What lesser-known sci-fi reads do you recommend?
There are some great novel recommendations here, but I wouldn't say that most of them are lesser-known.
What are your recommendations?
As for me, I've exclusively read well-known novels, except if you consider someone like Alfred Bester obscure, for example.
One exception: Misha Burnett's Endless Summer: Twelve Strange Tales of Mankind's Future. It's a collection of exceptionnaly well-crafted stories. It ain't a novel, though.
https://tildes.net/~books/1vlc/what_lesser_known_sci_fi_reads_do_you_recommendOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
51 replies
This is a good topic. I bet there are people out there who have read some obscure stuff but don't realize it.
I think Vernor Vinge is a good choice (I see them mentioned in the original post). True Names is not unknown (it is an excellent and prescient novella), but there people that would overlook it for different reasons. I love sci-fi but I'm not well-read enough. A few years ago I might have been able to drop names left and right, but I'll throw the Semiosis Trilogy (Sue Burke) in just because I enjoyed that one and I was thinking about it today for some reason.
Oh shit the third Semiosis came out? Loved the first couple, how did I miss that?
I missed it too until I Iooked up the duology again yesterday and saw that it had become a trilogy.
Wyrm by Mark Fabi
It's all about computers and online gaming, and it was written in 1988 so it's a little dated, but it's also amazingly prescient in a lot of ways. Furthermore it's a bit like a proto-LitRPG novel before that was even a genre.
Bloom by Wil McCarthy
A really good gray-goo/nanotech apocalypse story.
Oh yeah, our protag was a serious Mary Sue!
Awesome read though.
Which one? I don't recall either leading character being overly Mary Sue-ish, but it's been a while since I read them.
Wyrm?
So we have our protag and his encyclopedic knowledge of dork culture, an external hard drive filled with live computer viruses, and he's not just taking class with the local kung fu school - but he knows better than to jog barefoot in the snow: because he's been there/done that. So we are schooling and entire class full of would be martial artists on how to do it better.
And then he's off on a date - because our kung fu, have-laptop-will-teavel, aspie-coder protag is also a chick magnet?
Yeah. Mary Sue.
Awesome read though. Even had chess lines in the back appendix.
Fair enough.
The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy is one of my top ten fav Sci Fi novels. Bloom was also good...
I'll check it out!
Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad. It's an anthology style and takes place in a far future where most of the characters are robots, focusing often on two constructors who compete with each other in achieving some goal first or building the best machine for a contest.
Other than the Tarkovsky's production, it's been adapted into movies rather badly, but Lem's Solaris is a fine read as well.
I feel like stepping outside native English works is a bit like cheating. 😃 There's a lot of super interesting European scifi. During the USSR it was a major form of escapism and veiled criticism all over Eastern Europe so that area alone yielded a massive amount of scifi, but there's a rich history of the genre all over Europe. Mostly it got translated to neighboring European languages, seldom to English, and even if it did most likely never reached other continents.
To fit the theme I will give some French examples because French scifi has some major wierdos:
If you manage to read any of them I don't think you'll be dissapointed.
Tanith Lee. "The Silver Metal Lover." "Don't Bite The Sun." "Venus Preserved."
She's mostly known for fantasy, but her science fiction is great.
Joanna Russ. First openly gay SF writer. "Picnic On Paradise" and "The Female Man."
R. A. Lafferty. Insanely good short stories.
Jumper by Steven Gould. They made a movie, but it wan't anything like the series.
I loved the book as a teen, haven't reread it since my 20s but I probably read it five or six times.
The sequels were meh with one exception:
The one about his daughter doing a space startup was fun because I work in New Space and pretty much all the tech stuff she does is real. I was on the first project to use Iridium to send data between earth and above the Karmen Line and we currently have a payload in orbit aboard Vigoride-7 doing exactly that. So when we have Davie and Millie's daughter teleporting herself into orbit and talking to the ground on an Iridium phone which sets off an alarm at Iridium HQ I was like... "Hell yeah, she can do that! And it would."
I don't see Ken Grimwood's Replay mentioned too often. It's an entertaining and emotionally compelling novel about a man who finds himself waking up in a time loop after he dies, with the loop narrowing each cycle. It explores some themes about what you'd do differently, and what you'd lose because you could never recreate some moments or meetings in the right way.
Interesting, makes me think about the movie Groundhog day.
Similar, yeah, but the loop starts out much longer than one day. I think I read somewhere that the book was a big inspiration for the movie.
The Black Ocean series by J.S. Morin is one of my lesser known faves. It has a kind of weird mixture of SciFi tech and ancient magic that's really fun.
I second this! There are several fun series in the Black Ocean universe. I started with Galaxy Outlaws. The audio books are also expertly narrated! Leslie Buroker also has a fun space opera series called Star Kingdom.
