Nothing adds zest to life like an ongoing quest. For readers, nothing lends itself to questing more than the knowledge that most books remain in print for a limited time. Not only that, but specific editions may be available only in a limited region. Add those together and one can assemble an impressive list of out-of-print or otherwise unavailable books for which one can search in bookstore after bookstore.1
Here are (guess the number!) five possibilities for North Americans whose quest lists are too short.
Amazons! edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (1979)
Amazons! demonstrates a point now so commonplace that it beggars belief to think it ever controversial: that it is possible to write a story in which women are not relegated to arm candy, support staff, or rewards for male protagonists. Younger readers astonished to discover that this was debatable are advised to seek out venerable source material like Poul Anderson 1974’s “Reply to a Lady”2, which offers such interesting passages as:
Certain writers, Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke doubtless the most distinguished, seldom pick themes which inherently call for women to take a lead role. This merely shows they prefer cerebral plots, not that they are antifeminist.
Of course, we are ever so much more evolved now (obligatory pause for bitter laughter).
Recruiting a legion of authors, most but not all of whom were women, Salmonson delivers a diverting array of short pieces featuring women protagonists, most notably “Agbewe’s Sword,” “The Sorrows of Witches,” and Cherryh’s “The Dreamstone.” Even better from the perspective of a modern book hunter, Salmonson does this in a mass market paperback from an era when print runs were enormous: the odds of finding a copy are very good.
The Beehive by Margaret O’Donnell (1980)
Modern readers stumbling across O’Donnell’s dystopic novel could be forgiven for believing that it was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The two narratives share many details: a nation abandoning democracy for authoritarianism and a society committed to subjugating women being two very prominent examples. However, a quick glance at the publication dates proves this cannot be the case: The Beehive predates The Handmaid’s Tale by five years.
Set in an unnamed nation (quite possibly Ireland), the novel details a game of cat and mouse between Steiner, head of the secret police, and Sarah Hillard, whose dream of overthrowing the dictatorship and restoring the rights of women are nearing fruition. It’s an engaging tale and I don’t understand why the novel fell out of print almost as soon as it was published.
Gifts of Blood by Susan C. Petrey (1990)
There are any number of science fiction and fantasy authors who exited the field far too soon, leaving behind a small but memorable body of work. As previously discussed,, Petrey died in 1980, so close on the heels of her debut that six of her nine published works were published posthumously.
Such a career arc is usually a recipe for instant obscurity.3 Petrey was spared this. A decade after her death, all nine of her stories were collected into a slender hardcover volume, accompanied by essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Kate Wilhelm.4 A later mass market edition omitted the essays but is otherwise complete. The majority of the tales focus on a clan of mostly benevolent Central Asian vampires. An exception is also the best story in the volume: “Spidersong,” which features a musically inclined spider concealed within a musical instrument.
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed (1996)
Originally published under a now disused byline, The Fortunate Fall combines critical acclaim with a bewilderingly brief lifespan on bookstore shelves. If ISFDB can be believed, The Fortunate Fall had a single hardcover edition in 1996, and a single trade paperback in 1997. Since then, nothing. The mismatch between the novel’s reputation and its actual publishing history is mindboggling.
Maya Andreyeva is a roving Eye in a world scarred by genocide and transient singularity. A carefully curated version of what she witnesses is made publicly available on the net for the edification and education of bored masses.5 The crimes that shaped her world are history to Maya, but history and its victims are not entirely dead, a fact that becomes alarmingly relevant to Maya. Elements of this noteworthy work resonate with our current affairs; a reprint under an updated byline would be timely. Until then, have fun searching!
Fire Heart by Joyce Ch’ng (2022)
The good news where Fire Heart is concerned is that it is a recent release and very much in print. Even better, it is in print in the region where the majority of humans beings live. Less conveniently for North Americans, that region would be Asia. Fire Heart has no North American edition. Copies on North American bookshelves will therefore be rare. Of course, one could order it from overseas but where is the fun in that?
Fire Heart focuses on Wehia t’Doniyat, who dreams of becoming a respected swordsmith. Family connections win her the opportunity to prove herself worthy of an apprenticeship. As Wehia discovers, that is only the first step on a very long road, one on which apparent shortcuts are potentially career-ending traps. The narrative is enthralling (and an astonishing quick read). Too bad the odds of finding it in North America are so poor.
***
Tracking down these five books should keep book hunters busy for a while. No doubt there are equally worthy works that are even harder to find. Feel free to brag about hard-to-find works you nevertheless found in comments, which are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]Or you can cheat and use Abebooks or a similar online source. But just as ebooks are not as fun as paper books, online purchases do not provide the same zing as poking through stacks in a poorly lit bookstore whose proprietor is *almost* certainly not an eldritch entity that is scheming to drag bibliophiles off as Hell’s Tithe.
