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.
Oh yeah, our protag was a serious Mary Sue!
Awesome read though.
Which one? I don’t recall either leading character being overly Mary Sue-ish, but it’s been a while since I read them.
Wyrm?
So we have our protag and his encyclopedic knowledge of dork culture, an external hard drive filled with live computer viruses, and he’s not just taking class with the local kung fu school - but he knows better than to jog barefoot in the snow: because he’s been there/done that. So we are schooling and entire class full of would be martial artists on how to do it better.
And then he’s off on a date - because our kung fu, have-laptop-will-teavel, aspie-coder protag is also a chick magnet?
Yeah. Mary Sue.
Awesome read though. Even had chess lines in the back appendix.
Fair enough.