You boys and girls are so young and innocent. The Horror genre, for example is not owned by its reigning monarch, Stephen King, but by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is so scary that when Stephen King reads him, he has to have several changes of underwear. And while his stories are mostly short stories, there are a lot of them.
And what about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan? Pulpy, cheesy and a million movies have been made from it.
Proust, A Remembrance of Things Past is the masterpiece of continuous and circular typing.
Pompous poems about the Devil, John Milton.
Tedious poems about hell, Dante Alegheri.
Great epic poetry, Homer.
I’m currently re-reading LOTR, and I’ve got to say that it is absolutely fantastic. I hadn’t read it for twenty years, and there is so much detail and character and plot and theme and motif that it is no wonder he took more than a decade to write this thing. Having read most of the classics, I’d say that it fully measures up.
Geez, Fenris, wanna take this outside? You must be another one of the tall mafia. Watch your kneecaps.
And the site you link to shows Turtledove winning exactly once. He’s lost several times, though. There’s an argument for you. “My guy has lost the award in his field of specialty more than anyone. See, that proves he owns the genre.”
Kidding aside, Guns made a huge public splash in the mainstream that neither our beloved Castle or Darkness did, so I’ll stand by the LotR comparison.
I’ll also stand by liking Turtledove a lot when he’s not doing “Extruded Alternate History Product” (the aforementioned Household Gods or the vastly fun Case of the Toxic Spell Dump.
His AH stuff, for all that it’s popular, I can take or leave.
Well, given the attention that Philip K. Dick is regularly getting in the mainstream these days, I’d bet his name is far better known than Turtledove’s. Little of it is for Castle, that’s true.
But what we’ve established is mainly that LotR is pretty much unique and hunting for examples of books with similar influence in other genres is hard to pull off.
I’m OK, You’re OK is the Lord of the Rings of self-help books.
Doom is the Lord of the Rings of first-person-shooters (even though Wolfenstein, 3d, was first, IIRC).
What do you think of The Usual Suspects as the Lord of the Rings of movies with O’Henry-esque surprise endings (though it has many, many forebears, e.g., Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone series)?