[2]This quote was a riposte to certain comments by Joanna Russ.
[3]See for example, the author who published as Allison Tellure, active from 1977 to 1984. I was able to track down all five of her stories to review them thanks to a friend with an impressive magazine collection. Other details, such as her actual name, eluded me: https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/firstone-and-its-kin
[4]The essays focus not on Petrey but the Clarion workshop, which Petrey was never able to attend. A grant for would-be Clarion attendees was set up in Petrey’s name, sales from the hardcover being used to fund it.
[5]“The Fortunate Fall” immediately reminds one of “The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe,” (https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/every-single-day) while simultaneously being almost entirely unlike it.
Currently Amazons II is my great white whale.
I’d add Gael Baudino’s Gossamer Axe to this list, an early 1990s queer urban fantasy. It’s a book that had a lot of influence on me.
Soo many books fall in this category to my mind. Post those golden era works that have remained either in print or have been reprinted, there are so many remarkable books and authors that seem to have disappeared into the void of “not yet in the public domain” and “not enough interest (or renown)” to be picked up for even print-on-demand availability. Our only hope is that enough people like you (and the rest of us) snatch those books from oblivion and get them scanned before they turn to saw dust. (I have a few that I worry will be mere piles the next time I try to pull them from the shelf.)
Anthologies seem particularly prone to staying out of print, due to the right issues. I would imagine someone who wanted to reprint, oh, A Treasury of Science Fiction might have a hard time tracking down the current rights owners.
Mine is Laurie J. Marks’ Dancing Jack, an incredible Sapphic fantasy between two middle-aged protagonists. It contains many themes Marks would go on to explore in her Elemental Logic series. A runner-up would be any other Marks book that’s not the Elemental Logic series – Children of the Triad series and The Watcher’s Mask.
Anthologies in particular are likely to never, ever be reprinted or given an eBook release just because of the complicated licensing issues, which is a shame because there were a lot of great ones back in the day — McCauley’s Dark Forces, Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords! series, Salmonson’s Amazons and Heroic Visions, various Brian Aldiss SF anthologies, etc., etc.
[EDIT: As god is my witness, when I was composing this, comment #4 was not visible on the feed.]
I’ll certainly keep a lookout for all of these. Seeing C J Cherryh listed on the cover of Amazons! reminds me I really need to find a new copy of Downbelow Station too.
And the mention of Poul Anderson (and the self-revealing nature of that quote) reminds me of ‘Virgin Planet’, with its unquestioned assumption that a man—just an average, random, man—would automatically be “the biggest, strongest, human on the planet”, even though some of that planet’s women are trained hunters or fighters cloned from a specially selected ancestor. I’m happy to say I could see the fallacy even as a young reader close on 50 years ago.
I actually just came here to see if The Fortunate Fall was mentioned, because it deserves to be… and came back with the bombshell that the author’s still around under a new name. Every time I’d talked about or reread the book I always did a search to see if anyone knew what happened to them, and it’s exciting to find not only are they still about, but apparently (according to their mastodon account) writing again. Thanks! And yes, I agree a new issue under the author’s name would be awesome, then I could point people to the book without having to tell them they’d have to track it down used.
@2 Exquisite book that I recommend often.
The OOP book I just got my hands on was “Northwest of Earth” a collection of all of CL Moore’s Northwest Smith stories. They’re pulp planetary romances written in the 30’s when inhabitable Venus and Mars wasn’t so impossible to imagine. Lovely well-crafted stories that hold up well – far better than I expected. Paizo published this edition in 2007 and it’s worth finding.
John the Balladeer by Manly Wade Wellman. Not giving up my Susan Petrie.
I loved The Fortunate Fall, as well as the author’s Tiptree-winning short story “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation”, and was disappointed to see no more fiction from them. I had not heard that they are called Cameron Reed — thanks for the information!
Honestly I didn’t think of The Fortunate Fall when I read The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (which is a great book, good enough that even Don Wollheim couldn’t think of a terrible title when he as usual had to change the original title, though Bernard Tavernier’s movie title is pretty lame!*) But I can see the reason for the comparison. As you say, though, in reality the novels could hardly be more different.
I’m pretty sure I already have Amazons and I MIGHT have Amazons II — I’ll check. If you want I could send you my copy though that would probably be cheating on your terms. :) (Plus, I might not actually have it!)
*(The other titles for The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe are The Unsleeping Eye (DAW edition) and Deathwatch (movie).)
