Favorite SF/Fantasy books that no-one else has heard about

In My Humble Opinion
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A couple of my favorite SF/F books that don’t get nearly the publicity I think they deserve (and that I buy extra copies of to force on friends) are:

Esbe: A Winter’s Tale Linda Haldeman. A weirdly quiet little tale of college students, demon summoning, and an angel.

Prince Ombra Rodrick Macleish. The Hero of A Thousand Hearts is reborn in a small New England town, but rather than waiting for him to grow up, Prince Ombra (his eternal enemy) starts their war when the hero is only 8 years old. Again, quiet weirdness. (The cover is a masterpiece of badness: it’s covered with some sort of holographic foil that makes it look like shimmering rainbow sherbet has melted on the book)

Bridge of BirdsBarry Hugart: The story of Number 10 Ox and Master Li in a China that never was…but should have been. It’s nothing like The Princess Bride but I think it’ll appeal to the same audience.

Denner’s WreckLawerence Watt-Evans’s tribute to Zelazny’s Lord of Light. People with super-tech land on a world where the descendents of a spaceship wreck live. The newcomers use their super-tech to pretend to be gods and impress the yokels. Impossible to find except in the Science-Fiction Bookclub edition hardcover (the paperback must have been in and out of print in 15 minutes)

I’ll probably think of more books later, but does anyone else have any suggestions/recommendations?

Fenris

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Anything by Avram Davidson.

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King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by John Steinbeck

Yes, THAT John Steinbeck!A wonderful book, an unexpected treasure.

There are a lot of sf books that I like that are fading into obscurity, but I’m not sure I’d say they’re ones no one knows – sf fans surely are familiar with them:

Anything by Fredric Brown, or William Tenn, or Theodore Cogswell. Masters of the short-short story all. Anything by Stanley G. Weinbaum (See “The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum” or “The Black Flame”)or L. Sprague de Camp or Hal Clement (the master of hard sf)

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Hey, Duck…did you pick up that big Avram Davidson short story collection that St. Martin’s put out a year or two ago? Nice!

(Fascinating Fact: Davidson ghost-wrote one of the last Ellery Queen detective novels…either The Player on the Other Side or The Fourth Side of the Triangle, I can’t remember which.)

My choice is Charles Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935). Utterly idiosyncratic. Fucking brilliant. Horribly out-of-print.

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Virtually no one in the US has heard of Stanislaw Lem, but he remains the most popular SF writer worldwide. Strange, isn’t it. I’d nominate “Fiasco” and “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub” from Lem.

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Starship On Saddle Mountain. I don’t recall the author, but I read the book in 9th grade, one of my first forays into science fiction beyond comic books and loved it. That started me on a long and very happy journey into thousands of science fiction stories in years to come and a great side interest in learning about the technology and science mentioned in them.

It was well written with a simple plot and no massive, bloody alien invasion. Just about a young kid in the West, on a farm, with a horse who stumbles across a starship which had landed to investigate Earth, with human-like occupants, including alien kids his age. There were no abductions, no horrific ‘probes’, no bloody battles and no impending war from any superior alien species. Imagine, a good science fiction story written without anything bloody happening!

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CalMeacham, Another Hal Clement fan, glad to meetcha’.
Needle was the book that got me addicted to Sci-Fi.

An author I greatly enjoyed that I’ve never seen mentioned on the boards is Lee Killough.

I know I have more, but they’ll have to wait 'til I get home.

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Nobody’s heard of Lem? Must be because of the passage of time – Lem wrote “Solaris”, upon which Tarkovski’s movie was based. At the time it came out you could find a lot of Lem (“Solaris”, “The Cyberiad”) on the sf bookshelves. But I have to admit I haven’t seen it in years.

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Quite obviously, my first choice is “Staroamer’s Fate” by Chuck Rothman, mainly because I wrote it. :wink:

For a less biased opinion, some choice are:

“Replay” by Ken Grimwood – Incredible novel based on the age-old question, “if you had your life to live over, what would you do?” Grimwood ups the ante by asking, “What if you had your life to live over – and over – and over?” World Fantasy Award winner, but otherwise forgotten.

“Davy” by Edgar Pangbourn – Unjustly neglected, this is one of the truly great novels of SF. “I"m Davy, who was king for a time. King of the Fools, and that takes wisdom.”

