Those of us who are bookworms have probably all had this experience: you pick up a book, and it captures your soul. You can't put it down. In fact it's so good, when you get to the end you might even turn back to page one and just start reading again.
And yet, you never meet anyone who's ever read it. You never hear about it winning any awards, or see any reviews of it. Years later you look for it and it's never on any bookstore shelves. You may find it on listings of obscure or out-of-print books, and maybe not even then.
These days it's a little better, because there are so many booksellers online. You can find those obscure out-of-print books and get a copy if you want one. But it's sometimes still just a little sad: you look at this wonderful book, and you realize that while it's still floating around out there in the out-of-print book stores, almost no one will ever read it. It had perhaps one print run many years ago, and then disappeared.
Two books I can think of off the top of my head like that are Buddy Holly Is Alive And Well On Ganymede by Bradley Denton, and Ariel by Stephen R. Boyett. Both of these books had perhaps one print run many years ago. Almost no one has heard of them or read them. Yet I loved them so much I read them more than once and many, many years later they still stick with me. Yet still, almost no one's read them. (Although I'm happy to see that Ariel, at least, is now available as an e-book).
Any of you guys got books like this? Books you loved that it seems like no one ever read but you?
The Tombs of Atuuan by Ursula K. LeGuin. Although this book is 2nd in a series of 3 books, I never read the other two. This one hit me so hard it has never left my mind. I believe it is one book that has strongly influenced my own bent toward gothic fantasy/horror.
Sabella by Tanith Lee. To me this is the best vampire story in print. Sorry Anne Rice, Lestat has got nothing on this strange girl.
Death's Master by Tanith Lee. A dreadfully dark fantasy about a child born of its dead mother... and it just gets odder still.
Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede was a very cool book. I once toyed with the notion of adapting it into a screenplay (I might've even done the opening scene, with the satellite dish), but who the hell would go see such a movie?
Still, the scene of the little boy and his mother trapped on a rooftop as a tornado approaches, hysterically singing "I Can See For Miles And Miles" to each other to keep from panicking, is something that should be filmed.
And I just loved Ringo.
It was published as a mid-list book, one print run only I think, and more or less disappeared. Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's SF) gave it a good write-up at the time, along with some other mid-listers, and that's how I found it. The review was either by the late Baird Searles, or Norman Spinrad, I honestly don't remember which.
There, see? A fellow Michigander knows one of the books, at least. :)
Oh yeah! Both of those books are great reads, although neither will likely qualify as great literature. I never could get into anything else of Bradley Denton's that I've tried. Boyett only has one other published novel, The Architect of Sleep, which was interesting, but he never got another novel out. He has (or had) a website which details why. (Its partly because Architect was about giant racoons! Oh, and the publishing industry is dysfunctional and bizarre.)
Many "lost cult classics" have been revived by small presses in recent years.
Some fun SF/fantasy books (since you appear to like SF) which disappeared barely without a trace:
The Interior Life, by "Katherine Blake" (a nom de plume of Dorothy J. Heydt). A housewife lives a fantasy dream life. Heydt's much more recent "A Point of Honor" is good too, and isn't anywhere near as hard to find--but OOP.
P.C. Hodgell's dark fantasies were very OOP for a long time, until Meisha Merlin reprinted them in a single volume a few yars ago. Meisha Merlin (www.meishamerlin.com) has reprinted a lot of good mid-list stuff which had gone OOP. Check out Sharon Lee/Steve Miller, Lee Killough, Phyllis Eisenstein, Sylvia Engdahl, Janet Kagan.
Silverlock, by John Myers Myers. I think I picked it up at the used bookstore off State Street in Ann Arbor during an Art Fair, IIRC. I was roughly 12 at the time, and had just finished one of the Stephen R. Donaldson Covenant books (Lord Foul's Bane, maybe?). This terrific book sat in a place of prominence on my bookshelf until I lost it in a move. I've meant for years to replace it, and this blog entry moved me to do just that. A quick search at abebooks.com shows that the New England SciFi Association has just released a hardcover edition including the "Silverlock Companion". Happy Birthday to me!
One that comes to mind is "Hopeful Monsters", by Nicholas Mosley - one of my favorite novels of all time. The only people I know besides myself who have read it are people that I MADE read it.
Another one was actually quite famous in its day, and turned into a TV series - The book is "I was a teenage dwarf", by Max Shulman. Truly one of the funniest books I have ever read. Out of print now. I found it at the Strand for 2 bucks.
These books are treasures to me. I am sure I will think of more!
The Book Of The Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin Jr (1979).
