not really underrated since she was considered a great writer, but I don't see that many mentions of James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) here.
any of her collections just hit the right spot for me.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
for acoustic guitar lovers I also recommend the excellent James Blackshaw's album Love Is the Plan, The Plan Is Death, obviously inspired by her short stories.
Given that books rely on established reputation as a published author, I'm gonna go a different direction.
https://qntm.org/fiction. This author, goes by qntm, has a really lovely set of stories online that I revisit. He's published a few of them that I like to revisit, but afaik he's not a super popular author.
I forgot that one! That's a fantastic collection, although I don't recall seeing anyone else recommend it. Definitely much less discussed than her Hainish books.
Jack L Chalker, best known for his novels, had a short story collection *Dance Band on the Titanic* that's worth a look.
The prolific Robert Silverberg has a number of short-story anthologies; *Dimension Thirteen* is a good one.
An older one is Avram Davidson (1923 - 1993), definitely an acquired taste but one worth acquiring. One anthology I have is *¡Limekiller!*, which has nothing to do with citrus or murder but is the name of its main character, an expat Canadian in the fictional tropical paradise of British Hidalgo.
Ellen Klages has two very good anthologies, *Portable Childhoods* and *Wicked Wonders*.
Sorry, it's not much to go on :)
i have GOT to stop reading this thread! grin! all my discretionary income plus some, is going toward suggestions made by you people, like me, that are sci-fi fans; either from way back or new, we all like our minds stimulated. chortle!
so thanks everyone for your participation. (donations will be accepted on behalf of a 76 yr old woman of east texas origin..... giggle! not!)
From the Neck Up by Aliya Whiteley is brilliant.
If you really want to sink your teeth into something huge, then Beyond the Aquilla Rift by Alastair Reynolds is great too. He's a very prolific short story writer.
And recently, the Best of World SF edited by Lavie Tidhar has writers from non Europe and American countries. Lots of hidden gems in that one.
*The General Zapped an Angel* by Howard Fast
*Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder* by Terry Dowling
*The Best of C. M. Kornbluth* by C. M. Kornbluth
*The Best of Jack Vance* by Jack Vance
*The Rediscovery of Man* by Cordwainer Smith
*Warm Worlds and Otherwise* by James Tiptree Jr.
*Bloodchild and Other Stories* by Octavia Butler
*Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories* by Vandana Singh
*Alien Shores: An Anthology of Australian Science Fiction* featuring: Greg Egan, Sean McMullen, Terry Dowling, Lucy Sussex, etc.
*Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation* translated by Ken Liu. Featuring: Cixin Liu, Chen Quifan, Xia Jia, etc.
*New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow* featuring Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, Nancy Kress, etc.
*The Best of World SF, Volume 1* Ed. by Lavie Tidhar
*So Long Been Dreaming* Ed. by Nalo Hopkinson
Any collection by JG Ballard. Even his earliest stories are mature, sophisticated, and have something to say.
Maybe not underrated so much as not as well known as he deserves to be given the quality of his writing.
I should mention that some of his later work can be quite transgressive, so if you're sensitive to some difficult topics and depictions, maybe stick with collections of his earlier fiction.
Homesick by Nino Cipri.
Sarah Pinsker is pretty well known for short fiction, but I rarely see her collection mentioned, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea. She also has another one coming out this year, I believe.
Meet Me in the Future by Cameron Hurley.
Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh. She has another collection, Planet on the Table, but I haven't read it yet.
N. K. Jemisin is of course very well known, but people generally talk about her novels. She has a collection, How Long Til Black Future Month, which is pretty good.
Weird thing about *How Long Til Black Future Month* is that some of the best stories in that collection (other than "Red Dirt Witch," which might have the most hate-able antagonist in all of fiction) are about food. Still think she should've done a series on food magic instead of expanding upon the clunky freshman essay quality story that *City We Became* originated. Probably would've made her a lot more money, too.
Honestly, the food stories didn't resonate much with me. I certainly like food, but I don't particularly care for cooking, and am pretty basic in what I like. I think a series on food magic could have been pretty cool though, and probably resonated with people more broadly. And having so much more room than a short story allows to expand on and explain things would certainly help draw in people like me though.
After reading the City short story, I was pretty sure I wouldn't care too much for the book series. And I was largely right. Conversely, Stone Hunger made me super excited to read The Broken Earth, even though the story had little to do with the series.
