unable to fly and dependent on the keepers assigned to them. Thymara, a Rain Wild girl born with too many of the physical changes the river inflicts on its inhabitants, is the central protagonist alongside Alise Finbok, a Bingtown scholar whose expertise in Elderling lore has been the purpose of a constrained life. Dragon Keeper establishes the chronicle's central concern - the relationship between the keepers and their charges, and the question of what both must become to find Kelsingra.
La Belle Sauvage
by Philip Pullman
The first volume of The Book of Dust is set approximately ten years before Northern Lights, following Malcolm Polstead, an eleven-year-old boy who works at an inn near Oxford and has fallen into an unlikely friendship with the infant Lyra, then in the care of a nearby priory. When catastrophic floods transform the landscape and agents of the Magisterium close in on the child, Malcolm takes to his canoe La Belle Sauvage to protect her. The novel opens in a quieter register than His Dark Materials before expanding into something stranger and more mythological, drawing on English folklore and fairy tale in ways that distinguish it tonally from the original trilogy. It establishes the theological and political forces that will shape Lyra's world while she is still too young to be aware of them.
Northern Lights
by Philip Pullman
The first volume of His Dark Materials introduces Lyra Belacqua, a young girl raised among the scholars of Jordan College, Oxford, in a world where the Church holds absolute authority and every human soul takes the form of an external animal companion called a daemon. When children begin disappearing from the streets of London and Lyra's friend Roger vanishes, she embarks on a journey north that takes her from the gaslit streets of an alternative Oxford to the ice palaces of the Arctic, confronting armoured bears, witches, and the sinister organisation known as the Gobblers. The novel establishes Pullman's alternative world with extraordinary confidence, grounding its philosophical concerns - the nature of Dust, the Church's fear of original sin, the meaning of growing up - in adventure narrative of genuine propulsive force.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Arthur Conan Doyle
The first and most celebrated short story collection, gathering twelve stories that had appeared in The Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1892 and made Holmes a cultural phenomenon. The collection opens with A Scandal in Bohemia, introducing Irene Adler, and includes The Red-Headed League, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, and The Adventure of the Speckled Band - among the most ingeniously plotted and widely anthologised stories in the canon. The Adventures established the template for the Holmes short story at its sharpest, and Doyle's invention within the form across twelve consecutive cases has rarely been matched. Critical and popular reception was exceptional, cementing Holmes as the dominant fictional figure in British popular culture.
A Study in Scarlet
by Arthur Conan Doyle
The first Sherlock Holmes story, introducing the consulting detective and his companion Dr John Watson through a London murder investigation with roots in the Mormon settlements of Utah. Doyle establishes Holmes's method of deductive reasoning, the Baker Street setting, and the central partnership that would define the canon. The novel's structure is unusual, splitting between the London investigation and a lengthy American flashback that some readers find disruptive but which establishes the murderer's motive with considerable force.
Authors
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Robin Hobb
5 series17 books
Robin Hobb is the pen name of American author Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden, who also publishes fantasy fiction under the name Megan Lindholm. Born in California in 1952 and raised in Alaska and Washington State, she began publishing as Megan Lindholm in the 1980s before adopting the Robin Hobb name for the Farseer Trilogy in 1995. The two names represent genuinely distinct bodies of work rather than a simple rebranding - the Lindholm novels are smaller in scale and more intimate, while the Hobb novels are characterised by their emotional intensity, long-form character development, and willingness to subject protagonists to sustained suffering. The Realm of the Elderlings sequence, published across three decades, is widely regarded as one of the finest achievements in contemporary epic fantasy for the depth of its characterisation and the uncompromising honesty of its emotional register.
Philip Pullman
2 series5 books
Philip Pullman is a British author best known for His Dark Materials, a trilogy that began with Northern Lights in 1995 and established him as one of the most significant voices in contemporary fiction for children and adults alike. Born in Norwich in 1946, he worked as a teacher and lecturer before his writing career took over, drawing on a wide range of influences including Milton's Paradise Lost, William Blake, and Heinrich von Kleist. His Dark Materials brought him international recognition and considerable controversy for its unflinching engagement with organised religion, free will, and the nature of consciousness. The trilogy's final volume, The Amber Spyglass, became the first children's book to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award. He has since returned to the same universe with The Book of Dust trilogy, the second volume of which was published in 2019. He was appointed a Companion of Honour in 2019.
Arthur Conan Doyle
2 series9 books
Arthur Conan Doyle was a British author and physician whose creation of Sherlock Holmes placed him among the most influential writers in the history of popular fiction. Born in Edinburgh in 1859, he trained as a doctor before turning to writing, drawing on his medical background to shape Holmes's famous method of deductive reasoning - itself modelled partly on the diagnostic techniques of his mentor Joseph Bell. The first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, and the character's popularity quickly outpaced everything else Doyle wrote. Frustrated by Holmes's dominance over his literary reputation, Doyle killed the detective off in 1893 only to resurrect him under considerable public pressure a decade later. He continued writing Holmes stories until 1927. Outside Holmes, Doyle wrote historical novels, science fiction including the Professor Challenger series, and was a prominent public figure with strong interests in spiritualism in his later years.
From the Reading Room
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A Better Platform: What We've Been Building
OpenFiction has been in beta for a while now, and if you've visited recently you may have noticed things feeling a little sharper, a little more considered. Over the past few weeks we've added a significant batch of improvements across the platform - some visible, some invisible, all of them making OpenFiction more useful for readers and more reliable under the hood. This post covers what's changed and why.
Spoiler filtering now supports mystery fiction
When we added Sherlock Holmes to OpenFiction, it became clear quickly that mystery fiction has a fundamentally different relationship with spoilers than epic fantasy does - and that the existing filtering system, built for series like Stormlight Archive and Wheel of Time, wasn't quite the right tool for the job. This post explains what we've built, why, and how it works.
Portraits, a rebuilt reading profile, and cascades that actually make sense
Today's update is a mix of visual and structural work - some of it immediately obvious, some of it quietly fixing things that have been a low-level annoyance since launch.