Fantasy and SF Recommendations: Obscure books and series

[Darth Richard]

Have you guys read anything by this Stephen King fella? I hear his books are real darn good, despite their obscurity.

[polishgenius]

Good, then my mission is succesful.

Pretty crap mission, that.

[Ouranid]

Orgy of the Blood Parasites by Jack Yeovil is a fun little pulp item that does interesting (not revolutionary) things within its genre.

Time Snake and Superclown by Vincent King is well mental, the plot is the sort of thing you´d think up staring at a colander on an uninspired drug cocktail, if you were just a little horny.

I´ve recently discovered Peter Milligan´s run on Shade, the Changing Man, and was delighted to find a superhero that looks just like me. It´s about the sort of controlled insanity comics do so well, a launch title for DC´s Vertigo (Hellraiser, Sandman, Doom Patrol).

[thecryptile]

I think this qualifies as "obscure" (I'm the only one who reviewed it on amazon.com, anyway): Albert Cowdrey's Crux Here's the blurb:

Centuries ago, the Time of Troubles left Earth shattered and nearly empty. But a few survivors in Central Asia and returnees from Luna City hung on to bring the human race back to life. Now the Government of the Universe is spread out among hundreds of worlds. Genghis Khan is idolized as the Great Unifier of Humanity, and democracy is a long-forgotten notion. Old racial and religious divisions have been swept away by the rising oceans which lap around the Appalachian Islands, and peace abounds throughout the stars.

Into this glorious golden age comes a new threat. Scientists in the World City of Ulanor have created a wormhole generator-a machine which can send people into the past. A band of Old Believers, bleeding hearts, and other malcontents who call themselves "the Crux" have captured the generator to undertake the greatest humanitarian mission of all time: to stop the Time of Troubles by assassinating the man responsible, the legendary Minister Destruction.

And here's my review:

I love this book because of the intricate and exotic future world and the quick paced action. The style is much like one of the classic stories by Alfred Bester. I recommend it to any fan of SF.

[Tixu Oty]

Kallocain by Karin Boye is a nice little sci-fi book. It's a lot like 1981 except it was written like a year before. I loved it. It's obviously pretty grim.

Pierre Bordage is one of my favorite authors. I think Wang is the only good one that was translated in English. It's pretty much an apology of chaos. Wang is a Chinese refugee from Poland (yeah cause Eastern Europe got flooded with Asian refugees when Western Europe built a great Wall and closed the gates). The gates open like once a year or so. Wang tries his luck and instead of being used as an organ donor he's made into a kind of gladiator in some large scale battle reality show.

If anybody wants to recommend books that were originally written in German, Portuguese or Swedish bring it on. I like my books in the original version. Good books + language practice = perfect combination.

[sologdin]

guy wrote some pretty good scripts about a ghost telling son to take vengeance, another one with witches and ghosts, another one with a lady turning to stone, another with demons summoned on the battlefield, and another faeries and love potions. so obscure i can't even recall dude's name.

[Ormond]

Obviously "obscure" is relative, but what about:

Fletcher Pratt, The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star

Pauline J. Alama, The Eye of the World

R. A. MacAvoy, "A Trio for Lute" trilogy (Damiano, Damiano's Lute, and Raphael)

John Crowley, Little, BIg

(Crowley is very well known by literary critics of the field but it seems to me he's still fairly obscure with the general reading public.)

[PhoenixFlame]

Oh, was digging through old stuff and came across an old favorite.

The Firebringer trilogy, by Meredith Ann Pierce. Not the Fire Bringer about red deer. This one's about unicorns who were driven from their homeland by wyverns and now fight gryphons.The prose is really, really beautiful. It's YA, but it goes to some weird places. The first in the trilogy is called Birth of the Firebringer.

“Jan could not recall ever seeing a creature more beautiful, though there nagged somewhere at the back of his mind the notion that she ought to have seemed hideous. Why? For she was pure, admirably pure, without a twinge of conscience or shame.”