I have a complete collection of Phyllis Eisenstein novels but if I didn’t, I would be very frustrated that her more recent short stories didn’t spur reprints. Actually, I am frustrated because it means people who might enjoy her books are less likely to encounter them.
I had an unexpectedly hard time finding a hardcover copy of Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen. In theory there is a current Tor edition but not only does it seem to be trade, not HC, but my attempts to order it online resulted in non-delivery from a variety of vendors [1]. In the end, I bought a (surprisingly affordable) 1980 Dial edition, the one with the Dillon cover.
1: Over whom the publisher has no control, obs.
The sole survivor of my 1970’s science fiction library of hundreds of paperbacks including Ace doubles is Jack Vance’s Emphyrio, which I reread recently….stands up as mid-level Vance with his patented strangenesses like “openwork monkeys”. Ancient paperbacks have tremendous mana…..
Historically, a nation abandoning democracy for authoritarianism is the most common way for democracies to fall. Some sort of “crisis” happens which needs a “strong man”, (yes, usually male) to fix. And the people generally flock to this solution, whether or not it works.
All in all, it makes you depressed about the future of democracies in general.
Personally, I think the solution is two fold. First, a civically minded and educated citizenry. (The percentage of people voting in the United States would imply that we don’t have such a citizenry.) Second, a distrust of centralized solutions to problems. (No, it’s not that a centralized solution might be the best solution for a given problem. It’s that the centralized solution will be embraced by those leaning towards authoritarianism.)
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any white whale books for me in particular (well, discounting things like very expensive, small-press reprints of things I already own), thanks mostly to my very bad habit for most of the past 30 years of buying everything when I saw it at the shelf on Uncle Hugo’s or Dreamhaven or whatever.
But there are any number of authors, mostly from the 80s, that I wish were more widely known and were still in print — Louise Cooper being one of my go-to examples.
Another reason to look for Amazons!, it contains “Bones for Dulath”, the first published story by Megan Lindholm (a.k.a. Robin Hobb).
A Small Colonial War series By Robert Freeza
Deathgift series by Ann Tonsor Zeddies
Borderlands Series By Lorna Freeman
Dueling Machine by Bova
Warchild by Karin Lowachee
but I do agree about the Gael Baudino book Gossamer Axe
Non-SF but no doubt I will work it into a tor piece eventually: I was very pleased to find an affordably-priced copy of Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America, which was one my family’s go-to song books.
5: If ebooks are acceptable to you, I have some good news:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1343113
@10. WMc: I’m pretty sure John the Balladeer is coming up for a reprint from Valancourt Books!
The odd thing is that Tor did publish The Fortunate Fall as an ebook at some point, but it’s since been withdrawn? See here: https://www.worldcat.org/title/1149317428
Perhaps this was an “unauthorized” scan by archive.org … it’s “borrowable” here: https://archive.org/details/fortunatefall0000cart_a1i4/
Has Cameron Reed published anything else? A fast search didn’t turn anything more recent, just a number of (presumably other) people named Cameron Reed.
Gifts of Blood is on my desk as we speak, due to your recent review of it. I did stoop to buying it online. Amazons is in a box somewhere, along with the Tomoe Gozen books.
My white whale books were the 1920’s lost-race novels by Ganpat. (M.L. Gompertz) Harilek is probably the best known.
Reed mentioned on mastodon that another work is in progress.
I am soooo bookmarking this post, the books in the post sound interesting and then there are the replies :)
I love hunting for books, have the iron rule (when buying for myself) they come from brick stores only, so that’s a challenge – also, I live in the Netherlands, so that’s challenge no. 2 when it comes to English language sci fi.
So not sure how this is for North America, but I really want to run into more Connie Willis. Only found her Doomsday Book so far, that was brilliant, and it’s been years already since that one.
Andre Norton’s “Forerunner Foray” is pretty good, and not in e-book form.
I know I had “Gossamer Axe” at one point, but not sure if I still do. (I’ve moved since then. A lot of books went to a good used-book store.)
@10 Haffner Press is taking preorders for a complete collection of all John The Balladeer stories and novels, plus one previously unpublished Wellman story originally intended for “The Last Dangerous Visions.”
Pamela Dean gives more information (and links) regarding Cameron Reed’s work-in-progress here. These include current drafts of the first couple of chapters. Reed makes a few comments there also.
17: The last I heard of Frezza, he was working, I think, on a historical novel. That was a long, long time ago, back when USENET was a big deal.
Well, I was mad – you left out Sudanna, Sudanna (Brian Herbert).
But I still think everyone needs to read it.
