The Book Award Annals reports "American Gods" as the most honored sci-fi/fantasy book of all time. It lists 6 honors, 3 of them are wins.

Personally, I think it deserves it. I wasn't all that excited about it while reading, but I think about "American Gods" quite a lot--more so than I expected. It has really made an impression, I guess.

I did really enjoy "American Gods" just for the record..but i didn't think it the strongest of Gaiman's work.
I think i'd hand the all time most honored sci-fi/fantasy to HG Wells. And not for the Time Machine or War of the Worlds either..tho good they are.
But for The Island of Dr Moreau. It may have been written at the turn of the century, but always chills me to the bone. It's like watching surgery..it;s awfull, yet you can;t look away. Pity the films are so crappy.

i think by most honored they mean having won/been nominated for awards and formal honors. not that it's necessarily the best.

Yes, Jak is right. It's the book that has received the most honors--awards or nominations. Right now, there are a lot of awards that a sci-fi/fantasy book can win, so it's not a fair to compare to books of long ago when there were no such awards.

Nevertheless, A.G. seemed to impress a lot of the people who judge such things.

BTW, A.G. won a Stoker Award and was nominated for International Horror Guild Award. It didn't really seem like a horror story to me, though (other than the dead girl).

I really must read American Gods again, it took me the longest time to get into. Maybe I was just in the wrong mood to read it.

quote:

Originally posted by KennyLucius:
The Book Award Annals reports "American Gods" as the most honored sci-fi/fantasy book of all time. It lists 6 honors, 3 of them are wins.

Personally, I think it deserves it. I wasn't all that excited about it while reading, but I think about "American Gods" quite a lot--more so than I expected. It has really made an impression, I guess.

...
AG deserves it more then 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' or 'Neuromancer' or 'Snow Crash' or '2001' or 'The Martian Chronicles' or any other Ray Bradbury book or 'Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrel' or 'The Gunslinger'?
in some strange anti-matter universe, where black is white and up is down... yes. but in my world, all the books i listed were better written, funnier, and more profound then AG. and i prefer that world

i can't remember the first line of AG, but i can tell you that, once, the sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel

quote:

AG deserves it more then 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' or 'Neuromancer' or 'Snow Crash' or '2001' or 'The Martian Chronicles' or any other Ray Bradbury book or 'Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrel' or 'The Gunslinger'?
in some strange anti-matter universe, where black is white and up is down... yes. but in my world, all the books i listed were better written, funnier, and more profound then AG. and i prefer that world

Dear Mr. Lord,

You realize of course that the above is a matter of opinion. Certainly "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is a more influential and perhaps a more important book than AG and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it's not exactly an example of beautiful writing and his character development is pretty bad. And I was bored out of my skull by "Neuromancer"; so bored in fact that I can't remember the ending and have no desire to read it again. "Martian Chronicles" is great and I love it, but it has some real flaws and he forgets that women exist as something more than footnotes (and it keeps changing -- Mr. Bradbury keeps revising it). Sorry AG doesn't mean a whole lot to you, but again, all of it is a matter of opinion and not a matter of which way the universe is pointing.

Yes, it is a matter of opinion... but i've read some of those books years before i read AG and still remember them much more clearly.

Not the universe, maybe, but the sci-fi/fantasy community. Neil is awesome, but he isn't Ray Bradbury. Few people are.

Try to remember that literary awards, for the most part, award every single year. *Somebody* had to be nominated and win those awards. If you look at the other nominations, there weren't any that stand out like AG did (IMHO). I only read half of the Hugo and Nebula nominees, but AG is the only one that stood out in my mind.

Please note, also, that I didn't think much of it while reading it. It didn't have the real sociopolitical import of Heinlein (TMiaHM or SiaSL) or humor of Snow Crash, but it had something that inserted itself into my consciousness and stayed there for a long time. And I don't think it was plot.

I would compare AG with Neuromancer for the writing. Perhaps AG didn't tie together several seemingly disparate trends in society and predict the future with creepy accuracy, but those qualities aren't what made Neuromancer so great--it was the writing as the Big Nothing pointed out. He probably won't agree, though, since he can't pick a single line out of AG to use as an example.