A House-Boat On The River Styx by John Kendrick Bangs (1895).
melmoth the wanderer by charles robert maturin. it's still very in print (pick up the penguin version if you buy it, since it has extremely detailed and helpful footnotes), and supposedly a classic, yet i don't know anyone besides myself who's read it. maybe i just need different friends?
Two more that come to me off the top of my head:
Round the Bend, by Nevil Shute
Space Relations, by Donald Barr (I think)
Whoops, let's add a third:
Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner
Tower of Fear by Glen Cook his best work that went virtually unnoticed because of the popularity of his Black Company and Garrett novels.
Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip - probably the most underrated Fantasy author ever.
A Genius for War by Trevor N. Dupuy - non-fiction military history, but one of the best reads I've ever had. Although I suspect there may be a couple of regular commenters here who actually have it on thier shelves :)
I haven't read Ariel, but will soon. It's on my shelf, but I haven't been in the mood to read it yet.
Why?
Because Stephen R. Boyett is, in all probability, a self-absorbed prick.
What? How can I say such a thing? Well, waaaayyyy back in the 80s, I ran across a book with a bipedal raccoon on the cover, looking rather mean and wearing a Freddy-Kreuger-style bladed glove. In this case, you can judge a book by its cover. It was one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read, a fascinating glimpse into a world of alternate evolution. And he understood language like few authors do.
Alas, it was part one of a multi-part story. And although I waited for years, no follow up. It was written by, you guessed it, Stephen R. Boyett.
Years later, just 2 years ago, in fact, I found it again at a used bookstore and bought it to see if it was as good as I remembered. It was. But now we have the internet, so I started researching him, seeing what other people said about the book at Amazon, hoping that maybe he'd put out the conclusionary novel without my noticing.
Nope. What I found was a website in which he vaguely describes some sort of contractual squabble with his publisher, so he decided to not write the rest of the series. I saw that his fans have been begging him for more than a decade to write more in the Ariel milieu, but guess what? He had one planned, but another contractual squabble with a different publisher means he won't ever write anything more there, either. And his attitude seemed to be, "Hey, fans, screw you. This is my book and my money, and I don't give a flying rat's butt what you want."
Sure, he doesn't owe us anything. But it seems to me that if he has two squabbles with two different publishers, and these publishers have been around for years without any similarly antagonistic clashes (to the point the author refuses to write any more), the problem is HIM, not them. But anyway, if you ever want to read an awesome novel that leaves you hanging, The Architects of Sleep is the one you want.
More great novels no one seems to know:
The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock
Replay by Ken Grimwood
Jumper by Steven Gould
Wrack and Roll by Bradley Denton
Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
Admittedly, I picked this one up in Jr. High, when it was still a fairly recent publication, but Operation Chaos, by Poul Anderson, is a favourite read. A witch and a werewolf going behind enemy lines during WWII to find the Nazis' newest super-weapon, a powerful demon, made for a great opening to the story. After that, the plot gets interesting.
For pure wierd, I would nominate Dahlgren, by Sam Delaney. This is his longest work, and he was deep into his obsession with language at the time. It isn't a book for the faint of heart, especially if you are really uptight in matters of sexual relations. But if you want a real mental workout, this is a good one.
I am also reading another fascinating piece of fiction. Or, rather, I am told it is fiction. The narrative is pretty compelling. However, I've been sworn to secrecy on it. Besides, it isn't done yet. };-)
Despite the horror that was the cinematic version, I LOVED "Battlefield Earth" and read it 6 or 7 times as a teen.
Also in the teen read category were The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.
Of course there's the Bible. Nobody really reads that, but everybody thinks they've got it down. My counterpoint to the Bible is "The Blind Watchmaker," which is truly an astounding read.
"Paperback Writer" by Mark Schiffer. It's a parody novel about the Beatles reuniting in 1979 to make a truly wretched album that leads to their being third-billed on a tour behind Peter Frampton and the Sex Pistols. Sonny and Cher play a big part in it as well.
Shockwave Rider is one I still read on a yearly basis- it's still in print.
The Forever War by Haldeman is another- it had some success, but you ahrdly ever hear of it any more.
Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, a book which asserts, among many other things, that the planet Venus did not exist until recently.
Some 3500 years ago in the guise of a gigantic comet, it grazed Earth a couple of times, after having been ejected from the planet Jupiter some indefinite time earlier, before settling into its current orbit.
Velikovsky (1895-1979), a psychiatrist by training, does not base his claims on astronomical evidence and scientific inference or argument. Instead, he argues on the basis of ancient cosmological myths from places as disparate as India and China, Greece and Rome, Assyria and Sumer.