Now, if they would only make the musical version, my life would be complete.
@26 — Forerunner Foray isn’t available as a standalone eBook, but it’s included in the Baen Books omnibus Warlock:
https://www.amazon.com/Warlock-Andre-Norton-ebook/dp/B00AP940EI/
During my intense cyberpunk days, I bought the hardcover of A Fortunate Fall on Aug. 16, 1996, about a month after it came out. Pleased to have it in my collection, and excited to hear that Cameron Reed is going to publish more.
I bought the hardcover copy of Gifts of Blood from bookseller Paul Wrigley, who had a whole stack of them, as he was a co-editor. He pretty much quit the business last year, but likely still has a number of copies, for anyone who wants to hunt him down. It’s the limited edition signed by Le Guin, McIntyre and Wilhelm.
I hadn’t realized Raphael Carter was Cameron Green until you cited it. They attended Wisconsin for a few years and I know I purchased the hardcover when it came out. I believe Patrick and Teresa wrote about publishing it in a how-to write publish volume that’s all I can did up from my memory. And I agree that it’s likely Paul Wriggly and Debbie Cross who helped publish the Susan Petrie book likely have copies still.
Add me to the list of people who are glad to hear Cameron Reed is writing again!
My “white whales” are a few small-press Gene Wolfe books: Bibliomen (which I actually could have now if I could spare $500 or so), Letters Home, Young Wolfe, and Plan(e)t Engineering.
There’s a particular paperback edition of Clarke’s The Exploration of Space I regret misplacing, as well as a Sagan-related SETI conference proceeding whose title I forgot and so cannot look for.
I loved Fortunate Fall, and told everyone I knew about it when it came out. I have a paperback copy of it around somewhere.
Another out of print book with a similar theme to The Beehive, also set in Ireland, is The Rising of the Moon by Flynn Connolly.
@5: +1. I remember being very impressed by Dancing Jack, enough that it survived my great downsizing.
Nth-ing Gossamer Axe, another survivor.
@13: I’d recommend The Blue World over Emphyrio, but I wouldn’t quarrel with the latter. ISFDB shows both of them out in the last decade from a small press, so they’re probably uncommon but not as unavailable as many of the above.
If I were still haunting bookstores, I’d be searching for Tepper’s Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse. In between the mechanical and mostly-routine True Game books and the larger (and often angrier) ~singles, she did the Marianne trilogy, 3 works barely long enough to come out in paperback with as much punch as much longer works. I have the others and remember reading this one, but didn’t find a copy before they vanished from reasonable sources. SFBC did an omnibus, but I’m not sure that was made well enough to survive.
Not a white whale for me, but back in the early 1970s I picked up a used copy of Larry Niven’s The Shape of Space at a church rummage sale. I was attracted to its bright cartoon cover, and gladly paid 35 cents for it. I have never seen another copy anywhere in the past almost half-century, and my understanding is that the book (for whatever reason) has never been reprinted.
One set of books I dare never lend out as they likely will never be replaceable is my Thieves World collection. Such a shame as it is a great introduction to so many great authors.
For many years, the Liavek anthologies were white whales; they did finally get republished, though I’m not so fond of the volume breaks on the new edition.
Other white whales from the Minneapolis contingent include Pat Wrede’s Seven Towers and Wrede’s collaboration with Caroline Stevemer, Sorcery and Cecelia (not only rescued, but sequeled, much to my delight). Mirabile and Hellspark from Janet Kagan were other frequent cases for the Fidonet Used Book Squad, back in the day.
I thought the Thieves World books were reprinted in 2020 but I guess only in ebook.
@5 Marks just announced today that Dancing Jack is back in print. Ebook only, though, I think.
One out-of-print book that I own, and have held onto for many years, is The Forest of App by Gloria Rand Dank, a fantasy novel for younger readers about a magical forest that is losing its magic. As far as I can tell, it is the only book that she ever published, and while there are used copies available online, it will probably never be reprinted. It is a simple story, short and sweet, but it carried a great deal of emotional impact for me when I found it, and I still have that same battered copy, some thirty years later.
@10 and @20: I unexpectedly obtained all of the John the Balladeer short stories by when my brother gave me the E-book edition of the collection Mountain Magic. The print edition contains a story by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor, Henry Kuttner’s Hogben stories, and David Drake’s Old Nathan stories, but apparently Kuttner’s estate prohibits E-book publication of his work, so the E-book has Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer stories instead. (Having read them both, I prefer Wellman’s work anyway.)
@46: Thank you! I now have John the Balladeer on my Kindle!