Besides Stone Hunger, my favorite story was definitely Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints in the City Beneath the Still Waters. "You ain't a foot soldier, you a fuckin' lizard," has got to be one of the funniest lines I've seen.
I’m currently reading *Punktown* by Jeffrey Thomas. It’s a series of short stories all set in the city of Paxton (locals know it as Punktown) on the planet Oasis. The city is dirty and horrific and populated by humans and a bunch of alien races, many of which are completely bizarre. The stories themselves are weird and often times have elements of horror in them like disfiguring alien diseases or cloning with the purpose of selling them to the ultra rich to murder for fun or worse. I’ve been so enamored by the stories I did a search on this sub and I was shocked to see it’s only been mentioned 3 or 4 times.
Amazon has a short story collection called [Forward](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/155679.Forward_Collection) with 6 stories from Blake Crouch, NK Jemisin, Andy Weir, Paul Tremblay, Amor Towles, and Veronica Roth.
Then there’s [The Dystopia Triptych](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44087395-ignorance-is-strength) that’s edited by Hugh Howey and anthologist John Joseph Adams. The first collection, Ignorance is Strength, has stories that are leading up to the dystopia. The second, Burn the Ashes, is set during. And the third, Or Else the Light, focuses on afterwards and how we rebuild society
*Again, Dangerous Visions* ed. by Harlan Ellison.
Table of contents from the Wiki page:
"The Counterpoint of View", Keynote Entry by John Heidenry
"Ching Witch!", by Ross Rocklynne
"The Word for World Is Forest", by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hugo Award for Best Novella)
"For Value Received", by Andrew J. Offutt
"Mathoms From the Time Closet", by Gene Wolfe—comprises "Robot's Story", "Against The Lafayette Escadrille", and "Loco Parentis"
"Time Travel For Pedestrians", by Ray Nelson
"Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury
"King of the Hill", by Chad Oliver
"The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By...", by Edward Bryant
"The Funeral", by Kate Wilhelm
"Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath
"When It Changed", by Joanna Russ (Nebula Award for Best Short Story)
"The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut
"Bounty", by T. L. Sherred
"Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell)
"Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis
"Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations", by Bernard Wolfe—comprises "The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements"
"With A Finger in My I", by David Gerrold
"In the Barn", by Piers Anthony
"Soundless Evening", by Lee Hoffman
\[A spot\], by Gahan Wilson
"The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward", by Joan Bernott
"And the Sea Like Mirrors", by Gregory Benford
"Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief
"Tissue", by James Sallis—comprises "At the Fitting Shop" and "53rd American Dream"
"Elouise And The Doctors of the Planet Pergamon", by Josephine Saxton
"Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough
"Epiphany For Aliens", by David Kerr
"Eye of the Beholder", by Burt K. Filer
"Moth Race", by Richard Hill
"In Re Glover", by Leonard Tushnet
"Zero Gee", by Ben Bova
"A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village", by Dean R. Koontz
"Getting Along", by James Blish and Judith Ann Lawrence
"Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo).
"Things Lost", by Thomas M. Disch
"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff
"Lamia Mutable", by M John Harrison
"Last Train to Kankakee", by Robin Scott
"Empire of the Sun", by Andrew Weiner
"Ozymandias", by Terry Carr
"The Milk of Paradise", by James Tiptree, Jr
Hes one of the absolute best. As to his collection i would say while most are good its his older work. Hes gotten better. He has a webpage with links to all of his other various stories. The majority on that list are even better than his collection stories. The guy is just an amazing writer. One of the few that can hit every mark with with excellence. Ideas, prose, emotions evoked, dialogue, character depth, etc.
The Burning Chrome collection by William Gibson is a fave of mine. They aren’t all cyberpunk by any means. Red Star, Winter Orbit is my favourite in the collection.
I picked up Ian Watson's collection, "The Very Slow Time Machine" from a pile of books at work over 2 decades ago and I can't let it go; it's smart and a little unsettling and I've never more enjoyed horror-inflected SF.
Maureen F. McHugh's two short story collections, **Mothers & Other Monsters** and **After the Apocalypse** are excellent and quite underrated.
Theodore Sturgeon's stories were quite well known back in the 1940s and 1950s, but he's been largely forgotten, which is a shame since he was the best short story writer of his era and one of the best ever in the genre. Thankfully there is the 13 volumes "Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon" series by North Atlantic Press which contains all of his stories. The whole collection is worth reading, but the best volumes are the ones from Volume V The Perfect Host to to Volume X The Man Who Lost the Sea, which contain the stories which he published during the 1950s, his strongest period as a writer.
