Clancy used to do Full Omniscient quite well. Michener is considered a master of the form. It's true that I can't think of a lot of authors that have done Full Omniscient particularly well, but it is a valid choice if the focus of the story demands it.

I think that one of the key elements of choosing Full Omniscient is if the story is essentially didactic or persuasive. When you want to convince the audience that a story is really possible or teach them about what actually happened historically, Full Omniscient is a good choice.

During some time I thought about trying that kind of thing (retelling from a different perspective), but I finally decided I wasn't able to do it well without boring the reader. I would be interested in reading it, maybe.

I read long ago a short story written by Borges, where he mentioned there was a Book called "The Book and the Ring" by Robert Browning which did something similar (and in poetry!). I purchased it from amazon but, shamefully, my english skills proved insufficient to understand everything from the start and I forgot the reading.

KatFeete: thanks for your recomendations! I've already read (and enjoyed) novels from Austen and Dickens. I'll try Eliot. I suppose that being spanish there are a lot of english classics that I miss just because in school they try to give more emphasis on the spanish ones. (BTW if anyone wants any reccomendations on spanish literature I'll be glad to give my two cents).

On your question, Christine. I'll give my opinion. I personally do experiments sometimes, trying to use other POV's but I always end up using the same: 3rd limited or first. These are the only ones I feel comfortable with. In my case, not using other options is a matter of "fear". I fear that I won't be able to involve the reader if I don't use the ones I have used more successfully.

In other words, if you're dong a movie about an earthquake, then you can concentrate on the characters (Charlton Heston saving people from a collapsing building etc.) or you can concentrate on the geological processes that none of the characters directly experiences. One gives you Earthquake, the other is a Nova two hour special about earthquakes.

Now, both of these can have value, the question is which you want to write (translating movie to novel). The central reason to use omniscient is because the human drama is not the key tension. If the key tension is something that is not a human experience (meaning something that an individual human experiences), then Full Omniscient is a likely bet for your POV. Also, if you've written a number of Full Omniscient books that have been well recieved, then you might write in Full Omniscent even when telling a human scale drama.

I love watching Nova, and I love well written Full Omniscient. I don't even mind if one or two bits of science have been fudged (for Nova at least, I'm less forgiving when it comes to fiction) as long as overall there is a concerted effort to get it right. But it cannot be denied that proper Full Omniscient which gives equal time to every physical event which directly impacts the story (almost always an event story) being told will tend to relegate characters to somewhat subordinate roles. Or you could redefine character and say that there will be a lot of non-sentient/non-living characters crowding a proper use of Full Omniscient.

Narrator told stories are different. Any story can be told by a narrator, but then you need to have an attractive and interesting narrator. Dickens and contemporaries used narrators extensively. The form has fallen out of favor because it is a bit "cat's pajamas" to the modern audience, and there is also the issue of using fictional author narrators, where the narrator is a fictional version of the author with differing social, political, and often personal views. The modern audience is a bit less receptive to this sort of thing than was the case in earlier times (there are various reasons for this, but we probably shouldn't discuss them here).

Narrators are somewhat better accepted in Fantasy and futuristic SF, since it is easier for the audience to see that the fictional narrator is a literary convention rather than some kind of authorial deceit. But with the alienation of narrators from popular contemporary fiction and the relative difficulty of maintaining a narrator across an entire novel or series, it is probably the sort of thing that needs special circumstances to be used outside of shorter fiction.

The current fad is, as several people have said, for limited third person. All well and good: my current WIP is limited third with a single viewpoint character. The problem, to my mind, comes when people want lots and lots of characters but are intimidated by omniscient. So instead they use lots and lots and lots of limited third narrators, some of whom only appear once or twice, many of whom just repeat what some other narrator has said in a different way. And then they want to switch viewpoints in the middle of a scene, so they do - but only once or twice, and usually without warning or clarification - and then they get confused over who's seeing what, and the reader gets confused, and there's so many characters that you need an index to keep track, and the whole thing dissolves into an ugly gooey mess.

my big baby, Searth, is being written through my omniscient narrator who is actually a secret character who has been involved from the beginning, and will remain involved until the very end of humanity. now, if that doesn't give dead away who that character is, i don't think anything will :P