I was a HUGE fan of Gregory McDonald’s Fletch and Flynn books back in the day. After reading all of them, I sought out some of McDonald’s other works:
Who Took Toby Rinaldi? Dear M.E. - Love Among the Mashed Potatoes Running Scared (his first novel. nothing to do with the Billy Crystal/Gregory Hines buddy-cop movie) A World Too Wide (part of a quartet of ‘literary fiction’ he wrote; apparently he had a lot of trouble getting these published) Skylar (an attempt to recapture the Fletch magic with a new character. there is a second Skylar novel I haven’t read)
I didn’t hate any of the above, but I wouldn’t recommend any of them either.
The Overlords of War by Gerard Klein. I picked it up in Jr. High school thinking it was a compendium of WWII or WWI biographies. It turned out to be sci-fi with a perfect time-travel loop.
The Destruction Of The Temple by Barry N Malzberg.
In a dystopian future, a graduate student is doing his thesis. He has gone into one of the cities (abandoned by the upper classes) to film a recreation of JFK’s assassination. Then, AFAICT, the lumpen put some kind of brain implant in him and make him relive the lives and deaths of various political figures.
The cover has Harlan Ellison raving about the book.
It’s a dark, absurdist picture book giving instructions of performing a dance/play involving a Mister Potatohead, children dressed as tater tots, and many potatoes.
I read it at the (since closed) National Potato Museum.
True, but why “to be fair”? Most of the people here weren’t reading books before then, anyway.
Willy Ley had translated and published two of his short stories in F&SF in the 1950s. I’ve seen anothere one recently.
And there still isn’t a complete English translation of Zwei Planete.
Satan- His Psychotherapy And Cure By Cy Kassler (JSPS)
This one is great. Without spoiling- Satan is incarnate in a computer built by a slightly crazed MIT professor. Cy Kassler becomes a psychologist. The drama of the years of the book is broken by seven interludes of sessions Dr Kassler has with Satan. I love this book.
To Serve Man- A Cookbook For People
By Karl Wurf. I got this as a freebie when I worked for Scithers. It’s funny. The illustrations are good. But the one note joke just wasn’t worth ten bucks.
I loved this idea. Pluterday is a extra day of the week reserved for just the superrich.
Chuck and I could probably go back and forth all day mentioning obscure but great literary science fiction writers. (Obscure literary sf writer is a redundancy, of course.) Who’s ever heard of Michael Kandel? His first novel, Strange Invasion, was probably his best. Very dark humor.
John Sladek, BTW, is one of the few good parodists in science fiction. The best is probably David Langford, who’s published two collections of them, Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge, Odyssey Two and He Do the Time Police in Different Voices. He’s big in sf fandom but otherwise those collections are exactly as obscure as their titles suggest. The best mystery parodist is Jon L. Breen, but his collection, Hair of the Sleuthhound, is so unknown that he makes Langford look like Harry Potter by comparison.
This was mass mailed to a LOT of people. I think I’m the only one who actually read it. The Catholic church is the beast of Revelations. A law mandating Sunday as the day of rest is his mark. I enjoy the rantings of the crazed and have read it cover to cover many times.
**The Last Parallel **by Martin Russ. A 21-year-old Marine’s diary of the last year of the Korean War. Gruesome (corpse retrieval patrol) and hilarious.
I recall the Mushroom Planet.
I also read a truly horrible science fiction book about tanks and some kind of space war where we Terrans go and devastate some planet that we think has launched an attack on us. The point of view is from a tanker, and the author is filled with respect for how good Israelis are with tanks, despite the fact that this is the far future.
Anyway, after we duke it out with the aliens, we discover we were wrong, they had done nothing, and the initial attack was just from their general direction, and some other aliens had done it, and we go off after them. This is the end of the book.
I read this thing when I was at sea for a month in the subarctic Pacific (Station P, for those of you following along at home), and the weather was horrible, and we were getting pounded day and night. The book had been left on board the ship for the edification of others I assume. It is simply the worst book I’ve ever read. I finished it, just to see if it could sustain its level of craposity. It did. If you know the title this book, please let me know.
Most of Nabokov’s stuff besides Lolita and Pale Fire, my favorite being Ada. When I took out Ada in 1992, it was still on the shelf despite last having been checked out in the late 1970s.
I have to admit I’ve read several of the books mentioned - The Muller-Fokker Effect, the 1st 2 of the Inquestor series by Somtow Sucharitkul (the other 2 are on the shelf as well but I know I’ll have to read from the beginning again eventually) the Pluterday one by Paul van Herck, the Michael Kandel (and I read his next book, too, but I only kept Strange Invasion). The Overlords of War by Gerard Klein; I think I read all his books that came out round about then… The Insmouth Tabernacle Choir Hymnal isn’t really very good…
And currently I’m re-reading one of the first trashy sf novels I ever read - Abandon Galaxy by Bart Somers! (aka Gardner F. Fox) Probably not too many people have read that one!
Anybody else ever read The Captain Must Die? I read it when I was in 8th or 9th grade. It was in a box of “trashy” paperbacks one of my uncles gave me. His taste in reading ran heavily towards stuff like this and Mandingo which was in the same box. TCMD was a really good read; Mandingo considerably less so.
About the most obscure one I can think of is Ten Thousand Miles Underground, a bad attempt at combining 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and A Journey to the Center of the Earth, complete with stereotyped black servant! As I recall, it was written by “Roy Rockwood”.
[QUOTE=Roy Rockwood]
[“WASHINGTON! I say Washington!”
Throughout a big shed, filled for the most part with huge pieces of machinery, echoed the voice of Professor Amos Henderson. He did not look up from a small engine over which he was bending.
“Washington! Where are you? Why don’t you answer me?”
From somewhere underneath an immense pile of iron, steel and aluminum came the voice of a colored man.
“Yas sir, Perfesser, I’se goin’ t’ saggasiate my bodily presence in yo’ contiguous proximity an’ attend t’ yo’ immediate conglomerated prescriptions at th’ predistined period. Yas, sir!”](http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/ftmun10h.htm)
[/quote]
Gold!