For example, ancient Greek mythology asserts that the goddess Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. Velikovsky identifies Athena with the planet Venus, though the Greeks didn't. The Greek counterpart of the Roman Venus was Aphrodite. Velikovsky identifies Zeus (whose Roman counterpart was the god Jupiter) with the planet Jupiter.
This myth, along with others from ancient Egypt, Israel, Mexico, etc., are used to support the claim that "Venus was expelled as a comet and then changed to a planet after contact with a number of members of our solar system" (Velikovsky 1972,182).
Etherian: I suggest that you read the other 2 books in the Earthsea trilogy; you're missing out.
Kurt: Patricia McKillip created one of my favorite trilogies of all time which began with "The Riddle Master of Hed". I haven't re-read it in 20 years but have it prominently displayed on my bookshelf.
Anyone into old, somewhat obscure scifi? How about the Skylark and Lensmen series by E.E. Doc Smith? Dated today, yet still wonderfully imaginative.
"The Eternal Champion" by Michael Moorcock. This was one of the lesser known books in his myriad of eternal champion novels. It was my first exposure to Moorcock but certainly not the last.
"Ginger Star" and "The Hounds of Skaith" are 2/3 of a wonderful series that's becoming a little hard to find these days. I'm drawing a blank on the author right now.
One final entry: a collection edited by Isaac Asimov called "Tomorrow's Children". That book introduced me to many great authors/stories, not the least of which was Heinlein's "The Menace From Earth".
I've wasted enough of Dean's bandwidth. I could on for hours about books. I'll simply lurk and read the comments of others.
Pepperoni Hero #1 Sandwiches are not my business
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. Makes you feel the world of Tormance, where there are five primary colors, and the phaens (who are neither male nor female) are referred to by their own third-sex pronouns.
Jack of Eagles by James Blish. One pulp plot device is piled on top of another, in this gripping good read about an ordinary everyday man who is waking up, perhaps too late, to his own psi powers and their central role in an unseen battle of good versus evil.
Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture by John Carroll. "We live amidst the ruins of the great, five-hundred-year epoch of Humanism. Around us is that 'colossal wreck'. Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble... We are destitute in our plenty. We are homeless in our own homes." Ah, and with these opening words of his prologue, Carroll is only just warming up, in his gale-force critique of Western culture from the Renaissance to the present...
The Creation of Cloah Sark by Johnny Clougher. The autobiography of a destitute New Zealand ne'er-do-well who lived in a tin shed— and how he designed and built the oceangoing yacht of his dreams single-handed.
Ah, and I almost forgot:
In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. In this disquieting Sixties tale, the sun shines a different color each day of the week. "In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar..."
With Brautigan and Worlds in Collision, I'd say this thread has expanded slightly. My modest additions:
Spacetime Donuts by Rudy Rucker. Starring Mick Stones. That was now, this is then, spacetime donuts come 'round again!
Millennium, by John Varley. Salvation body snatchers from 50,000+ years in the future. According to this novel, nobody has ever died in a commercial plane crash.
The Maze Maker, by MIchael Ayrton. A great historical novel about Daedalus by a classical British sculptor (a marble carver) who committed suicide in the Seventies.
NESFA is a very high quality amateur publisher--I may have to order a copy of Silverlock from them. I don't think Silverlock can be considered a book nobody's ever heard of though, considering that it was reprinted a number of times by different publishers, had a book published about it, has several web sites dedicated to dissecting the references--one of them was mine but not currently online, has had may of the songs lyrics put to music by many people as well as various completions to the interrupted song written...
Also, Brunner's Shockwave Rider has probably been continuously in print for decades, considered a classic precursor to the entire cyberpunk genre--again, a novel that hardly can be said noone has heard of.
Come to think of it, I may not be the best person to try to run SF/fantasy by--my own collection is almost certainly over 5000 books.
One of the books that I really enjoyed reading and no one else seems to have read is The Quincunx by Charles Palliser.
The novel is about 800 pages. I think that may put quite a few people off -- along with it being a historical novel. It is set in 19th-century London and reminded me of the great Dickens novels.
one of the most moving works of history i've ever read: "The Battle of Britain" by Marcel Julian, translated from the French by Ann-Yvette and Alan Stewart (New York : Orion, 1967). a very odd, very, VERY French take on the pivotal point of WWII in the West, with an emphasis on the individual stories and trials of combatants ranging from the pilots to Marshalls Dowding and Goering.
Windhaven, I stole from my sister 25 years ago. Still have it and read it.
Ender's Game, a random selection from some SciFi shelf, still have it, and it's one I hear many begin to talk about lately.
