Views from Medina Road

We waited a few days for any paper mail stragglers, though they are increasingly few -- only about 50 this year -- then last night and tonight I finished editing write-in votes, ran final tallies, compiled the survey results, and turned them in to the home office. All done! There were slightly over 1000 valid ballots* this year, up from 962 last year, though I'm not sure if it's an all-time record. Over 300 came in the final week, boosted by plugs from various websites and blogs. As usual, I ran incremental tallies as ballots came in over the past 10 weeks since the poll went online, and as usual, the majority of categories exhibited clear leaders early on. It's nice to attract as many ballots as we can, but statistically, it doesn't take 1000 ballots to determine a winner in most cases. (I've probably mentioned this before.) That said, there were two categories this year with fairly close results. You won't know which until the poll results, with statistics, are published in the magazine, in... July? August?

A selection of comments from the ballots will be posted online in the near future. This year there were both general comments, and responses to a bonus online question about attracting younger reader to serious SF.

*We realize that many multiple submissions are probably the result of email or webform glitches, but there's no excuse for submitting a ballot without a name, or voting for the same item more than once in the same category. We say this every year...