I like your portrayal of Vergil as fantasy writer. It's sad that he lost, but I encourage you all to go read him because that was the point of this anyway. I'm glad he lost to Tolkein. It's a better ending than most of the remaining authors.

16. J.R.R. Tolkein
18. Isaac Asimov
62. George Orwell
61. Charles Dickens
5. Virginia Woolf
38. Victor Hugo
39. Edgar Allan Poe
40. Alexandre Dumas

So Asimov vs. Poe assuming skipping the first one again due to its being the most recent. I vote Poe, or Tolkien if it's him vs. Dumas.

I vote Victor Hugo for everything.

Poe. I love Asimov, but Poe is just the better writer and the more influential for his day. Everything Asimov really influenced was Science related. pie did poetry, horror, and detective/mystery fiction.

So again, I say Poe.

Poe 2
Asimov 0

Oh man. I like Poe, and I like Asimov. This comes down to poetry vs. science-fiction...

So I have to say Asimov.

Damn, Woolf's drawn a tough opponent...oh well...hopefully she can prevail still, and anyway, glad a pick of mine made it this far (especially her, I'd argue that she's probably the most underrated of the 8 remaining.)

Poe vs. Asimov, hm...

On the one hand, no question, preference goes to Poe, and I think he's the bigger name with arguably the better body of work...

On the other hand, Asimov's arguably more indispensable in his --you can have Gothic horror or poetry without Poe, but doing sci-fi without Asimov is like trying to read the great playwrights and not reading Shakespeare or Ibsen.

On the shallow side, Poe's just more fun for me...on the equally-shallow side, always tempting to vote for a Jew, and Asimov's the last one left (I really thought Kafka would have a better shot vs. Poe.)

I guess I'll go with Poe in the end...I personally think his role in founding the detective story is a bit overstated sometimes--don't get me wrong, he did start it, but mystery-solving in works of literature is one of the oldest dramatic conventions there is, heck, even Hamlet's arguably trying to solve a mystery, Poe just took that convention and formed a genre around it as his society allowed for that kind of genre--but nevertheless, very important, and I think he's the better overall author:

Poe: 3
Asimov: 1

Asimov though both are amazing.

Hardest one... Poe horror and detective fiction... enduring, probably more so than Asimov will be, in some ways. But Asimov. Wow. His locked room mystery short stories? Foundation... Robots... the 3 laws that seem to be obliquitous now, like Tolkien's world in fantasy. Damn.

Quoth the raven.... Asimov... though it rips my heart.

Poe

And I've read The Aeneid, ghug...

And while it is a masterpiece, frankly, that's enough Vergil for me for a while...it's been a couple years now since I read it, but even so, Vergil for me is most interesting as the cap to the Iliad/Odyssey/Aeneid trilogy that forms a huge basis of Greco-Roman literary tradition....

Maybe it's an odd comparison, but to me, Vergil is like Breaking Bad, and someone like Shakespeare The West Wing--

I can watch/read the latter two over and over, always find new things, and be equally entertained or intrigued or moved, and often more so with each new reading/viewing...Hamlet/Martin Sheen as the President (and Bradley Whitford as the Deputy Chief of Staff...Josh Lyman...that character was and is MY character...everything from the attitude to the Jewishness to the smart-assery to the shouting and rooting for the Mets) I can enjoy endlessly.

The latter two? Breaking Bad/The Aeneid were great to go through once, but a lot of the interest came from just seeing where each was going...once they ended...well, I can't see myself watching Breaking Bad over and over again...maybe occasionally, someday, but the fun was in Walter White and the plot twists, and with the latter revealed and the former played out...I can't see me watching it again and again.

Same with Vergil--I can read Shakespeare over and over and find new, great things each time, but Vergil? I'm sure I could to...but he doesn't really compel me to do so...put another way--

I'd be one of those nutjobs who WOULD sit through a full rendition the entire Henriad, all 4 plays, that's probably 10-12 hours easily, if not more...I might even do so multiple times...that epic is just so rich, the language so perfect, the journey of Prince Hal in the tavern with Falstaff to Henry V in Agincourt is just THAT incredible (and of course probably far more incredible than the actual tale and man himself)...

I'd watch or listen to an opera or musical version of that, or the War of the Roses plays.

But Vergil's epic?

Berlioz has a massive, 5-act grand opera centered on it...and I LOVE long operas...and I couldn't make it through, and while part of that's down to my not being the biggest Berlioz fan--he's OK, but I like a ton of composers far better--another part is just down to the fact that, for whatever reason, I can't bring myself to care as much about that epic and those characters.

