Wednesday 4 March 2015

Literary Comparisons

Appreciating Poul Anderson has involved comparing his works to those of:

William Shakespeare
Mary Shelley
Lewis Carroll
Rudyard Kipling
HG Wells
Olaf Stapledon
Jules Verne
CS Lewis
JRR Tolkien
Michael Moorcock
Brian Aldiss
Mark Twain
Edgar Rice Burroughs 
L Sprague de Camp
Robert Heinlein
Isaac Asimov
James Blish
Ray Bradbury 
Ward Moore
Jack Finney
Larry Niven
Jerry Pournelle
Greg Bear
SM Stirling
Peter Cakebread
Alan Moore
Neil Gaiman 
Mike Carey
Jamie Delano
Audrey Niffeneger
Richard Matheson
Tim Powers
Harry Harrison
Kim Stanley Robinson 
Frank Herbert 
Julian Holt
Dante
John Milton
Jex Collyer
Stieg Larsson
John C Wright 
Carl Sagan
James Elroy Flecker
Karel Capek
Percy Shelley
Bob Shaw
Kurt Vonnegut
Fritz Leiber
Andrea Camilleri
PG Wodehouse
Ian Fleming
Edgar Allan Poe
David Drake
Len Deighton
Philip K. Dick
Peter Frankopan
Agatha Christie
GK Chesterton
Clifford Simak
David Brin
Samuel Butler
Hal Clement
Harry Turtledove
Jane Austen (and Pride And Prejudice here)
Cordwainer Smith
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Mack Reynolds
Theodore Sturgeon
Elliot S! Maggin
Damon Knight
Jonathan Swift
Dan Brown
Barbara Vine
Arthur Conan Doyle
Edmund Cooper
Alfred Bester
Kingsley Amis
Arthur C Clarke
Hesiod
Homer
Virgil
Stanislaw Lem
Yuval Noah Harar
John Buchan

I had forgotten many of these comparisons until I searched for them.

Addendum, 5 Mar: In fact, the list has more than doubled since it was first posted. I had to be reminded of Kipling, then other names kept recurring to memory.

2 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

I'm surprised! You forgot to include Rudyard Kipling in this list. As we know, Poul Anderson was a huge fan of Kipling and often quoted from or alluded to his works in his own writings. Anderson's novel THE GAME OF EMPIRE is at least in part a homage to Kipling's KIM.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
Rectified! (And a few other omissions added as well.) It just shows that I don't think of everything.
Paul.