“Chronosequence” by Hilbert Schenck – Schenck was one of the most exciting SF writers of the early 80s. This novel combines his usual fast pacing and fascinating characters in a book about an alien presence off the New England coast.

“Bug Jack Barron” by Norman Spinrad. Very controversial when it first came out, but it seems to be forgotten now. I also like Spinrad’s “The Iron Dream,” though it’s pretty much unreadable (by design).

“The Man Who Folded Himself” by David Gerrold – the ultimate time travel novel.

“Titan” by John Varley – the book that affected my life the most.

“Up the Walls of the World” and “Brightness Falls from the Air” both by the incomparable James Tiptree, Jr.

“This is the Way the World Ends,” “Only Begotton Daughter,” and “Towing Jehovah” by James Morrow. Morrow has a very funny way of dealing with some very serious issues.

“The Anubis Gates” or “Last Call” by Tim Powers

I’m also a fan of the short fiction of Robert Young, William Nolan, and R. A. Lafferty.

I know Davidson wrote “On the 8th Day.” He may also have done “Fourth Side.” Theodore Sturgeon wrote “The Player on the Other Side.”

Good choices, all. BTW, de Camp died a few weeks ago. :frowning:

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Congratulations to all posters, who seem to have excellent taste. Avram Davidson is a particular treat, as is John D. MacDonald’s wonderful fantasy, “The Girl,The Gold Watch & Everything.”

Though just a short story,Oliver LaFarge’s classic western fantasy “Spud & Chochise” is fairly obscure, though Spider Robinson did include it in his “Best of All Possible Worlds” collection. He also championed Edgar Pangborn, particularly “Davy” which is well deserving of your attention for its marvelous humanity, a thread that runs though all of his work.

Chester Anderson’s “The Butterfly Kid” is worth hunting up for its alien-invasion-defeated-by-the-hallucinogeic-imaginations-of-hippies plot.

Dave Van Arnham’s “Wizard of Storms” and Robert Lory’s “Master of the Etrax” manage to include humor and pithy quotations, i.e. “A good bow is an argument with many points.”

A big second to the Frederick Brown stuff, particularly his short story collection “Nightmares and Geezenstacks”

Happy reading!

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Lord Dunsany

Otherwise known as Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett.

Hunter, sportsman, wanderer, playright, world-class chess player, baron, and craftsman of dreams.

Anyone with the slightest interest in fantasy should read Dunsany, especially The King of Elfland’s Daughter, The Charwoman’s Shadow, The Food of Death and 51 Other Stories, and The Hashish Man. Dunsany writes some of the most exquisite prose in the English language: meandering, dreamy, evocative, and ruthlessly economical. Yes, economical, meandering, and dreamy at the same time. He must be experienced to be believed.

He wrote in the early 20th century, and every fantasy writer who has ever cracked open a book owes him a considerable debt, even JRR Tolkien.

Del Rey has been republishing his works in the past few years as his enormous opus has slowly become more popular. Neil Gaiman even wrote a novel, Stardust, which quotes Dunsany extremely liberally and develops some of the themes of The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

I would highly recommend his work.

MR

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Thanks, RC! I always mess those suckers up. Incidentally, critic Francis M. Nevins, the King of Queen, calls “Player” the best of the late-period Ellery novels. No wonder, if Sturgeon wrote it.

You have any idea who wrote “A Fine and Private Place” (1971), the last Queen novel published before the death of Manfred B. Lee (the elder half of the Queen writing team, which incidentally doesn’t seem to have actually written a Queen novel after 1958’s “The Finishing Stroke”)?

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I can second that recommedation: It was wonderful and bizarre.

**
I loved Titan, but my favorite moment in the trilogy is when Gaea has made herself a new body based on Marilyn Monroe and is stomping around the countryside. “FIFTY FOOT TWO AND EYES OF BLUE” indeed :slight_smile:

While we’re listing great short SF/F authors, let me agree with the above and add Robert Sheckley, Henry Kutter and/or C.L. Moore (particularly their “Lewis Padgett” pseudonym) and Keith Laumer (who’s short fiction is even better than his longer works!)

Fenris

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Curious…that’s the title of a Peter Beagle fantasy novel. I don’t know when it was originally published, but the paperback came out in June of last year. Wonderful book, it is.

