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.
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.
Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man, as mentioned previously, but also the best space opera ever written, The Stars My Destination.
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.
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.
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.
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 . 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.
Jack Vance has been recommended very highly, but I usually read fantasy novels.
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.
IMHO any thread of this nature deserves a link to this excellent thread:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74792
- Tamerlane
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
** … Only Forward … **
By Michael Marshall Smith
http://www.scwu.com/bookreviews/h/SmithMichaelMarshallOnlyForward.shtml
I will second Tevis. A fair chunk of Mockingbird is available to read at 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.
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:
- Olaf Stapledon First and Last Men and Starmaker
- Philip Jose Farmer The Riverworld Series
- Frank Herbert Dune (and maybe its sequels)
- Walter Miller A Canticle for Leibowitz
- Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination
- Ursula K. LeGuin The Left Hand of Darkness
- H. G. Wells The Time Machine
- Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle
- Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth The Space Merchants
- Theodore Sturgeon More than Human
- Roger Zelazny Lord of Light
- Arthur C. Clarke Against the Fall of Night
- Stanislaw Lem Solaris
- Ken Grimwood Replay
- Joe Haldeman The Forever War
- Michael Frayn The Tin Men
- Larry Niven Ringworld
- Robert Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land
- Clifford Simak City
- Isaac Asimov The End of Eternity
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.
I’ve only read Darwinia, but I loved it.
I’ll have to look for more of his stuff.
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.
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.
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.
Soylent Green is a classic.
The Blob is a classic
Invasion of the Body Snatchers