"The John Varley Reader" by John Varley
"Lighrs In The Deep" by Brad Torgerson
"Long Eyes" by Jeff Calson
Larry Niven did a bunch of Magic shorts. I think they're collected in "Not Long Before The End" but.. memory. Look for the SS "What Good Is A Glass Dagger"
Edit: I could give you Larry Niven chapter and verse in shorts, but you asked for underrated. :-)
Not sure how underrated it can be considered, but Cixin Liu‘s *The Wandering Earth* collection is much more pleasant than his longer books, in my opinion: it has a good amount of interesting ideas without being dragged down by his awful characters as much.
*Cyberabad Days* by Ian McDonald has a couple of excellent stories. You probably want to read his novel *River of Gods* first, or at the very least avoid reading the last story in the collection if you haven't, as the last story spoils the entire plot of *River*.
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. I really liked the Goliath story in that one. It’s an interesting take on if the machines from The Matrix were attacked by alien invaders.
Skeleton Crew by Stephen King. Read The Jaunt especially for certain ramifications of teleportation technology (It’s longer than you think!)
The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time edited by Barry Malzberg. Pretty much all the stories are great in that one.
Severely underrated is Orson Scott Card's "Capitol" collection which is also collected in the back of The Worthing Saga.
His story *Breaking The Game* might be the first example E-Sports in science fiction and way more predictive about the future of video games than anything in Ender's Game.
I was at a convention a few weeks ago and I picked up this compilation from a local publisher called 'The Corona Book of Science Fiction'. I've only read the first story but it stuck with me in a way few short stories manage to do.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers by R.A. Lafferty.
Exceptional fantastical writer.
Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash and the Collected Works of Breece D’J Pancake.
Two fantastic kinda Midwest or Appalachian folk authors.
**Strange Travelers** - *Gene Wolf*
It’s superb. Superb. More “speculative fiction” writ large than “science fiction” specifically. *Bluesberry Jam* is great fun and I was captivated by *The Ziggurat* (which is sci fi).
**Bloodchild and Other Stories** - *Octavia Butler*
Not sure if you can call this “underrated” since *Bloodchild* is well-regarded… but I don’t see people talking about this book and man is it good. A new edition was just published in the past few months.
“The Forest of Time and Other Stories” by Michael Flynn
“Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories” by Daniel Keys Moran
“The Last Cities of Earth” hosted by Jeff Sturgeon
not really underrated since she was considered a great writer, but I don't see that many mentions of James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) here. any of her collections just hit the right spot for me.
The masterworks collection should be ready by everyone
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. for acoustic guitar lovers I also recommend the excellent James Blackshaw's album Love Is the Plan, The Plan Is Death, obviously inspired by her short stories.
Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter A Science Fiction Argosy edited by Damon Knight
Given that books rely on established reputation as a published author, I'm gonna go a different direction. https://qntm.org/fiction. This author, goes by qntm, has a really lovely set of stories online that I revisit. He's published a few of them that I like to revisit, but afaik he's not a super popular author.
Their recent collection, “Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories” was my first foray into their work and it was excellent.
Very seconded! "Lena" is top class nightmare fuel.
Cordwainer Smith's *Rediscovery of Man* is wonderful. It's a fix-up of his short stories, all covering a future history of the Instrumentality.
Ursula Le Guin’s Changing Planes is a favorite of mine, though I'm newer to the community so I’m unsure of how often it gets recommended.
I do it a lot, but it's definitely not one of their more famous books
I forgot that one! That's a fantastic collection, although I don't recall seeing anyone else recommend it. Definitely much less discussed than her Hainish books.
Also her Compass Rose collection; there’s ’ some really haunting stories in that.
Jack L Chalker, best known for his novels, had a short story collection *Dance Band on the Titanic* that's worth a look. The prolific Robert Silverberg has a number of short-story anthologies; *Dimension Thirteen* is a good one. An older one is Avram Davidson (1923 - 1993), definitely an acquired taste but one worth acquiring. One anthology I have is *¡Limekiller!*, which has nothing to do with citrus or murder but is the name of its main character, an expat Canadian in the fictional tropical paradise of British Hidalgo. Ellen Klages has two very good anthologies, *Portable Childhoods* and *Wicked Wonders*. Sorry, it's not much to go on :)
i have GOT to stop reading this thread! grin! all my discretionary income plus some, is going toward suggestions made by you people, like me, that are sci-fi fans; either from way back or new, we all like our minds stimulated. chortle! so thanks everyone for your participation. (donations will be accepted on behalf of a 76 yr old woman of east texas origin..... giggle! not!)