@41: What happened to “The Shape of Space”. Search online for: “the shape of space” “niven” “reprint”
Briefly: the stories all appeared in other collections, including “Convergent Series”.
The web site Black Gate is reading out of the introduction to “Convergent Series”, I think, as I remember it. I quote: “The Shape of Space contained four Known Space stories, one Gil Hamilton story, and seven unrelated stories. The Known Space stories and Gil Hamilton stories were reprinted in Tales of Known Space and The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton. Rather than reprinting The Shape of Space with those five stories that were readily available, Niven took the remaining stories, added several newer ones, and published the volume as Convergent Series.”
Also there’s at least one math textbook called “The Shape of Space”… and maybe one called “Convergent Series”, but I don’t know if that would make a whole book.
Yes, I am extremely grateful to the SF Gateway project for bringing a lot of classics back into print, such as all of Tepper’s True Game setting and a bunch of Tanith Lees. Finding those was always a challenge.
Mind you I have three copies of Lyndon Hardy’s Riddle of the Seven Realms because I keep forgetting I finally managed to track down a copy.
My all time favourites though are the full set of Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness, which was a good 20 years ahead of it’s time, and which was cancelled as a series even with two books about to print.
@47: You’re very welcome!
My friend Jesse of SFF Audio would argue that this is exclusively a problem of copyright–if works fell into the public domain more quickly, they would find republication more easily. I am not convinced of this view, but I do note that there are plenty of books that are grey like several of these.
In re the anthologies, those are tricky to get back into publication even as an ebook because of the number of authors involved. Which is a crying shame because those anthologies were a strong corner of SFF for a good long while, even if they are now not on the menu. Thieves World and Murasaki, and Time Gate, and Heroes in Hell, and on and on.
So glad you asked. I have on hand
Good Neighbors and Other Strangers, a collection by Edgar Pangborn in a Collier paperback edition
The Unholy City by Charles G. Finney, a Pyramid paperback also containing The Magician Out of Manchuria and a fold out ad for the Science Fiction Book Club
The Non-Statistical Man, a collection by Raymond F. Jones in a Belmont paperback
The Dancers of Noyo, a novel by Margaret St. Clair in an Ace paperback
The Wolf in the Garden, a werewolf thriller by Alfred H. Bill in a paperback from Centaur Press
All worth grabbing if you happen to spot a copy somewhere.
Regarding Manley Wade Wellman… while hunting for the John the Balladeer stories, I found that the Baen book ‘Mountain Magic’ contains stories by Henry Kuttner as a paper volume, but replaces them with the John the Balladeer in the ebook version. Which is weird, but meant that I was able to reread the Manley Wade Wellman stories last month (lost my physical copies to a house fire in 2021).
Nicholas Stuart Gray’s Mainly in Moonlight is my White Whale. Read it when I was still getting books out of the childrens’ section of the library and I’m not sure if it would have aged well at all, but I’d like to see it again.
I’d like to find a first edition Princess Bride with the red print for the narration.
My most wanted is Mermaid’s Song by Alida Van Gore, I believe. She died not long after publishing her first book, this one. I read a loaned copy and have been searching for an affordable one ever since. Why it has not been reprinted, I don’t know, but should be!
I’m surprised MirrorShades isn’t on the list.
Seems like it would be a perfect fit.
Julian May’s Pliocene Exile should be on this list.
Fire Heart sounds a bit like The Paladin, a CJ Cherryh work that was much better than the cover or descriptions conveyed.
I found the controversial Nobel Prize winning sci-fi poem Aniara fascinating, in this category.
I’ll never forget finding a copy of a book I had been trying to find for years. Found it in my favourite second hand bookstore. That was in the 90s. To this day I’ve never seen another copy. Spider Robinson’s Melancholy Elephants is still one of my most treasured books.
Jim Grimsley’s Kirith Kirin is thankfully back in print at reasonable prices, and it is now also available in eBook form, though when I finally found a paperback back in 2009 it was a true unicorn and it cost me a small fortune.
I am truly surprised that this extraordinary book, as well as its sequels, continue to fly under the radar. First published in 2000, it is an astounding piece of high fantasy, with a rich and exhaustively developed magic system and a mythology and language(s) to march, an incredible cast of characters, and it is also a world where queer relationships coexist with heterosexual ones without so much as anyone batting an eyelid.
Central to the story is the changing relationship between the protagonist, wizard-in-training Jessex, and near-immortal king Kirith Kirin, who is battling the increasingly overreaching sorcerer Drudaen Keerfax.
The sequels (so far two: The Ordinary and The Green Tree) shed additional light on the original by situating it into a SF frame: what started as a story set in a continent under an everchanging sky becomes a battle on a galactic scale as well as the slyest, most interesting application of Clarke’s Third Law I have ever encountered.
