I don't like comperative statements when talking about exceptional work. Can you say the Beatles are more popular/influential than Queen? How can you even decid

I don't like comperative statements when talking about exceptional work. Can you say the Beatles are more popular/influential than Queen? How can you even decide something like that? The words themselves (exceptional,influential) do not have comparative/superlative forms. Agreed on Mao and Marx. I'd argue that HGW, Verne and Asimov created or helped significantly in shaping a literary genre which has a high impact on our psychological and cultural behavior and currently paves the way to our future. Whether their ideas last only a 100 years is irrelevant. Is Baroque, or better yet - Rococo - irrelevant? There will be a handful of books that make a big, permament paradigm shift in society as a whole (or in big parts of it). But in order for the authors who will write those books to be born, society has to constantly move and spawn new trends.