# Recommend Some Good, Little Known Sci/fi **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 5, 2003, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741 "2003-10-05T18:36:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Zenster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/cdc98d/32.png) [@Zenster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zenster)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/21 "2003-10-06T05:28:44Z")
Also, anything by the team of Fredrick Pohl and CM Kornbluth:[ul][li] Search the Sky[/li][li] The Space Merchants[/li][li] Gladiator at Law[/li][li] Wolfbane[/li] The Wonder Effect[/ul]“The Space Merchants” has been translated into more different languages that any other science fiction book written. Classic stuff. ---
**Author:** ![widdershins](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f0a364/32.png) [@widdershins](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/widdershins)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 6:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/22 "2003-10-06T06:47:55Z")
People remember the movie _The Man Who Fell To Earth_ but overlook the great little novel by Walter Tevis it was based on. I’ve never read his sci-fi novel _Mockingbird_ but it’s supposed to be worth seeking out also. Tevis also wrote the novel made into _The Hustler_, a strange contrast of works. Since someone mentioned John Brunner, I’ll add _The Shockwave Rider_, an interesting proto-cyberpunk novel. ---
**Author:** ![Rocketeer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rocketeer/32/4437_2.png) [@Rocketeer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rocketeer)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/23 "2003-10-06T13:21:28Z")
Alfred Bester: **The Demolished Man** , as mentioned previously, but also the best space opera ever written, **The Stars My Destination**. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/24 "2003-10-06T13:43:32Z")
It is sad to see some of these authors listed as “obscure.” Bester, Smith, Kornbluth, Van Vogt, Brown, Simak, Clement, Brunner, and Pohl are giants of the genre. Might as well list Asimov as obscure. :rolleyes: So, do we list great forgotten writers, or great books that are fairly obscure? Some of my choices: **Replay** by Ken Grimwood – A truly great novel asking, “what if you could live your life over again? And again? And again?” **Fluke; Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings** by Christopher Moore – The most delightful SF book I’ve read in a very long time. Starts as a hard science book about studying whale behavior, and goes off in bizarre and amazing directions. Great, funny characters. **Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy** by Matt Ruff – Insane SF novel set in 2023 New York, with androids, alligators, and a mutant shark in the sewers. Especially good if you dislike Ayn Rand; he rakes her over the coals. ---
**Author:** ![NE\_Texan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/e99b99/32.png) [@NE\_Texan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NE_Texan)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/25 "2003-10-06T18:37:43Z")
Tim Powers is passed up way too often. Gene Wolfe is one of my favorites, along with Zelazny, but I’m not at all sure they qualify as “Little Known”. Oh, and Iain Banks - both the stuff they shelve in the sci-fi section, and the stuff they shelve with the regular fiction. ---
**Author:** ![krisolov](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/krisolov/32/3724_2.png) [@krisolov](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/krisolov)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/26 "2003-10-06T20:25:27Z")
Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series are incredible in scope Rudy Rucker’s Software, Wetware, Realware books are great reads, written by a mathemetician George Alec Effinger’s stuff is good too, if you can find it. ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/27 "2003-10-06T23:23:06Z")
I don’t know if I fit into this thread or not, but I like Robert J Sawyer’s books, so far. I’ve read _Calculating God_ and I’m 2/3 of the way through his _Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy_, consisting of _Hominids, Humans and Hybrids_ (Hybrinds is on its way from indigo at the moment!) He has a bunch of other books, which seem to be all in the sci-fi/philosophy genre, most taking place in contemporary times. Calculating God takes place in Toronto (at the ROM), and the Neanderthal Parallax shifts around Ontario and upstate New York - the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is a big part of the setting. The author has a website at [www.sfwriter.com](http://www.sfwriter.com) . The author is Canadian, hence the locations 🙂 I am not a big sci-fi fan, though I have read a few books by different authors here and there, but I REALLY like Sawyer’s writing. I read both the first Neanderthal books in a matter of hours, and I am anxiously waiting for the last one. I plan on reading the rest of his books, too. ---