I cannot recommend these books enough.
Jim Grimsley’s Kirith Kirin is thankfully back in print at reasonable prices, and it is now also available in eBook form, though when I finally found a paperback back in 2009 it was a true unicorn and it cost me a small fortune.
I am truly surprised that this extraordinary book, as well as its sequels, continue to fly under the radar. First published in 2000, it is an astounding piece of high fantasy, with a rich and exhaustively developed magic system and a mythology and language(s) to march, an incredible cast of characters, and it is also a world where queer relationships coexist with heterosexual ones without so much as anyone batting an eyelid.
Central to the story is the changing relationship between the protagonist, wizard-in-training Jessex, and near-immortal king Kirith Kirin, who is battling the increasingly overreaching sorcerer Drudaen Keerfax.
The sequels (so far two: The Ordinary and The Green Tree) shed additional light on the original by situating it into a SF frame: what started as a story set in a continent under an everchanging sky becomes a battle on a galactic scale as well as the slyest, most interesting application of Clarke’s Third Law I have ever encountered.
I cannot recommend these books enough.
An underrated resource for out-of-print book seekers: addall.com
It aggregates listings from used book sellers online. Input your shipping destination (to the nearest country or state) and preferred currency, and it will find you the cheapest option including shipping. Non-North American sources include Blackwell’s Books in the UK and the French and German instances of Amazon.
ISBN.nu does something similar but is more USA-centric (though it includes Amazon.ca listings) and all prices are in USD.
(I am not an affiliate of either, I just like enabling people’s book habits.)
The Fifth Millennium series, which is a collaboration between S.M. Stirling, Shirley Meier, and Karen Wehrstein. It started with three stand-alone books by these authors, which happened to share the same post-apocalyptic setting after nuclear war decimates modern society. But then the main characters of Stirling’s “Snowbrother” and Meier’s “Shadow’s Daughter” starred in a book together and hit it off, and next thing you know it’s a five or six book series wandering through the American Southwest on the way back to Russia, with a side trip to what is probably Italy or parts thereabouts.
They’re very definitely *not* for children. There is violence all over the place, with fairly graphic sex scenes also sprinkled throughout. There is several depictions of sexual assault in Snowbrother, and in Shadow’s Daughter. If these are sensitive subjects for you, then be forewarned and read with caution. But the worldbuilding and characters are so good that even with these caveats the series is absolutely one of my favorites. They’re mass market paperbacks so they’re not TOO hard to find, but you’re not finding them new anywhere.
I’m going to put in a word for Diana Paxson’s “Westria” books. The first of the series are out of print and hard to find because they are treasured by her fans. They are very much worth looking for.
@1 I picked up a lot of what was loosely termed feminist SFF in the 80s from Forbidden Planet in London. That included both Amazons! and the Tomoe Gozen series in the DAW editions. The latter is slowly coming down in price when Open Road mark down on Amazon.co.uk.
@2 There’s also the 5-book Strands series which I am reminded of every time I read an article on the Middle East. I really need to read both; but alas they are behind a large stack of board games and a home office desk set up.
@60 I re-read The Paladin a couple of years ago, and thought it didn’t hold up well with the teacher/student dynamic; it came across as a bit pervy. It seemed to be something of a thing at that time – Hambly’s Darwath series (the original 3 books) had the same dynamic.
@65 bookfinder.com does much the same thing. (I haven’t compared the sites so I can’t say which if any is better.)
@61) I read Aniara in the first (I believe) English translation, the one reprinted in the Avon SF Rediscovery series of trade paperbacks. I have to say I found it hard going, and I was unimpressed by the poetry.
I am told by Swedish friends that it is actually very good in the original, and that there is a later English translation that is much better.
I was surprised to learn that my Avon book was pretty expensive on the resale market.
@63 (and 64!) — Somehow I had missed that Kirith Kirin had sequels! I got the impression that the implosion of Meisha Merlin, his original publisher, had really messed with Jim Grimsley’s career. (This is true of other writers as well, including a good personal friend of mine.) I’m glad to see that the sequels were picked up by Tor, sad to realize that the do seem to have flown under the radar.
@55 Raskos everything by Nicholas Stuart Gray. In particular I need a copy of Over the Hills to Fabylon
I have kept Amazons!, Amazons II, and Heroic Visions on my shelves since the days I bought them – brand new!
I am in fact shocked by how many titles listed in the comments remain on my shelves, actually. Kinda gratified!
