|
Poll Results | Survey Results | About the Voting | About the Results
(This was the Poll and Survey form)
1998 categories Though the numbers were relatively small, most of the wins were decisive in the sense that the leaders in each category emerged early, as ballots were tabulated beginning the first or second week of each polling period, and held their leads until the end of the voting. The suspense in updating the totals every couple of days was in wondering which and how many stories would gather the minimum number of votes to be listed in the final results -- 3% of the ballots voting in each category. Both polls were experiments to see what kind of results an online poll would get; specifically, how closely the results would agree, or to what extent they would disagree, with the results of the parallel poll in the magazine. Part of that answer is already evident; the rest awaits completion of the magazine results.
All-time categories Asimov's ''Nightfall'' is famous as being the story that has always been voted the all-time best (it was in SFWA's vote too) -- until now. Daniel Keyes' ''Flowers for Algernon'' earned a decisive victory, not just over Asimov's story, but gaining more votes and more points than any single story in the entire poll. The all-time short story category was a virtual tie between two Harlan Ellison stories and Clarke's perennial favorite ''The Star'' -- with another Ellison story in fourth place. This was one category where the lead changed as votes accumulated. The results of all-time short fiction writer category are interesting for how they contrast with the results of the other categories. Ask, who's your favorite short fiction writer?, and many voters offer up names other than the authors of the stories they nominate. Obviously, many writers have been so prolific, or so uniformly excellent, that they are become favorites of many readers even if they don't have one or a handful of stand-out stories. Theodore Sturgeon, for example, tied for 6th place in the voting for all-time short fiction writer, but placed only 13th when the ranking depended on votes for particular story collections, and lower than that, 22nd place, when the ranking depended on votes for particular stories. There is one modern version of an all-time short fiction poll, and that's the Internet Top 100 Story List, compiled along similar lines as the famous list of Internet Top 100 SF books. (I had seen it before, but forgot about when I set up this poll; perhaps just as well, to avoid influencing voters with its ranking.) The Internet Top 100 lists are compiled differently than a typical poll. Each voter can vote (via email to the compiler) for any number of stories, rating each story on a scale of 1 to 10. The ranking of the final list is based on cumulative diffused averages of all the stories to date (which means, roughly, that the most recent votes are scaled down so that a new story rated 10 by a couple voters doesn't immediately rise to the top of the list). It's an interesting ranking, and most of its top rated stories appear in our results too.
All-time anthology and collection
The all-time collection category had the lowest voting totals of any category. Most of the books on the list fall into one of three groups: collections of linked stories (or what I might call 'story-cycles') that have the fame and endurance of novels, including three of the top four, The Martian Chronicles, The Past Through Tomorrow, and I, Robot, as as Kirinyaga lower down; career retrospective collections, including Ellison's 3rd place book, and the books by Davidson, Card, Silverberg, Tiptree, Cordwainer Smith, Bester, Kornbluth, Leiber, and Sturgeon; or collections that represent a peak in the short fiction careers of their writers: the books by Le Guin, Wolfe, Varley, Delany, Willis, Gibson, Zelazny, Lafferty. Who is the highest placing all-time short fiction writer with a collection not on this list? Arthur C. Clarke!
|
||||
TOP |
© 1999 by Locus Publications. All rights reserved. |