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.
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.
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 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.
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold.
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.”
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.
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”.
Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith
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 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.
If you can lay hands on a copy, “The People”, “The Anything Box”, and “Holding Wonder” by Zenna Henderson are all worthwhile.
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.