I love the mention of The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe in the footnotes. Last year the UK record label LIbrary of The Occult released a soundtrack based on /inspired by this book! (i’m not affiliated w/ LoTC in anyway, but it was their release that brought the attention of the book to me, which in all my years I’d never been aware)
I’d like more of these lists!
@48: There are indeed entire textbooks about infinite series, e.g. Konrad Knopp’s Theory and application of Infinite Series, but I don’t know of any actually titled Convergent Series.
@65, 69: There is also https://www.vialibri.net/
The Merro Tree by Katie Waitman. I was fortunate enough to find a (much battered, I don’t care) signed copy of the paperback original some years ago. You haven’t seen pansexual rep until you’ve met Mykk. An imaginative and hopeful read. What I wouldn’t give for an ebook I could have on hand anywhere!
A favorite subject! So many nominees, alas. The last decade or so has seen some reduction, both in print and electrically.
S C Sykes. Red Genesis. My favorite Mars novel.
Raymond Harris. Shadows of the White Sun. A great Venus novel.
Gertrude Friedberg. The Revolving Boy. A special story about a special child.
Megan Lindholm. Alien Earth. A story about the meaning of Life.
Eluki Bes-Shahar. Hellflower and sequels. Gnarly fun–in dialect!
Bonus #6 Kate Wilhelm. Juniper Time. Maybe the best sf novel pre 1980.
My white whales are the Thief books by Megan Whalen Turner. Not published in the UK for some reason, and I’m too broke to get copies posted from the US.
@@@@@ 70. ecbatan: Sorry about the duplicate comment, I don’t know what happened there.
You’re literally the first person I meet who have read Kirith Kirin or is even aware of it.
Of the sequels, I have a particular fondness for The Ordinary, for too many reasons to go over here. The Green Tree ends on a particularly sour note, particularly unexpected, but I won’t spoil anything.
Grimsley has not mentioned anything about a further sequel, but he has avowedly published a few other stories set in the same universe on SFF magazines. The two I have read do not seem to have any direct connection with the novels, other than the shared universe. I have not been able to find any more.
That’s all I know.
I have been periodically chasing down the Godstalk sequels from PC Hodgell for ages — I loved the first few but it seems every subsequent one is in a different editions from a different publisher and a quieter release so I’m behind!
@16, @40: Emphyrio is included in the fourth collection of noteworthy SF novels from the 1950s and 1960s issued by the Library of America, that one being LOA #322.
@80 — After an epic journey between different publishers, at this point Jame seems to have found a permanent home at Baen. They reprinted the first four books in two omnibus volumes, then new books started coming out at a relatively regular pace. The series is now up to #10 (Deathless Gods) and it’s looking like there may be an end in sight in the next volume or two.
Well, let’s see. I had four or five paragraphs of this note started before I inadvertently navigated away and the reply was lost. So I’ll try again.
I agree, Gael Baudino should be back in print; I have something like four of her books, including the Dragonsword trilogy and Gossamer Axe. I was impressed by the existence of others.
I also note that Travis Butler, in comment 43, mentioned Patricia Wrede. (I remember communicating with Butler, Pamela C. Dean, and Pat Wrede, among others, on the old FidoNET SF Echo; I have the T-shirt Travis sent me from those days still.) I think at least her Lyra novels are all available in eBook format, and she has a blog as well. This includes mention of a collection of Liavek stories coming out in eBook form, so unless you (like many of us older folks) really prefer hardcopy, they are out there.
I also liked Elizabeth Boyer’s books, and they appear not to be available in electronic format; you have to rely on ’80s and ’90s paperbacks to find copies. The best of the 11 fantasy novels she produced, I believe, was The Elves and the Otterskin. I recommend them to those who might want to try them, and can find them. She is still around, I believe, but has given up on writing. A pity.
John Morressey’s novels are pretty much unavailable; I think I remember reading on the SFWA website that the copyright owners are unknown. I have the trilogy that includes Greymantle, and I have all the humorous fantasy novels about the wizard Kedrigern. There was at one time an effort made to print all the Kedrigern stories in a three-volume omnibus edition; after the first two volumes came out, Morressey passed away and the publisher went bankrupt, so I suppose I will never see the third volume, alas. (I have the novels it would contain, but not necessarily the short stories, some of which were in old F&SF back issues.)
@59, there’s a lot of Julian May’s stuff I would like to find; I have, I think, only one volume of the Pleistocene Exile, and another that looked like a good series but I only got one volume of it; solid space opera, and I can’t remember the title. The Rampart Worlds, I think. There were quite a few others.
That’s enough for now.
anna to the infinite power by mildred ames. loved the book and the movie as a kid.