**Author:** ![Rhelle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e480ec/32.png) [@Rhelle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rhelle)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/28 "2003-10-07T01:25:56Z")
**Jack Vance** has been recommended very highly, but I usually read fantasy novels. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Hometownboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/5e9695/32.png) [@Hometownboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hometownboy)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/29 "2003-10-07T02:34:07Z")
This far and no one has mentioned Edgar Pangborn’s **Davy**? That absolute classic has some of the most joyous and _human_ writing in all of SF. And that includes all the rude stuff that makes us ashamed to be human sometimes as well, so it’s not just a feelgood gloss. It’s a work than can make us look at humanity, warts and all, and still feel the joy. And while you’re at it, look up his novelette **Angel’s Egg**. Again, it will slip under your radar and affect you deeply. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/30 "2003-10-07T05:38:30Z")
IMHO any thread of this nature deserves a link to this excellent thread: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74792](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74792) - Tamerlane ---
**Author:** ![Odinoneeye](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/97f17d/32.png) [@Odinoneeye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odinoneeye)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 6:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/31 "2003-10-07T06:44:48Z")
I’ve become a fan of Bob Shaw lately. **Orbitsville** which is about a dyson sphere with a diameter larger than Earth’s orbit. He’s really good at impressing how really huge this thing is. **The Land/Overland** trilogy **Medusa’s Children** ---
**Author:** ![Banquet\_Bear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banquet_bear/32/373_2.png) [@Banquet\_Bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banquet_Bear)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 7:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/32 "2003-10-07T07:03:48Z")
\*\* … Only Forward … \*\* By Michael Marshall Smith [http://www.scwu.com/bookreviews/h/SmithMichaelMarshallOnlyForward.shtml](http://www.scwu.com/bookreviews/h/SmithMichaelMarshallOnlyForward.shtml) ---
**Author:** ![don\_t\_ask](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e68b1a/32.png) [@don\_t\_ask](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/don_t_ask)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 7:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/33 "2003-10-07T07:22:43Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by widdershins \* > **People remember the movie _The Man Who Fell To Earth_ but overlook the great little novel by Walter Tevis it was based on. I’ve never read his sci-fi novel _Mockingbird_ but it’s supposed to be worth seeking out also. Tevis also wrote the novel made into _The Hustler_, a strange contrast of works.** I will second Tevis. A fair chunk of _Mockingbird_ is available to read at [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com). He also wrote another S/F book I’ve never found called _The Steps of the Sun_ and the best novel about chess _Queen’s Gambit_. Jonathan Carroll writes a unique kind of fantasy rather than S/F. Stephen King in reviewing _The Heidelberg Cylinder_ says _Jonathan Carroll is as scary as Hitchcock, when he isn’t being as funny as Jim Carrey. If you’ve never read this wonderful fantasist, buy this book. You’ll stay up all night and thank me in the morning._ ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 10:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/34 "2003-10-07T10:13:10Z")
Most of what’s being mentioned isn’t really obscure at all, so I think I’ll just give a list of my 20 favorite science fiction novels/series: 1. Olaf Stapledon _First and Last Men_ and _Starmaker_ 2. Philip Jose Farmer _The Riverworld Series_ 3. Frank Herbert _Dune_ (and maybe its sequels) 4. Walter Miller _A Canticle for Leibowitz_ 5. Alfred Bester _The Stars My Destination_ 6. Ursula K. LeGuin _The Left Hand of Darkness_ 7. H. G. Wells _The Time Machine_ 8. Philip K. Dick _The Man in the High Castle_ 9. Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth _The Space Merchants_ 10. Theodore Sturgeon _More than Human_ 11. Roger Zelazny _Lord of Light_ 12. Arthur C. Clarke _Against the Fall of Night_ 13. Stanislaw Lem _Solaris_ 14. Ken Grimwood _Replay_ 15. Joe Haldeman _The Forever War_ 16. Michael Frayn _The Tin Men_ 17. Larry Niven _Ringworld_ 18. Robert Heinlein _Stranger in a Strange Land_ 19. Clifford Simak _City_ 20. Isaac Asimov _The End of Eternity_ ---
**Author:** ![Badtz\_Maru](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e36b37/32.png) [@Badtz\_Maru](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Badtz_Maru)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/35 "2003-10-07T10:20:59Z")
Robert Charles Wilson is relatively unknown, but is an excellent author and plays with some truly innovative ideas. In _Darwinia_, Europe experiences ‘The Miracle’ in 1912. The continent and everyone on it disappears and is replaced overnight with a strange alternate-Earth, which looks like it could have diverged from ours hundreds of millions of years ago - nothing recognizably related to life elsewhere. As the story progresses through the decades, there are some really interesting twists regarding the nature of the universe. _Bios_ is a very dark story of space exploration on a world with a biology that is far older than ours, and very