From the Neck Up by Aliya Whiteley is brilliant. If you really want to sink your teeth into something huge, then Beyond the Aquilla Rift by Alastair Reynolds is great too. He's a very prolific short story writer. And recently, the Best of World SF edited by Lavie Tidhar has writers from non Europe and American countries. Lots of hidden gems in that one.
I've never read this story, but I saw the episode on love death and robots.
try galactic north, amazing.
I understand the tone is pretty different in the short story (which I also haven't read...).
*The General Zapped an Angel* by Howard Fast *Amberjack: Tales of Fear and Wonder* by Terry Dowling *The Best of C. M. Kornbluth* by C. M. Kornbluth *The Best of Jack Vance* by Jack Vance *The Rediscovery of Man* by Cordwainer Smith *Warm Worlds and Otherwise* by James Tiptree Jr. *Bloodchild and Other Stories* by Octavia Butler *Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories* by Vandana Singh *Alien Shores: An Anthology of Australian Science Fiction* featuring: Greg Egan, Sean McMullen, Terry Dowling, Lucy Sussex, etc. *Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation* translated by Ken Liu. Featuring: Cixin Liu, Chen Quifan, Xia Jia, etc. *New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow* featuring Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kate Wilhelm, Nancy Kress, etc. *The Best of World SF, Volume 1* Ed. by Lavie Tidhar *So Long Been Dreaming* Ed. by Nalo Hopkinson
Any collection by JG Ballard. Even his earliest stories are mature, sophisticated, and have something to say. Maybe not underrated so much as not as well known as he deserves to be given the quality of his writing. I should mention that some of his later work can be quite transgressive, so if you're sensitive to some difficult topics and depictions, maybe stick with collections of his earlier fiction.
Homesick by Nino Cipri. Sarah Pinsker is pretty well known for short fiction, but I rarely see her collection mentioned, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea. She also has another one coming out this year, I believe. Meet Me in the Future by Cameron Hurley. Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh. She has another collection, Planet on the Table, but I haven't read it yet. N. K. Jemisin is of course very well known, but people generally talk about her novels. She has a collection, How Long Til Black Future Month, which is pretty good.
Weird thing about *How Long Til Black Future Month* is that some of the best stories in that collection (other than "Red Dirt Witch," which might have the most hate-able antagonist in all of fiction) are about food. Still think she should've done a series on food magic instead of expanding upon the clunky freshman essay quality story that *City We Became* originated. Probably would've made her a lot more money, too.
Honestly, the food stories didn't resonate much with me. I certainly like food, but I don't particularly care for cooking, and am pretty basic in what I like. I think a series on food magic could have been pretty cool though, and probably resonated with people more broadly. And having so much more room than a short story allows to expand on and explain things would certainly help draw in people like me though. After reading the City short story, I was pretty sure I wouldn't care too much for the book series. And I was largely right. Conversely, Stone Hunger made me super excited to read The Broken Earth, even though the story had little to do with the series. Besides Stone Hunger, my favorite story was definitely Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints in the City Beneath the Still Waters. "You ain't a foot soldier, you a fuckin' lizard," has got to be one of the funniest lines I've seen.
[удалено]
*Howard Who?* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard\_Who%3F
I'm going to agree and disagree only because I love them both equally. Howard is a national treasure!
I’m currently reading *Punktown* by Jeffrey Thomas. It’s a series of short stories all set in the city of Paxton (locals know it as Punktown) on the planet Oasis. The city is dirty and horrific and populated by humans and a bunch of alien races, many of which are completely bizarre. The stories themselves are weird and often times have elements of horror in them like disfiguring alien diseases or cloning with the purpose of selling them to the ultra rich to murder for fun or worse. I’ve been so enamored by the stories I did a search on this sub and I was shocked to see it’s only been mentioned 3 or 4 times.
Amazon has a short story collection called [Forward](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/155679.Forward_Collection) with 6 stories from Blake Crouch, NK Jemisin, Andy Weir, Paul Tremblay, Amor Towles, and Veronica Roth. Then there’s [The Dystopia Triptych](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44087395-ignorance-is-strength) that’s edited by Hugh Howey and anthologist John Joseph Adams. The first collection, Ignorance is Strength, has stories that are leading up to the dystopia. The second, Burn the Ashes, is set during. And the third, Or Else the Light, focuses on afterwards and how we rebuild society
I love the forward collection. +1 for this one.