Does The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams count as lesser-known?
CW: extreme graphic sex and violence, suicidality, neural network AGI a little too close to Big Tech's wet dreams (eerie for a 1994 novel: self-fulfilling prophecy?)
I love this story so much. I read it years and years ago and found it recently.
The pip and flinx series by Alan dean foster
I love Alan Dean Foster's work for the most part. His writing is excellent and hes been writing for eons.
Woah.. been a hot minute since I thought about these. "The Flinx was an ethical thief..."
"Secret Realms" by Tom Cool
An Ender style War College of Matrix kids in the near future. It's seriously a solid read.
"The Uplift Storm" Trilogy by David Brin
Sapient Dolphins take on a hostile universe with the help of all manner of aliens, not as good as the Uplift Trilogy, lesser known and worth a rec.
"The Bridge Trilogy" by William Gibson
The Sprawl is too dated, the Blue Ant is too near the present. This one is just right.
"The Nights Dawn Trilogy" by Peter F. Hamilton
If you liked The Expanse (books or show) this is your jam. Phenomenal world building, fast paced story, sharp prose and then it goes off the rails so hard you'll need a support group to deal with it (stop reading when Al Capone shows up... Just.. seriously, stop)
Seconding Night's Dawn, hell of a series. I come back to it every few years after I've forgotten enough to need refreshing again.
+1 for Night's Dawn or anything written by Peter F. Hamilton. He is 100% our best living ScFi author, I have nearly every book he's written on my shelf. Night's Dawn trilogy is amazing, but is a daunting length - I usually recommended Fallen Dragon to introduce new readers to his work, as it's much more contained (a standalone novel) and is brilliant.
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. It's a short story.
Please read it before checking what year it was written. Come back here and write your guess in a reply before checking.
Damn! The year was the first thing I saw. Incredibly prescient.
This was assigned reading and the instructor had us guess about the year of publication also. Interesting to me that the question is still being asked, since it was four decades ago when I read it.
Interesting. I only discovered it a year or two ago, and not because of school or anything. I believe I saw it mentioned in a comment on Hackernews, and and the commenters praised it a lot there, so I read it.
The Bolo series. Originated with Keith Laumer. Mostly short stories written by Keith and others. A few long form books by David Weber and John Ringo.
The Bolos are sentient tanks who are tragic heros. And are basically future knights.
While not really ground breaking, I've always enjoyed the stories and reread them every couple of years.
They definitely deserve more love.
Who doesn't love the dinochrome brigade?
The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam is easily my most recommended and gifted series outside of the mainstream. I’ve bought book one 6 times now!
If you can lay hands on a copy, "The People", "The Anything Box", and "Holding Wonder" by Zenna Henderson are all worthwhile.
Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold.
I've put together a few book recommendations for lesser-known cyberpunk/tech noir stories:
The Other Kind of Life by Shamus Young - Cyberpunk / Tech Noir
The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth - Protocyberpunk
The Velvet Glove by Harry Harrison - Protocyberpunk short story
The Petrovitch Trilogy by Simon Morden - cyberpunk book series
Frontera by Lewis Shiner - Proto(?)cyberpunk Book
Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality universe. Smith was an interesting person himself, he was in national intelligence.
The Instrumentality was a very strange and vivid world building paradigm, and his writing is very compelling. Too bad there isn't a hundred more stories.
The StarCraft novels are pretty good IMO, especially if you are already a fan of the game.
I don't know if Clifford D. Simak is lesser known, but his work is pretty foundational for a lot of more modern sci-fi. Before there was "I, Robot", there was "City".
Before there were Ewoks, there was "Little Fuzzy".Before there were living ships like in Farscape, Lexx, or Xenogenesis, there was "The Visitors".I should have remembered that was H. Beam Piper. Also great.
Clifford Simak didn't write Little Fuzzy. That was H. Beam Piper.
Correct. My mistake.
Sandkings by GRR Martin is really good.
I read this as a kid in the Omni Book of Science Fiction. It lives rent-free in my mind to this day.
GRR Martin wrote some very cool SciFi, honestly wish he'd stuck to it rather than Fantasy.
Jack Vance has some gems; the Durdane trilogy is a fun time if you ever get the chance. Three short books, "The Anome" (also published as "The Faceless Man"), "The Brave Free Men", and "The Asutra".
In Her Name series by Michael R. hicks. A series of novels about conflict between humanity and a race of far superior cat women. There's a whole lot more to it but it's a great read with an interesting story.
the truth machine! it was formative for me! i think it came out in the 90s
I really enjoy Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity (1954) and the sequel Star Light (1971). The worldbuilding is really good, and it gives new a similar feeling of wonder as Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama (1973) and Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970).