So yesterday’s post on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harold Lamb and the recent post on the canon, coupled with today is the anniversary of the passing of J. R. R. Tolkien and the seventh anniversary of the death of Frederik Pohl, got me to thinking. I referred to Burroughs and Lamb as giants. In the canon post I quoted Newton talking about his achievements being due to his standing on the shoulders of giants.

So who exactly are the giants in the field?

Who are the writers upon whose shoulders those who came after have stood? Some well-known names come to mind, such as Burroughs and Lamb. But there were others who have faded into obscurity or fallen into disfavor for wrongthink.

So I asked myself, “Self, if you were making a list of the writers who have had a major influence on the genre, whether they were genre writers themselves, who would you put on the list?”

So I made myself I little list. It had the following criteria:

1. World War II was the cutoff. While some writers had successful careers both before and after the war, if not during, they had to have done the bulk of their writing, or to have written their most important/best known works before the war. John W. Campbell, Jr. had such an impact on the science fiction field, and fantasy wasn’t readily available after the demise of Weird Tales, that World War II seems to be a good place to draw the line. There is one exception to this, Tolkien. He started working on the his history of Middle Earth long before the war, so I’m going to include him. (It’s’ my list, I can do that if I want.)
2. They didn’t have to write fantasy, horror, or science fiction, but they had to have written adventure stories, either contemporary to their times or historical. They also have to be well-regarded by writers who were most active after World War II and before the end of the Twentieth Century. This is a somewhat arbitrary metric, but given the lack of respect towards, and gross ignorance of, the major writers and editors of the last 80 years by many of the younger writers today, I’m not sure I care what most of them think.

This is an arbitrary list, and it leaves out a number of writers who could and should be considered giants, such as Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Robert Silverberg, Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Cilifford D. Simak, Jack Williamson. Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury, and many others.

So here are the writers I would consider giants, whose work I can only hope to equal in quality. In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read widely in the works of everyone on the list. But I have read some from everyone. In alphabetical order of last names, they are:

1. E. F. Benson
2. Ambrose Bierce
3. Algernon Blackwood
4. Edgar Rice Burroughs
5. Lord Dunsany
6. E. R. Eddison
7. Henry Rider Haggard
8. Dashiell Hammett
9. William Hope Hodgson
10. Robert E. Howard
11. Montague Rhodes James
12. Rudyard Kipling
13. Harold Lamb
14. H P. Lovecraft
15. Abraham Merritt
16. Talbot Mundy
17. Rafael Sabatini
18. Clarke Ashton Smith
19. J. R. R. Tolkien

I’m sure there’s others I’m overlooking. So here’s your homework assignment. Who would you put on this list? What writers are giants upon whose shoulders other writers have stood?