No clue about the Ellery Queen novel, though.

MR

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You do know that The Butterfly Kid is book 1 of a trilogy, don’t you?

Apparently Anderson was roommates or friends or something with two other authors and each of them wrote one book of the trilogy.

Book 2 is The Unicorn Girl by…arrgh…um…Michal Kurland…I think.

and Book 3 is The Probability Pad by T.A. Waters and is impossible to find (you can occasionally find them on Bookfinder (www.bookfinder.com) for around $20-$30 bucks).

Fenris

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I love this book! The two sequels, The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen aren’t quite as good, but I really like them, too. I just got the omnibus from Meisha Merlin a couple of months ago. You’re right that fans of TPB will enjoy them, I think.

My hands-down all-time favorite fantasy is Godstalk by P.C. Hodgell. It’s dark, often funny, with extremely engaging characters in an incredibly rich setting.(Yike! Too many modifiers!) Ahem. I really like the book, and its sequels. I’m impatiently awaiting the next one.

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Sentinels of Space by Eric Frank Russell. Not only does Russell create the wildest melange of mutants, he offers a rational explanation for the supernatural and the hereafter. This book is a stunner and I don’t know why it languishes in obscurity. I would also recommend Sinister Barrier, Wasp and Three to Conquer by Russell.

Merlin’s Mirror by Andre Norton. I have always thought this version of the Arthurian romance has been overlooked by SF fans.

A Mirror for Observors by Edgar Pangborn. A much better book than Davy, IMO.

The Compleat Werewolf and other Stories by Anthony Boucher. One of the three best single-author short story collections I have read (Sturgeon’s “E Pluribus Unicorn” and Gerald Kersh’s “Men Without Bones” are the other two). Most of the stories are light-hearted, but “They Bite” is one of my favorite horror stories. “The Pink Caterpillar” can also raise some hackles.

Day of the Giants by Lester del Rey. The Norse gods really exist. And they need modern science to help them win Ragnarock.

Syndic by C.M. Kornbluth. A somewhat uneven book, but Kornbluth takes a wild premise – the Mob takes over America – and pokes fun at many sacred cows.

The Silver Eggheads by Fritz Leiber. Fritz satirized damn near everything in this hilarious book.

Reality Chuck: I wholeheartedly agreed with your assessment of Bug Jack Barron. It’s a pity it’s out of print.

Maeglin: Glad to see there are some other Lord Dunsany fans on the board. He also had a profound influence on H.P. Lovecraft’s early work. BTW, Queen and Beagle both took their titles, I think, from a couplet in Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress.”
“The grave is a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Ukelele Ike: According to the web sites I’ve researched, Dannay, either with or without Lee, wrote “A Fine and Private Place.” It isn’t one of the duo’s shining moments IMO, but what the hell, they published plenty of great novels in the '30’s, '40’s and early '50’s.

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I haven’t read this book in years but I absolutely loved it. I stole from the school library for a year and gave it back because I was feeling guily that no-one else could read it. I’d heard there were sequels but I couldn’t find copies anywhere so I might buy them now.
I am also a major Princess Bride fan, and recently saw the actor who plays Wesley in Lady Jane with Helena Bohnam Carter, where he is equally wonderful.

::feeling warm and fuzzy with nostalgia::

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A couple of bygone authors:

Seconding Maeglin’s suggestion of Dunsany. I especially like The Last Book of Wonder, Time and the Gods and The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens.

And Eric R. Eddison, who wrote The Worm Ouroborous, Mistress of Mistresses, etc.

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L. Sprague de Camp died? Damn, I’m sorry to hear that. I met the man once. Besides his sf and fantasy, he should be remembered for his REALLY neglected history novels (If you can find it, read “The Bronze God of Rhodes”. It’s about the making of the Collossus of Rhodes, and is reminiscent of Ken Follet’s “Pillar of the Earth” – a lot of the book is about WHY it got built.). Read “The Ancient Engineers” and “Lost Continents” and the never-mentioned “The Great Monkey Trial”, the best book I’ve read on the Scopes case.

Another book I forgot --and I got my post name from it! – is “This Island Earth”. It’s finally back in print! If you only know the story from the idiotic 1950s film, get ready for a treat – the novel is intelligent and adult.