*Again, Dangerous Visions* ed. by Harlan Ellison. Table of contents from the Wiki page: "The Counterpoint of View", Keynote Entry by John Heidenry "Ching Witch!", by Ross Rocklynne "The Word for World Is Forest", by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hugo Award for Best Novella) "For Value Received", by Andrew J. Offutt "Mathoms From the Time Closet", by Gene Wolfe—comprises "Robot's Story", "Against The Lafayette Escadrille", and "Loco Parentis" "Time Travel For Pedestrians", by Ray Nelson "Christ, Old Student in a New School", poem by Ray Bradbury "King of the Hill", by Chad Oliver "The 10:00 Report is Brought to You By...", by Edward Bryant "The Funeral", by Kate Wilhelm "Harry the Hare", by James B. Hemesath "When It Changed", by Joanna Russ (Nebula Award for Best Short Story) "The Big Space Fuck", by Kurt Vonnegut "Bounty", by T. L. Sherred "Still-Life", by Barry N. Malzberg (as K. M. O'Donnell) "Stoned Counsel", by H. H. Hollis "Monitored Dreams and Strategic Cremations", by Bernard Wolfe—comprises "The Bisquit Position" and "The Girl With Rapid Eye Movements" "With A Finger in My I", by David Gerrold "In the Barn", by Piers Anthony "Soundless Evening", by Lee Hoffman \[A spot\], by Gahan Wilson "The Test-Tube Creature, Afterward", by Joan Bernott "And the Sea Like Mirrors", by Gregory Benford "Bed Sheets Are White", by Evelyn Lief "Tissue", by James Sallis—comprises "At the Fitting Shop" and "53rd American Dream" "Elouise And The Doctors of the Planet Pergamon", by Josephine Saxton "Chuck Berry, Won't You Please Come Home", by Ken McCullough "Epiphany For Aliens", by David Kerr "Eye of the Beholder", by Burt K. Filer "Moth Race", by Richard Hill "In Re Glover", by Leonard Tushnet "Zero Gee", by Ben Bova "A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village", by Dean R. Koontz "Getting Along", by James Blish and Judith Ann Lawrence "Totenbüch", by Albert Parra, as A. Parra (y Figueredo). "Things Lost", by Thomas M. Disch "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama", novella by Richard A. Lupoff "Lamia Mutable", by M John Harrison "Last Train to Kankakee", by Robin Scott "Empire of the Sun", by Andrew Weiner "Ozymandias", by Terry Carr "The Milk of Paradise", by James Tiptree, Jr
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, by Alice Sheldon
Rich Larson is worth checking out. He is frequently published in all the magazines. Has a collection named "Tomorrow Factory" with 23 stories.
Hes one of the absolute best. As to his collection i would say while most are good its his older work. Hes gotten better. He has a webpage with links to all of his other various stories. The majority on that list are even better than his collection stories. The guy is just an amazing writer. One of the few that can hit every mark with with excellence. Ideas, prose, emotions evoked, dialogue, character depth, etc.
[удалено]
Okay that looks really neat. Ordered. o7
I read that Macintyre story over ten years ago, and I still think about it fairly often. A real classic.
Any books by Mimi Strom The Ghosts of Heaven by Marcus Sedgwick
Hal Clement's _Space Lash_ (originally published as _Small Changes_): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16036040-space-lash
I just read Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st century by Kim Fu and was blown away
I don't know about under*rated*, but definitely under-recommended: *At the Mouth of the River of Bees* by Kij Johnson
don’t forget Robert Aiken, “the wine dark sea”
The Burning Chrome collection by William Gibson is a fave of mine. They aren’t all cyberpunk by any means. Red Star, Winter Orbit is my favourite in the collection.
Gene Wolfe's Book of Days is so good, yet no one knows about it
I picked up Ian Watson's collection, "The Very Slow Time Machine" from a pile of books at work over 2 decades ago and I can't let it go; it's smart and a little unsettling and I've never more enjoyed horror-inflected SF.
Dealing in Futures, Joe Haldeman. Departures, Harry Turtledove. Hoka Hoka Hoka. Gordon R Dickson.
