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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

Although Edgar Allan Poe is well known, I think his influence is under appreciated. He pretty much invented the detective story genre with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and his "Eureka: A Prose Poem" was early sci-fi that more or less invented the idea of the Big Bang.

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There is a Sci-Fi Noir TV show "Altered Carbon" (based on a book) featuring an AI using Edgar Allan Poe as their persona.

That Edgar Allan Poe is seminal in both genres makes me appreciate an already amazing character that much more! I would 10/10 recommend anyone watch season one of the series.

This thread now has me tempted to finally get into reading Poe himself, (among Lovecraft and the Altered Carbon books for more Poe influenced writing).

You might also enjoy Flow Like Poe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Z0VynTR84

What's interesting is that Poe is not in the Altered Carbon book. The hotel was called the Hendrix and its avatar was Jimi the guitarist. They couldn't get image rights for the film, so had to change it. But i agree that atmospherically and thematically Poe is a better fit.

I took a detective fiction course in college and Rue Morgue was indeed the first story we read.

He was also the primary influence on HP Lovecraft

Absolutely. I think that's more well known though, he wrote that Poe was his "God of fiction". His influence on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and H G Wells is probably less well know. He was also a big influence on Alfred Hitchcock who wrote "It's because I liked Edgar Allan Poe's stories so much that I began to make suspense films".

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