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Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
Science-fiction & fantasy literature: a critical list with discussions.
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“He went to a high glazed bookcase full of vellum-backed volumes; from where he stood Prospero could read titles like Aristotelis Opera and Mysterium Cosmographicum. Standing on a cane-bottomed chair, the man lifted down from the top of the case a huge untitled volume with the Seal of Solomon stamped on the side.”
– The Face in the Frost,
John Bellairs
What Is “Overlooked”?
This page gives me more conceptual trouble than most of the rest of this site put together. I have changed its content, and—more important—its guiding principles more than once or twice, and I am still unsatisfied. The problem, when compared to that of selecting for the other specialty-list pages here, is obvious: to decide if a book is light-hearted, or concerned with religion, or suited for young readers, all one needs to hand is the book itself; but to decide if a book is “overlooked” requires outside information of a sort not readily available.
(I went so far, at one point, as to gather and cross-survey various lists, from lengths of a hundred up to several thousand, of “greatest hits” of science fiction and fantasy, trying to determine what might be considered “known” titles, but was generally dissatisfied with the results, in part because the process, in the end, was only pushing the question of “what is known” back a stage—does appearance on a list make a book “known”?)
Another issue is the sad fact that of the books, and even just the authors, listed on this site, but a few are likely to be known to the general public—even the literate, book-reading public; and not so many more will be known even to those who regularly ingest science fiction and fantasy books. So, in a sense, almost all of this site is a list of “overlooked gems”; and it is hard in many ways to rationally select a subset of the master list as “overlooked”. But I have here tried to limit myself to books likely to be “overlooked” by those who most often move within these fields, so that some authors who may be reasonably well known to the general literate public can appear here as possibly unknown to those who focus tightly on speculative fiction (Paul Auster comes at once to mind as an example.)
How and why does a book of merit come to be overlooked? As I said in the introduction to my contribution to the SF Site’s laudable collection of lists of Ten Overlooked Odd Speculative Fiction Classics, Sometimes it’s because its author has produced some other work or works whose fame shadows it…. Sometimes it’s because the author is not commonly thought of as a “speculative-fiction” writer…. And sometimes it’s just a matter of the book or the author never having been noticed as it or he or she ought to be….
So here is my latest attempt at this list. In it, I have abandoned any attempt to be objective: this is a purely subjective list, both as to “overlooked” and as to “gem”. That last deserves comment: I have tried here to stick to books not simply of enough merit to make this site’s lists at all, but of merit above even that level. While my “stars” system I normally apply only at the author level, as a rough sort of overall-average measure of that author’s work, I often mentally apply it to individual books as well, in the sense that a “three-star book” is one such that if all that author’s work were about equally meritorious, I’d class him or her as a “three-star author”. Not every book on this particular page is a three-star or better book; there are some others whose quirkiness or some like characteristic said to me “I belong here”; and when one is making a subjective list, that suffices.
We are fortunate today that the advent of “print on demand” publishing is starting to make some of these wonderful books again available in forms other than tattered and often rare (and correspondingly expensive) old out-of-print editions. (John Betancourt at Wildside Press was one of the early movers in that process, and deserves plaudits.) But, sad to say, many of these delights remain, for now at least, hard to come by, though a pleasant number are findable through used-book searches.
Anyway, so long as you do not take this to be some definitive selection of “overlooked gems”—even just relative to this site’s overall lists—I think you will find it interesting and possibly illuminating.
(Inasmuch as this is a list of particular works, I have omitted collections of stories, unless the collected tales share a focus.)
» The full cycle is a mix of fantasies, historical romances, essays, verse, and plays. Although some of the component works are, in and of themselves, not exactly in our fields, they are integral parts of a larger whole that most assuredly is, and so are all duly noted in the list.
» The “Storisende Edition”, a nicely bound integral set of the Biography—published over the years 1927 to 1930—had special introductions and notes, and the volumes were each individually numbered and signed by Cabell. A complete set today—when available at all—costs into the high three figures (click the link), but individual volumes of it—signed, remember!—can be had for as little as $20.
» In the list below, the number after a title shows the volume of the Storisende set in which that title appeared (a number of the form 4a means the title was one of two or more published as one volume in the set). The links are to all available copies of the given title, but among those you will often find one or more copies of the Storisende volume containing that title; if you can stand the cost, those are by far the best editions available.
Beyond Life, #1 [nominally fiction but essentially an essay on life and fiction-writing]
Taboo, #18e [a thinly veiled fantasy-style recounting of the Jurgen obscenity trial;
the #18 Storisende volume also contains several more essays and appendices.]
The “Heirs and Assigns” Trio: (These are nominally related to the “Biography of Manuel”, though how is not obvious.)
The Nightmare Has Triplets (The link is to an omnibus edition of the three books listed below; but it is very scarce, usually expensive, and often impossible even to find at a given moment, so I also link the three individual novels separately.)
#The Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories *
(includes the scarce novellas “The Panic Hand”, “Black Cocktail”, and “The Heidelberg Cylinder”, plus numerous short stories—but scarce and expensive)
The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy[Includes the Enquiries and adds some five stories of Eszterhazy in youth, but they are late additions to the cycle and regrettably are clearly weaker.]
The Jorkens Sextet: (These are all collections of “club story” short stories featuring Jorkens. There is also The Complete Jorkens, a deluxe three-volume preferred edition; it is now quite expensive, so I also link the individual Jorkens books below, but some are very hard to find outside the set, and even the individual volumes tend to the pricey.)
