There are some great novel recommendations here, but I wouldn’t say that most of them are lesser-known.
What are your recommendations?
As for me, I’ve exclusively read well-known novels, except if you consider someone like Alfred Bester obscure, for example.
One exception: Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer: Twelve Strange Tales of Mankind’s Future. It’s a collection of exceptionnaly well-crafted stories. It ain’t a novel, though.
The Black Ocean series by J.S. Morin is one of my lesser known faves. It has a kind of weird mixture of SciFi tech and ancient magic that’s really fun.
the truth machine! it was formative for me! i think it came out in the 90s
This is a good topic. I bet there are people out there who have read some obscure stuff but don’t realize it.
I think Vernor Vinge is a good choice (I see them mentioned in the original post). True Names is not unknown (it is an excellent and prescient novella), but there people that would overlook it for different reasons. I love sci-fi but I’m not well-read enough. A few years ago I might have been able to drop names left and right, but I’ll throw the Semiosis Trilogy (Sue Burke) in just because I enjoyed that one and I was thinking about it today for some reason.
Oh shit the third Semiosis came out? Loved the first couple, how did I miss that?
Tanith Lee. “The Silver Metal Lover.” “Don’t Bite The Sun.” “Venus Preserved.”
She’s mostly known for fantasy, but her science fiction is great.
Joanna Russ. First openly gay SF writer. “Picnic On Paradise” and “The Female Man.”
R. A. Lafferty. Insanely good short stories.
Wyrm by Mark Fabi
It’s all about computers and online gaming, and it was written in 1988 so it’s a little dated, but it’s also amazingly prescient in a lot of ways. Furthermore it’s a bit like a proto-LitRPG novel before that was even a genre.
Bloom by Wil McCarthy
A really good gray-goo/nanotech apocalypse story.
Oh yeah, our protag was a serious Mary Sue!
Awesome read though.
Which one? I don’t recall either leading character being overly Mary Sue-ish, but it’s been a while since I read them.
Wyrm?
So we have our protag and his encyclopedic knowledge of dork culture, an external hard drive filled with live computer viruses, and he’s not just taking class with the local kung fu school - but he knows better than to jog barefoot in the snow: because he’s been there/done that. So we are schooling and entire class full of would be martial artists on how to do it better.
And then he’s off on a date - because our kung fu, have-laptop-will-teavel, aspie-coder protag is also a chick magnet?
Yeah. Mary Sue.
Awesome read though. Even had chess lines in the back appendix.
Fair enough.
The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy is one of my top ten fav Sci Fi novels. Bloom was also good…
I’ll check it out!
Jumper by Steven Gould. They made a movie, but it wan’t anything like the series.
I loved the book as a teen, haven’t reread it since my 20s but I probably read it five or six times.
The sequels were meh with one exception:
The one about his daughter doing a space startup was fun because I work in New Space and pretty much all the tech stuff she does is real. I was on the first project to use Iridium to send data between earth and above the Karmen Line and we currently have a payload in orbit aboard Vigoride-7 doing exactly that. So when we have Davie and Millie’s daughter teleporting herself into orbit and talking to the ground on an Iridium phone which sets off an alarm at Iridium HQ I was like… “Hell yeah, she can do that! And it would.”
If you can lay hands on a copy, “The People”, “The Anything Box”, and “Holding Wonder” by Zenna Henderson are all worthwhile.
Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad. It’s an anthology style and takes place in a far future where most of the characters are robots, focusing often on two constructors who compete with each other in achieving some goal first or building the best machine for a contest.
Other than the Tarkovsky’s production, it’s been adapted into movies rather badly, but Lem’s Solaris is a fine read as well.
I feel like stepping outside native English works is a bit like cheating. 😃 There’s a lot of super interesting European scifi. During the USSR it was a major form of escapism and veiled criticism all over Eastern Europe so that area alone yielded a massive amount of scifi, but there’s a rich history of the genre all over Europe. Mostly it got translated to neighboring European languages, seldom to English, and even if it did most likely never reached other continents.
To fit the theme I will give some French examples because French scifi has some major wierdos:
- Pierre Stolze, “Marilyn Monroe et les samouraïs du père Noël” (Marilyn Monroe and Santa’s samurais)
- Gerard Klein, “Les Seigneurs de la guerre” (The Lords of War)
- Pierre Barbet, “L’Empire du Baphomet” (Baphomet’s Empire)
If you manage to read any of them I don’t think you’ll be dissapointed.
I don’t know if Clifford D. Simak is lesser known, but his work is pretty foundational for a lot of more modern sci-fi. Before there was “I, Robot”, there was “City”. Before there were Ewoks, there was “Little Fuzzy”. Before there were living ships like in Farscape, Lexx, or Xenogenesis, there was “The Visitors”.
Clifford Simak didn’t write Little Fuzzy. That was H. Beam Piper.
The pip and flinx series by Alan dean foster
I love Alan Dean Foster’s work for the most part. His writing is excellent and hes been writing for eons.
Woah… been a hot minute since I thought about these. “The Flinx was an ethical thief…”
The Bolo series. Originated with Keith Laumer. Mostly short stories written by Keith and others. A few long form books by David Weber and John Ringo.
The Bolos are sentient tanks who are tragic heros. And are basically future knights.
While not really ground breaking, I’ve always enjoyed the stories and reread them every couple of years.
They definitely deserve more love.
Who doesn’t love the dinochrome brigade?
The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam is easily my most recommended and gifted series outside of the mainstream. I’ve bought book one 6 times now!
Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold.
Sandkings by GRR Martin is really good.
I read this as a kid in the Omni Book of Science Fiction. It lives rent-free in my mind to this day.