hostile. _A Bridge of Years_ is one of the best time travel stories I have ever read. All of Wilson’s characters seem like real, living people, but I was touched even more by the ones in this novel. _Mysterium_ is the story of a small town that is transported to an alternate universe where French and English practictioners of a faith that seems a hybrid of Gnostic Christianity and Roman beliefs are fighting over the Americas with pagan Spaniards. The English quickly seize the town, and they are both intrigued by our technology (they are about 50 years behind us) and repulsed by our extremely heretical beliefs. This was supposedly going to be the screenplay for a made-for-TV movie or miniseries, and I think it would be an excellent one. I don’t know what it is about his writing, but I really like it. Part of it is that it is stylistically different from most SF - it reads like quality mainstream fiction. The characters are developed very well, in one of the books you come to feel a great sympathy for a character that you still realize is extremely dangerous and needs to be destroyed. Characters also die unexpectedly, and really tragic things happen, sometimes on a scale beyond our imagining. Highly recomended. ---
**Author:** ![Odinoneeye](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/97f17d/32.png) [@Odinoneeye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odinoneeye)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/36 "2003-10-07T10:44:35Z")
I’ve only read Darwinia, but I loved it. I’ll have to look for more of his stuff. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 11:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/37 "2003-10-07T11:23:28Z")
Ian Watson (a British writer of high calibre). Any of his short story collections are awesome. Full Length novels: The Flies of Memory. Oracle. Hard to find though. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 11:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/38 "2003-10-07T11:58:30Z")
There’s a lot of obscure SG by well-known authors, which probably fits the bill. Most of Jules Verne’s ouevre isn’t reallty well known, and is worth reading. For example: **The Purchase of the North Pole** – the _second_ sequel to From the Earth to the Moon **The Hunt for the Meteor** – AFAIK, the first Sf story to use a “tractor beam” **The Fur Country** – Canadian adventurers inadvertently travel through the Northwest Passage. Cute twist. **Tribulations of a Chinaman** – how many books by European authors in the 19th centuyry had Chinese heros? H.G. Wells also wrote quite a few little-known books, many of them outside the field of SF. But have you read **The Star-Begotten**? Aliens induce genetic change in human beings usinf cosmic rays. Not as impressive as it sounds, but the premise seems incredibly advanced for its time. As for obscure authors, I’m sure I’ll offend some fans, but here goes: **Raymond Z. Gallum** isn’t exactly a household name, but he wrote some good SF back in the Golden Age, and was still writing in the late 1970s. The book **The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun** collects the short stories, including “Seeds of the Dusk” (which was in the landmark anthology “Adventures in Tim and Space”) and the Martian Astronomer tale “Number One” (referenced in Larry Niven’s “Rainbow Mars”). **F.M. Busby** doesn’t seem to be well known. I found his “Demu Trilogy” to be pretty pulpish. It’s the “Independence Day”- type story about technologically superior alien i9nvaders. The Earth guys very improbably turn the tables on them – a common theme in SF, and one that never seems convincing. But **Cage a Man** and the short story “The Learning of Eeshta”, which are part of the Demu saga, rise far above the tenor of the rest. Busby has latched onto some interesting concepts that say something about people and the human condition. **T.J. Bass** seems to have written hardly anything. As far as I can tell, his output consists of two books that were all over the place back in the 1970s, but now seem to have disappeared – **The Godwhale** and **Half Past Human**. They’re connected works. Bass throws out a _lot_ of off-the-wall concepts, constantly moving on to new ones (sort of like what Dan Simmons started doing at the end of his “Hyperion/Endymion” series). I get the impression that Larry Niven hated this stuff, but I found it an interesting read. ---
**Author:** ![booklover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/85f322/32.png) [@booklover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/booklover)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/39 "2003-10-07T14:52:57Z")
A fairly obscure SF book that I enjoyed is _How Like A God_ by Brenda Clough. There’s a sequel which is not quite so good. Also, there’s a series called “Magic Time” by Marc Zicree and another author. I read the first one and I see that the second one has finally come out. It appears to be kind of a government conspiracy, world-is-crumbling series. ---
**Author:** ![Isabelle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b5a626/32.png) [@Isabelle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isabelle)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741/40 "2003-10-07T16:29:30Z")
Soylent Green is a classic. The Blob is a classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recommend-some-good-little-known-sci-fi/205741.md?page=3)