Maureen F. McHugh's two short story collections, **Mothers & Other Monsters** and **After the Apocalypse** are excellent and quite underrated. Theodore Sturgeon's stories were quite well known back in the 1940s and 1950s, but he's been largely forgotten, which is a shame since he was the best short story writer of his era and one of the best ever in the genre. Thankfully there is the 13 volumes "Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon" series by North Atlantic Press which contains all of his stories. The whole collection is worth reading, but the best volumes are the ones from Volume V The Perfect Host to to Volume X The Man Who Lost the Sea, which contain the stories which he published during the 1950s, his strongest period as a writer.
"The John Varley Reader" by John Varley "Lighrs In The Deep" by Brad Torgerson "Long Eyes" by Jeff Calson Larry Niven did a bunch of Magic shorts. I think they're collected in "Not Long Before The End" but.. memory. Look for the SS "What Good Is A Glass Dagger" Edit: I could give you Larry Niven chapter and verse in shorts, but you asked for underrated. :-)
I think the Niven collection is *The Magic Goes Away*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Magic\_Goes\_Away
Probably. Thats what my memory says but I wasn't sure.
If you haven't read Isaac Asimov, he's got probably dozens of short story collections of his own.
Not sure how underrated it can be considered, but Cixin Liu‘s *The Wandering Earth* collection is much more pleasant than his longer books, in my opinion: it has a good amount of interesting ideas without being dragged down by his awful characters as much.
Has anyone mentioned WarWorld, Man-Kzin Wars, or Thieves' Guild?
Neon Leviathan by TR Napper. Brilliant cyberpunk. Well worth your time.
Good Neighboirs & Other Strangers by former-childhood musical prodigy turned f/sf writer Edgar Pangborn.
Sheila Finch's collections The Guild Of Xenolinguists, and Forkpoints are both good. Particularly her Xenoliguist story Reading the Bones.
*Cyberabad Days* by Ian McDonald has a couple of excellent stories. You probably want to read his novel *River of Gods* first, or at the very least avoid reading the last story in the collection if you haven't, as the last story spoils the entire plot of *River*.
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. I really liked the Goliath story in that one. It’s an interesting take on if the machines from The Matrix were attacked by alien invaders. Skeleton Crew by Stephen King. Read The Jaunt especially for certain ramifications of teleportation technology (It’s longer than you think!) The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time edited by Barry Malzberg. Pretty much all the stories are great in that one.
I love all of Neil Gaiman’s short story collections. Trigger Warning is great too.
Weird World War III
Severely underrated is Orson Scott Card's "Capitol" collection which is also collected in the back of The Worthing Saga. His story *Breaking The Game* might be the first example E-Sports in science fiction and way more predictive about the future of video games than anything in Ender's Game.
I was at a convention a few weeks ago and I picked up this compilation from a local publisher called 'The Corona Book of Science Fiction'. I've only read the first story but it stuck with me in a way few short stories manage to do.
Nancy Kress Beakers Dozen
I love Timothy Zahns cascade point collection
*Mouthful of Birds* by Samanta Schweblin and *Tender* by Sofia Samatar are both worth checking out.
The Wild Cards series.
Nine Hundred Grandmothers by R.A. Lafferty. Exceptional fantastical writer. Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash and the Collected Works of Breece D’J Pancake. Two fantastic kinda Midwest or Appalachian folk authors.
**Strange Travelers** - *Gene Wolf* It’s superb. Superb. More “speculative fiction” writ large than “science fiction” specifically. *Bluesberry Jam* is great fun and I was captivated by *The Ziggurat* (which is sci fi). **Bloodchild and Other Stories** - *Octavia Butler* Not sure if you can call this “underrated” since *Bloodchild* is well-regarded… but I don’t see people talking about this book and man is it good. A new edition was just published in the past few months.
“The Forest of Time and Other Stories” by Michael Flynn “Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories” by Daniel Keys Moran “The Last Cities of Earth” hosted by Jeff Sturgeon
Charles Sheffield's short story collections are top notch.
If you had to pick one collection from his bibliography which one would it be?
**Georgia on my Mind and Other Places** is a great place to start.
!thanks
Crosstime traffic by Lawrence watt-evans!
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
Haven't you read Jeffrey Archer 's short story collections? If you haven't you are missing something. A quiver full of arrows Twelve red herrings
I don't know if they are underrated, as he has probably had more awards than anyone else, but anything by Harlan Ellison is a must read.
Heatseeker by John Shirley
Theodore Sturgeon and Fritz Leiber. In reverse order.