[The Evil Queen]

Sime/Gen novels by Jaqueline Lichtenberg... I don't even know how to describe them really, I enjoy them, and I think they're pretty obscure, I did a quick search and had no results on this forum anyways.

Tales of the Timuras (trilogy) by Allan Cole, again not sure about obscurity, but Timura didn't show in the search, even if Allan Cole did for his collaboration in the Sten books.

[mgambino]

Tales of the Timuras (trilogy) by Allan Cole, again not sure about obscurity, but Timura didn't show in the search, even if Allan Cole did for his collaboration in the Sten books.

Seconded!!!

I'd like to throw in ANYTHING by Walter Moers, but particularly Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures. Moers is crazy popular in Germany, but he doesn't seem to have much of an American following.

Also, I'd recommend the Highroad Trilogy by Kate Elliott. I know she isn't obscure, but she originally published this under her real name before she started writing as Kate Elliott.

[Jo498]

But Moers is kind of crazy, isn't he? It's very entertaining, but probably hell to translate with all these anagrams etc., and VERY different from most contemporary fantasy. "Rumo" is probably closest, because it is mainly a traditional "quest" and also the one I'd recommend

[maarsen]

guy wrote some pretty good scripts about a ghost telling son to take vengeance, another one with witches and ghosts, another one with a lady turning to stone, another with demons summoned on the battlefield, and another faeries and love potions. so obscure i can't even recall dude's name.

Must be some old dude because I remember some stories like that when I was in school back in the seventies.

[Jo498]

For something really different check out "The manuscript found in Saragossa" by Count Jan Potocki. Written in the early 19th century it is a mixture of swashbuckling adventure, Arabian Nights and a few other ingredients and highly entertaining (if you are into this kind of stuff).

[Tixu Oty]

^ That sounds nice.

[Lord of Rhinos]

For something really different check out "The manuscript found in Saragossa" by Count Jan Potocki. Written in the early 19th century it is a mixture of swashbuckling adventure, Arabian Nights and a few other ingredients and highly entertaining (if you are into this kind of stuff).

That book is considered a classic. It isn't obscure.

[mgambino]

That book is considered a classic. It isn't obscure.

I think something can probably be considered both a classic and obscure, depending on the audience. How many non-Muslems have read The Adventures of Amir Hamza? That one is a classic, but super-obscure to most westerners.

[Jo498]

@mgambino: very good point. I had never heard of The Adventures of Amir Hamza until now.

I may have not used the search function properly, but I searched the "Literature" forum for "Potocki" before I mentioned the Saragossa Files and nothing came up, so it seemed obscure enough to be mentioned in this thread. It certainly is not as well known as Arabian Nights or Gulliver's Travels or Shelley's Frankenstein or Poe or similar older stuff.

[mgambino]

@mgambino: very good point. I had never heard of The Adventures of Amir Hamza until now.

I may have not used the search function properly, but I searched the "Literature" forum for "Potocki" before I mentioned the Saragossa Files and nothing came up, so it seemed obscure enough to be mentioned in this thread. It certainly is not as well known as Arabian Nights or Gulliver's Travels or Shelley's Frankenstein or Poe or similar older stuff.

I'd never heard of Saragosssa Files before, and it sounds like something that's right up my alley.

[Jo498]

Just to be clear, "Saragossa files" was a lame joke of mine, the actual title is given above in #153. I found it highly entertaining, but it is of course very different from modern fantasy. It's a web of stories within a framework that is maybe best described as cloak-and-dagger, with so many nested stories told by characters from a story one level above (like in some of the Arabian Nights) that one tends to lose the orientation and forgets on which level of the nested tales we are right now.

Interestingly the manuscript of the book itself had a somewhat adventurous fate, apparently the polish original got lost, the history is in the wikipedia entry. Habent sua fata libelli, indeed.

[Mysterios]

Let's see... I've been reading YA vampire stuff lately (but not Twilight), so I go for Nancy Collins' Vamps and Lucienne Diver's Vamped.

Old stuff I like includes The Fall of Worlds Trilogy by Francine Mezo, The Sword is Forged by Evangeline Walton and The Shattered Horse by S.P. Somtow.