I can care for 10-12 hours straight about the Henrys...

I can't do it for 4 hours straight for Aeneas and Company. Even if it were a straight adaptation or just reading it for 4 hours...no...I could do it for Shakespeare, probably for Dante, maybe even for Milton and Homer...

But while I can say Shakespeare isn't always "good" (hey, he wrote 37 plays, and co-wrote others), he's almost NEVER dull...even in a "bad" Shakespeare play, the man knows how to keep your attention--the language, the characters, sex, violence, conflict, jokes, bad jokes that get your attention as to just how bad they are...

Shakespeare's not always good, but ALWAYS engaging.

I can't say the same for Vergil--he's usually good, but that doesn't mean he's always engaging.

Doesn't mean he's bad or boring...just that I wouldn't sit spellbound by him for hours on end, whereas with others...I know friends who'll marathon the long-long editions of the LOTR movies for Tolkien, and again, I WILL sit through the whole damn Henriad in one shot (partially because of their balance, which is another issue with Vergil's epic--with the Henriad, you get a soft-ish opening with Richard II, a GREAT follow-up with 1 Henry IV, a follow-up to that that's so-so by comparison but ends strong and with one of the most dramatic interpersonal scenes in all of Shakespeare in the last meeting between Henry and Falstaff, and then the INCREDIBLE masterpiece that is Henry V...so, soft, great, so-so, incredible, Shakespeare never lets the story sag for too long, or has back-to-back so-so chapters...with Vergil, I find the first half of The Aeneid WAY more engaging than the second, sans the ending, where you pick up interest again, but by then, it's been a few Books, and some of the steam from the beginning's great start is lost...with Shakespeare, you start off modest, go big, taper off just slightly, and then go big times ten, it's almost constant escalation, whereas with Vergil, the momentum's not nearly as good.)

Poe 4
Asimov 3

Poe: 4
Asimov: 3

The tl;dr version--

At the risk of hurting her chances, I'd compare Vergil to Virginia Woolf vs. Austen--

I firmly believe Woolf's the better writer...

But I'd be lying if I didn't say Austen didn't know how to appeal to a bigger audience and essentially do so on the sheer force of her ability to string words together in a pleasing, musical way.

Woolf's the more advanced, experimental, daring, innovative one...she's the better all-around author...

But if you get bored by her prose or plots or characters, for whatever reason, you're in trouble.

If you can't stand AUSTEN'S characters or plots, however--and yeah, that has a pretty damn good chance of happening--she can more often than not write herself out of the corner by just making the words and the banter itself engaging enough to follow...and she can even make a character so infuriatingly bad they can get you engaged again just based on THAT.

So while the Vergils and Woolfs are the superior artists, the Austens of the literary landscape are like silver-tongued devils--not quite as good, but way better at convincing a mass audience to stick with them, and that DOES count for something.

Ninja'd! Hahahaha

Poe.

Both are great, but Poe has the Raven going for him, which for me surpasses anything I've ever read by Asimov.

Poe 5
Asimov 3

Hugo and Dickens will be easy votes for me. This one between Asimov and Poe was tough (SciFi master versus a father of Horror and Suspense), but the real tough decision will be having to decide between the great French Romantic-Adventure novelist and the master of Fantasy. Why couldn't these 4 have just been the final four... Because then I would have had to choose between one of them and Dickens and another one of them and Hugo still leaving me with tough choices.

Very tough.

As much as Asimov is THE science fiction writer, IMO, I'd still have to go with Poe.

I really enjoy Asimov, but I love Poe.

Poe

Poe 7

Asimov 3

Damn, was hoping this would stay close cause I love both.

Poe

Poe 8
Asimov 3

Poe by the Raven.

That's fair, Obi. Different strokes for different folks.

I'm kinda glad Asimov's losing. Still disappointed Douglas Adams isn't the one representing the genre far into the tournament.

Poe 9
Asimov 3

I just wish Asimov was getting a better showing.

Catullus; Plato (including the doubtful Seventh Letter); Horace; (Virgil) P. Vergilius Maro
Poe Poe Poe (.. but not the BOOK of Literary Criticism of the Same Name.); Richard Rorty; Aeschylus; Herman Melville; Dorothy Sayers (Dante & Chanson de Roland translations and the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories); Woodhouse (the Jeeves stories); Sir Walter Scott; Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Charles Williams; J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ray Bradbury.
On a roll -, just writing this waiting for certain bastards to finalize Retreats in a disgustingly slow game

This Taylor seems like a man of excellent taste.

Douglas Adams is superb, but lets not confuse him as a Science Fiction writer :)

I take it back, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency seroes was SF...