Well, in what IS a wibbley-wobbly timey-wimey implausible fashion, Gaiman wins 7-6, lol.

And now it's my turn to sadly vote against a beloved author...

Douglas Adams, you gave us Lalla Ward with Tom Baker, 42, the Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster, Vogons, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillian and, speaker of perhaps the most appropriate day-job comment ever--"LIFE? DON'T TALK TO ME ABOUT LIFE"--Marvin the Paranoid Android......

BUT Homer (or whomever we're crediting as "Homer") gave us "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," and yeah...along with the Old and New Testaments and (lest I forget and anger his fanbase) Virgil's "Aeneid," that's arguably a huge chunk of, oh, just the foundations for Western literature...and both epic poems are amazing to boot...

An author SO influential...well, I'd still probably vote for Shakespeare if they went head to head just because of damned favoritism, but I maintain Homer presents a far more compelling challenge to any Shakespeare supremacy than Vergil (though, in fairness, that battle's lost.) :)

So, yeah...So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, BUT...

Adams: 0
Homer: 1

Adams

Adams

Adams.

homer

Adams. #HomerIsNotReal #KrellinIsHomer

I'm only giving Adams the edge here because the Iliad, Odyssey, and Homeric hymns were all most likely written by different people (and the epics not even by single people). Also, Adams is awesome. He's like Pratchett except not terrible and instead really good.

Adams: 4
Homer: 2

Fair enough point vs. Homer, ghug, though now I'll ask--

If you were to evaluate not Homer the Blind Poet of yore but take "Homer" as just the texts (the same that I'm not persuaded that Shakespeare wasn't the Bard and Actor of Avon, but even if it were someone else, I wouldn't care, for me "Shakespeare" is almost entirely the man on the page)...

Would you take Homer the Text over Adams the Text?

@ghug

If Pratchett had spent countless years on each of his books like Adams had the luxury of doing he would have kicked arse. Adams also wrote so many versions of his book it's damned tricky at times to work out what the story actually is. Pratchett, by contrast, is the kind of frood who really knows where his towel is.

I have to count that as a point for Adams then, Octavious--

I've railed against Stephen King's ethos of treating literature like something you mass produce in great quantities plenty of times...

I'd far rather have F. Scott Fitzgerald's 4 novels, 1 unfinished novel (The Last Tycoon) and his short stories, or even Jane Austen's 6 novels (well, at least Pride and Prejudice...again, Mansfield Park...yeah, not so much) as opposed to King's 70 or so.

Quality over quantity.

It's true you may need to produce in quantity in order to get by--we can only assume that's the reason behind a few of Shakespeare's weakest plays...no one will ever convince me the fan fiction-esque, completely phoned-in The Merry Wives of Windsor was anything but either a cash grab or play written to satisfy Elizabeth's love of Falstaff--but understanding the reason McDonald's mass produces its burgers doesn't suddenly make them taste any better.

And I've never had any trouble following Adams' "Hitchhiker" saga...at least not the first few radio/TV/book sections.

You see, it all starts with the creation of the universe--

"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

@ Obi

Adams was commercial, just not very good at it. It's not as if he refused to add sequels with money as the chief motivation. It's also not as if he waited until he'd perfected his masterpiece before publishing. He published then tweaked then published then tweaked in a style not unlike a console game manufacturer releasing a title despite knowing it was full of bugs.

And the less said about his endings to Dirk Gently novels the better. Damn near unintelligible.

Regardless of that, however, he was a genius and the great bits more than make up for the crap.

this is the hardest choice for me as by now. i honestly don't know who to vote for, so i won't vote as for now.

Well, I've never heard of Dirk Gently...I know the man for THHGTTG and his aforementioned Doctor Who work, as well as his assorted quips here and there on Atheism, the Universe, and Everything.

But I actually like the fact that THHGTTG has similar-yet-distinct radio, book and TV iterations (the less said about that movie the better, though Alan Rickman was a good casting choice for Marvin and...well, between Arthur Dent, John Watson and Biblo Baggins, Martin Freeman seems to have found his niche in acting every Slightly-Above-Average British Man Flustered and Over His Head part out there.)

There are different versions of Shakespeare plays, of course, some only mildly different, others wildly so (Hamlet's First Quarto's rightfully called "The Bad Quarto," for featuring "To be, or not to be, aye there's the point, To Die, to sleep, is that all?" ...Not quite the refined words you're used to, lol...and then King Lear ends with either Edmund or Albany on the throne, depending on which version you pick, and that's a major choice) and Dickens wrote an alternate end for Great Expectations when his original one was deemed a bit too downbeat.

As long as the essence is intact--ie, the work doesn't become Lucas-ized, with Jar Jar Binks replacing Falstaff or Estella and Pip having a big wedding and living happily ever after--I don't have problem with tweaks after the fact.

I should add a reason I like said tweaks/variations is that they give you some options interpretation-wise as a reader, actor, director, artist, etc.

Whether you choose to have Hamlet say "This too-too solid/sallied/sullied flesh should melt" is a big choice...is his fleshy being "solid," somehow attacked, or dirty? What could that mean for this speech, or his character overall?

The same goes with THHGTTG...the different versions give you different options.

Homer. He might not have written it but he gets credit for it, so by that logic, he actually might have written it. It's not like anyone actually knows.

Pratchett - Adams would have been a fun fight.
Homer - Adams ... ... ... I ll vote Adams

Homer, clearly.

Homer, Christ have any of you here read him? The dude invented a form of descriptive prose that is still used today, TWO THOUSAND + YEARS LATER. Also his movie adaptation (Troy) is Brad Pitt's best movie.

Interesting to see people are questioning Homers identity but not Shakespeares. Wasn't Shakespeare really a woman by all accounts?

Adams: 5
Homer: 5

Good match-up thus far...

@obi: "I'd far rather have F. Scott Fitzgerald's 4 novels, 1 unfinished novel (The Last Tycoon) and his short stories, or even Jane Austen's 6 novels (well, at least Pride and Prejudice...again, Mansfield Park...yeah, not so much) as opposed to King's 70 or so.

Quality over quantity."

don't you think that you can write many good books? i mean, fitzgerald's novels aren't better just because he wrote so few, no? i think the basic assumption of "lots of output = bad output" is a flawed one.

take asimov for example, or simenon, or dumas, or christie. all of those have a huge bibliography, yet all of them are high-class writers (even if i don't like christie that much).

Homer, by a long stretch.

A better humorous writer than Adams could pop up tomorrow and likely will at some point, but no new writer could replace Homer's contribution.

Tosh. The only reason we've heard of Homer is that he was one of the better examples of a tiny pool of writers of the age. He is entirely unremarkable in every sense other than historical context.

octavious, i would be very hesitant to say that, and theodosius, i don't think any writer will ever replace adams' humor. this isn't a black-white situation. it isn't as simple as both of you claim it is.

Can you be called an author if you never wrote anything?

Adams, even though I never read Hitchhiker.

Definitely going to vote Adams. Homer is great and all, but Homer is only ever as good as the translation, and that translation is often more a reflection of the translator's effort than the original. Besides, there are a lot of bad versions of Homer's work.

I vote Adams. I really liked Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and the Hitchhiker books were good too. Plus, I have to vote against Homer for the same reason I voted against Virgil: since so much of poetry relies on the aesthetic properties of the exact words chosen, it's hard to appreciate poetry written in another language.