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.
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.
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.
Damn! The year was the first thing I saw. Incredibly prescient.
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.
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:
- Pierre Stolze, “Marilyn Monroe et les samouraïs du père Noël” (Marilyn Monroe and Santa’s samurais)
- Gerard Klein, “Les Seigneurs de la guerre” (The Lords of War)
- Pierre Barbet, “L’Empire du Baphomet” (Baphomet’s Empire)
If you manage to read any of them I don’t think you’ll be dissapointed.
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 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.
“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.
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.
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…”
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!
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
Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith
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).
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.
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”.
