I would have to suggest Blaylock’s The Digging Leviathan, although I don’t know if it counts as obscure. It’s about a boy who, like many boys, builds SF gadgets out of discarded junk… but they actually work.
There’s also K.W. Jeter’s Morlock Night, a sequel to The Time Machine in which the time traveller returns to the future and is killed by Morlocks, who, having a natural affinity for machines, use it to start travelling through time, under the direction of Morgan La Fey.
Jeter also wrote Infernal Devices, a tongue-in-cheek steampunk adventure of enormous complexity, featuring clockwork androids and convoluted conspiracies involving fish people.
I’d also have to put in a vote for The Flying Sorcerers, which is probably getting obscure right about now, since it’s been so long out of print. A crashed spaceman tries to raise the technological level of the natives, so that they can help him repair his ship, but his efforts bring about unexpected social changes. A classic of the genre but, like I said, it’s been out of print for what- 30 years?
I didn’t much like The Platypus of Doom, although I have to mention it because of the title. I don’t remember it well, either. I seem to remember that parts of it involved immortals who pretended to be Holmes and Watson. That reminds me of The Computer Connection (IIRC), which was by Bester and had a lot of amoral immortals who took on various roles. One decided to become an H.G. Wells character and build time machines and whatnot, while another (named “Grand Guignol”) made a hobby of torturing mortals, motivated by the fact that extreme stress could, in some individuals, trigger the switch to immortality.
For a variety of reasons I didn’t get to finish R. A. Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions, although I’m hoping to pick it up again. It was… odd. It’s about a war between rival secret societies. One group is a bunch of couples who have a sort of mind-orgy in which they merge into a group consciousness and send out tentacles of thought to control people’s minds. One of the counter-conspiracies is composed of people called “badgers,” (my memory of this is a little rusty, but you get the idea) and each major city has a badger assigned to it. I don’t quite remember if they were actual badgers or not. The protagonist is an ace reporter who becomes obsessed with the idea that a bigwig named Carmody Overlark is, in fact, the millenia-dead pharaoh Khar-ibn-Mod.
-Ben
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