I checked this article and all comments to see if anything by Michael Swanwick was listed. Personally “Vaccume Flowers” blew my mind and has been impossible to find since. For a taste “The Darla Horse” on Amazon is a beautiful short story you can still get.
I’ll submit Lords of the Sky, by Angus Wells. I was a big fan when it came out during elementary school, and while I haven’t reread in a while, it appears to be out of print, so I think it qualifies!
The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) by John Varley seems to be difficult to find new, can be found second hand.
First installment of the Eight Worlds series, set in a future where humanity is driven from Earth by enigmatic aliens, surviving on eight worlds in the solar system, from the Moon to Pluto, cloning and gender change is common, many advances comes from an outside source, sending information, the Ophiuchi Hotline , but its owners now are calling for payment.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64931.The_Ophiuchi_Hotline
I’d add ‘Those who Survive’ by Kir Bulychev. Looked everywhere for it, but only found one copy on amazon for over £100, and one copy on ebay in Ukranian
I recommend _The Ophiuchi Hotline_– it’s one of the best lots of ideas per wordage sf novels I know.
@85: Since you mention “The Dala Horse,” it might be helpful to note that you can also read the story here on Tor.com, along with other original short stories by Michael Swanwick.
PJ- yes! My maternal grandmother turned me on to Andre Norton and her science based universe when I was seven years old (she was a huge SF person, took me to see ‘2001’ for the Indianapolis IN premier, blew my young mind, often play the remastered soundtrack at ear bleeding volume when doing chores) by gifting me her paperback 1st edition “Galactic Derelict” to “see if I liked it”. I’m 63 now, and reread it on Gram’s b’day every year (she passed in the early ’00s); I inherited her huge SF collection of paper&hard bound books, and always loved the concept of “Forerunner civilizations” just waiting for discovery. Oh, the witch /psych stories are great as well, but the Forerunner/Solar Queen/Time Agent stories grabbed me hard. My absolute favorites tho’ are the adventures of Murdoch Jern & Eet chronicled in “The Zero Stone/Uncharted Stars”- I just can’t understand why these haven’t been optioned for film. How many more superhero movies must we endure? Although I own almost everything published by Andre Norton (thanks, Gramma!), I still buy every book of hers I find in used bookstores & flea markets- along with anything by/containing Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, and others in genre/period. Agreed, ebooks a last resort; just the scent/feel of vintage paperback sci-fi strips away the years and “bang!”- I’m a kid again. Can we start a campaign to get “Zero Stone/Uncharted Stars” made (PROPERLY!) into films? I’m kinda seeing young Ty Simpkins (”Insidious'”, “Jurassic World”) as Murdoch Jern, with Audrey Plaza doing the mental voice of Eet- she was perfect as Grumpy Cat (see “Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever), and I always assigned a sort of jaded, snarky voice to Eet. Love this site.
@65, 69: I also use bookscouter.com, it’s similar to all the resources you’ve mentioned. it compares book prices and helps to find the most profitable option. One click, and I get a list of book vendors with prices they offer. i always use it to buy cheap used books.
@@@@@78, Basiliaedes, apologies if I’ve missed someone else saying this, but the Queen’s Thief novels finally started to be published in the U.K., by Hodder, last year—£8.99 for the paperbacks! I did a little dance when I found the queen of Attolia on the shelf of my local Waterstones. Hopefully, it will be available at a bookstore or library near you. Only the first two books of the series have been published so far, here’s hoping the rest will be, too!
Grateful that have a large number of Phyllis Eisenstein’s books (most signed) as she was a guest at an SF convention I started while in high school (which is I believe still happening annually 30+ years later!)
One of my all time favorite books is The Stone and The Flute (translated by Andrea Bell, written in German by Hans Bemman. It’s a book that remains 30+ years later one of the most memorable books I have ever read. It’s 800+ pages and tells the story of one life literally from birth to death (by old age). It’s a fantasy book but unlike nearly any other work I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of books) and it has elements of fairy tales and elements of experimental fiction (kinda – it gets meta in ways that also feel very natural and of the story). It is a book that reading the reviews of online is often described as someone’s all time favorite book but yet I rarely if ever hear about it in online discussions or lists.
Another author I all too rarely in my opinion hear about is Lynn Flewelling – her works have gay and transgender hero’s, complex relationships, and are great fantasy adventure tales. But I rarely see them mentioned on lists of LGBTQ+ series. (I haven’t looked into why but find it a curious omission – and I don’t know how hard they are to find but I think her more recent book was in 2014? And probably not a great sign that her publisher’s link for her official website is to a site that closed as of 2017)