BTW, if you don't like the way the Hugo's are going, then join up and vote.

i guess i should reread AG. it might be an awesome book

but there's so many books i need to read first. so, yea, i could be wrong

that said, i've only read Neuromancer once and i remember bits-- Molly in Straylight, the ending-- that i don't remember in AG

plus, AG hates on the technical gods. Neuromancer lionizes them

After reading my last post, I realize it sounded unintentionally harsh when I said you couldn't pick a single line out of AG to use as a sample. I was referring to your reference to Gibson's famous "the sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel". I've heard that line quoted quite a bit as an example of Gibson's great writing. I don't hear anyone quoting AG, but that doesn't mean much.

I'm new to this but I'll throw my 2 cents in. I agree that AG may not be the greatest Sci-fi book ever written, but it did have some good quotes.

"Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and tnat prayers are just so much fucking spam."

That whole "language is a virus" makes me think of Burroughs.

quote:

Originally posted by MrCroup:
I'm new to this but I'll throw my 2 cents in. I agree that AG may not be the greatest Sci-fi book ever written, but it did have some good quotes.

"Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and tnat prayers are just so much fucking spam."

That whole "language is a virus" makes me think of Burroughs.

mmmmm... memetic viruses
if you want to read a book with more on that, check out Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash'. great fun

and that quote you quoted is great.... i guess i prefer the New Gods of technology and cyberpunk over the old ash and thorn stuff. the Technical Boy gets a few lines in AG... he's all of the Gibson and Stephenson stuff

I think the problem here is people compairing Gaiman to Bradburry, Orwell, and Assimov, when (to me at least) he's more of a Lewis Carrol meets Oscar Wilde. In short, more fantasy than sci-fi. Aside from the techgods, has Gaiman ever even commented on technology before? Most of his books concern swords and spells not robots and lasers.

Bradbury is more fantasy... heck, 'Dandelion Wine' reads more like prose poetry and contains very little science fiction.

I agree with Mr. Croup that Gaiman's genre is fantasy, not SF. Might as well lump in Tolkien for that matter, since some of the themes were parables for the advancing technology.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned, "Hyperion"? A SF Canterbury Tales. I think it won a few awards, but it's not the most honored. I also think that Ellison is more influential to the genre than Heinlein, but because his tales were a little subversive, they didn't appeal to the mainstream public/critics as Heinlein did. Gibson-I have problems with stream of consciousness type writing-my attention wanders. Phillip K. Dick's stories get made into movies, so in a roundabout kind of way, he's influential as well. Stephenson and Varley still have a long road ahead of them...
Has anyone read "Godstalk" trilogy by P.C. Hodgell? A bit of a mess, but by the gods (no pun intended), that woman has a fertile imagination.

*sigh*
Dick's books are influential only because of the movies? Those were some mighty influential movies... but the books themselves, as masterpieces of paranoia and the stripping of reality, are utterly brilliant and should be judged on those terms. And i haven't even read the more autobiographical stuff like 'Radio Free Albmuth' and 'Valis'. Stuff like 'The Man in the High Castle' and 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said' and 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' are beyond brilliant.

and Stephenson has a long road ahead of him? does he need to write 4 MORE 800 page epics? Write 2 more classic cyberpunk novels? We're talking about Gaiman as a 'classic novelist' for AG, Stardust and Neverwhere but the guy who wrote 'Cryptonomicon' and 'The Diamond Age' and friggin 'Snow Crash' has a way to go?
c'mon...

(look, i mean no disrespect, so don't attack that. its late, so i can be a little curt. attack the points i'm making)

i'll check out the books you've recomended, pkitty

wow... i just realized that if you take the very end of the first Sandman storyline and make it from the POV of the guy Dream is punishing (and not reveal what's really happening until the very end) you've got a 'typical' Dick story. 'Eternal waking'... sounds your typical Dick beggining repeated forever....

Yes, I agree that Stephenson is prolific (in more ways than one), but I think that he is going to come full circle and write something a little more simple (like Snow Crash) than his 800 page epics (which I enjoyed), and its going to blow everyone away.
I'm a lazy reader, really...unless it is Dickens.