Zimiamvia (That is an omnibus volume of the three works below; because that omnibus is now somewhat expensive, I also provide links to the individual books of the trilogy.
# The City in Stone (Though it is certain that Eisenstein wrote this book, the ISFDB lists it as “unpublished”—yet not one but two ISBNs exist for it, one from 2004 [9781592220113] and one from 2006 [9781592220106]. But no search engine can locate a copy of either, so it may be that the publisher—Meisha Merlin—registered the ISBNs but never actually published the books.)
Gardner, John ***
(Do not confuse this John Gardner—John Champlin Gardner—with the British chap who continued the James Bond novels; this John Gardner is one of the major figures of American literature.)
A Kingdom Far and Clear: The Complete Swan Lake Trilogy (This is a generally well-written series, supposedly “for children” though well readable by adults;
but be aware that it takes a sharp polemical right turn toward the end, belying that “for children”.)
The Mythago Cycle Books: (The internal chronology of the books does not correspond to their publication order; the list below is an attempt to represent the events in their internal-chronology order. But it is said by some that reading order is not crucial.)
Lafferty, R. A. *****
(Some Lafferty notes:
» Lafferty, like other prolific yet under-appreciated authors, is hard to sort into a coherent bibliography—this is the best I could do.
» The occasional “series” listed below don’t fully convey Lafferty: certain characters—like “the eminent scientist Willy McGilly”—recur, often as “cameos”, throughout his tales.
» The world is not always ready for genius: a shockingly high fraction of Lafferty’s published works were never printed in more than a few hundred copies each and remain shamefully rare, and correspondingly expensive; Centipede Press is now re-issuing all of Lafferty’s short stories, though sad to say the printings are limited and have thus themselves become inordinately expensive.
» Lafferty is hard to categorize: all or almost all his works are overlooked, are thoroughly—if not always obviously—religiously powered by his devout Catholicism, and are weirdly light-hearted.)
The Argo Mythos (This a complex, sprawling work with several subsets. The cycle also includes a few scattered short stories, not listed below. Be aware that many—most—component books of this cycle are now either very rare and correspondingly expensive, or, more commonly, absolutely unfindable.)
More Than Melchisedech: (This novel was published in three volumes; the link above is to a very rare and very expensive set of all three. The three individual volumes are each also rare—often unfindable—and quite expensive when found at all.)
Argo[rarest of the 3, normally unfindable at all—try an inter-library loan; also, do not confuse this book with “Episodes of the Argo”, below]
Episodes of the Argo[rare; often unfindable] (Also contains some material erroneously omitted from The Devil is Dead, but not the “interglossia”; the main story, a part of the Argo mythos, should have been subsumed into the novel Argo, but wasn’t.)
How Many Miles to Babylon?[rare; often unfindable] (Includes the “interglossia” from the novel The Devil is Dead, not printed in that book, plus a short tale in the Argo mythos cycle.)
The Centipede Press Short-Story Omnibuses: (A series still being issued, volume by volume; these are already scarce—sometimes unfindable—and expensive.)
The Flat-Earth Cycle: (There also exist in this setting a novella and 5 short stories; the novella and 3 of the stories appear in the collection Venus Burning: Realms and the other 2 stories in the collection Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata.)
Tales From the Flat Earth (The link is to copies of the preferred-edition omnibus volume containing the novels listed below.)
Night’s Master
Death’s Master
Delusion’s Master
The Lords Of Darkness (The link is to copies of the preferred-edition omnibus volume containing the novels listed below.)
Night’s Daughter
Delirium’s Mistress
Night’s Sorceries
The Paradys Quartet: (There also exists in this setting a novelette, “Doll Skulls”, which appears in the collection Hunting the Shadows.)
Machen, Arthur ****
(Machen’s work seems to having a revival: where once there were only numerous little books—chapbooks, really—containing overlapping smatters of his work, now there are several all-inclusive, or nearly so, omnibuses and sets: the problem is selecting. One set, in 3 volumes, from Hippocampus Press is pretty thoroughly inclusive, but expensive, around $75 as I write; another set, also 3 volumes, from Chaosium is distinctly less inclusive—though it has almost all the key works—but can be had for under $30. Nor does it make much sense to list the many various works individually, as one-off copies of most of his important works tend to be about as expensive as an omnibus volume. (Prices I mention here are for used copies, “Very Good” or better condition, including shipping, but not any tax, as of Spring of 2023.)
My suggestion is to get the Chaosium set; it comprises most of the essential works for a total of under $30. You could then fill in with the few major works not so included.
Roberts, Keith **
(Many of Roberts’ books comprise a series of linked short stories, and are so tagged below; but they are generally classed “novels”.)
Sucharitkul, Somtow **
(The man’s name is Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul; at times, thinking that too difficult for marketing, he wrote under the name S. P. Somtow, but has also writes as Somtow Sucharitkul. I here combine works written under both names; indeed, any given book may—and most do—appear under both names, which name depending on which edition.)
The Complete Magnus Ridolph (this has all 10 Ridolph tales—do not confuse it with The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph, which had 6, or the “expanded” Many Worlds, which had 8)
hardcover (The omnibus collections above each comprise the seven vaguely related novels that are his total prose output, and are the preferred editions; they are expensive, but you are buying seven books. If you prefer them individually, these are they:)
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