Maybe they're not that obscure, but two faves, now apparently out of print: Alice in Puzzle-Land, a book of logic puzzles by mathematician Raymond Smullyan, and Take the Bar and Beat Me, a lawyer's humorous memoir, by Raymond Woodcock.
Pretty much all of Emma Bull's stuff has been out of print for a while, but I highly recommend her absolutely astonishing "Bone Dance" and also "Falcon."
I will second the recco of Steven Gould's "Jumper" and throw in the rest of his books, particularly "Helm." And also Ken Grimwood's "Replay," which has induced repeated fantasies about what I'd do differently if I could relive my life knowing what I know now.
Anything by Daniel Keys Moran, particularly "The Long Run." Wish he'd write some more.
Anything by Catherine Asaro, who does this baffling hybrid of romance and space opera that somehow works. She's a former ballet dancer and also a physicist, so she knows enough hard science that her books appeal to guys. The plots, which usually revolve around people falling in love, as romances are wont to do, are enlivened by the interesting people who do the falling in love. Start with "Primary Inversion" or "Catch the Lightning."
Wen Spencer's "Ukiah Oregon" series is also a weird hybrid that somehow works. It's about a young private detective who was raised by wolves -- well, so it seems at first. It takes most of the first book in the series for the premise to be fully revealed. After that, I wondered what she'd pull out for the second book, after spilling all the secrets in the first one, and holy crap, she did it again! And I should not neglect to mention that these books' plots move like they're on rails. There are three now, with a fourth on the way.
Tony Daniel's "Metaplanetary" and "Superluminary," a two part novel of interstellar civil war. It's breathtaking. "Superluminary" is just out. These will be considered classics in twenty years, I think.
Don Kingsbury's "Psychohistorical Crisis" is a lot of fun for fans of Asimov's "Foundation" series and seems to have been largely overlooked. It's wrapped up too easily, but still, Kingsbury has managed to channel the Good Doctor's spirit admirably. (The sorta-sequel was not authorized by Asimov's heirs, so a number of names and places have been changed from "Foundation." Half the fun is matching them up.)
Dean (the King) asked:
"Any of you guys got books like this? Books you loved that it seems like no one ever read but you?"
HAVE I EVER!!!!
Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology by Murray S. Davis. By far the most profound book, both philosophically and psychologically, that I have ever seen on the subject of human sexuality. Just about everything that ever has been said or ever can be said on sex is in this book. I refer to it constantly. The three ideologies: "Naturalist", "Jehovanist", and "Gnostic", and all their permutations.
Optical Color & Simultaneity by Ellen Marx. I have lots of beautiful books on color, but this is the Queen of the whole galaxy of such books as I have seen. Filled with gorgeous colors from beginning to end, and very precise in her definitions of each and of their relationships. If you love color, you'll love this book.
Left and Right: the Topography of Political Perceptions by J. A. Laponce. I have a number of good books on this whole question of ideological spectrums, but this seems to be by far the most comprehensive. Based on a historical and cross-cultural study, he concludes that "Right" is associated with the vertical, with religion and/or hierarchies, and also with continuity, while "Left" is associated with the horizontal, with secularism and/or equality, and also with discontinuity. Corresponds to Yang and Yin, in other words. I think of this book all the time.
A World Between by Norman Spinrad. This is the one novel I've read that fits Dean's description (loved by me, obscure almost to the vanishing point). Everything I encounter about men vis-a-vis women, or "patriarchy" vs. "feminism", reminds me in one way or another of "Transcendental Scientists" vs. "Femocrats". Yang and Yin again.
Left or Right: the Bogus Dilemma by Samuel Brittan. Here's another spectrumological book I love. Actually, I read of this way back in the early 1970s, had always wanted to get my hands on it, and it wasn't until 2000 that I finally saw it on bn.com under Used & Rare. He replaces the "Left"-"Right" dichotomy with a 3-dimensional spectrum: Egalitarian vs. Elitist, Liberal vs. Authoritarian, Radical vs. Orthodox, and suggests several other possible dimensions as well.
Replay-good but a bit depressing.
Jumper-lots of fun.
Skylark and some Lensmen I've read. Also some Doc Savage (instead of studying for a test).
Forgotten Beasts of Eld was surprisingly good.
Men and Marriage (non-fiction) by George Gilder is very good. It was one of my "lightbulb" books where I go 'ah-ha' so that's why the world works that way.
Only Forward — Michael Marshall Smith.
Actually, anything by Michael Marshall Smith; I've spent over $200 on rare/limited editions of his stuff, and don't regret a single penny.