The last days of November saw a final rush to place votes in the Locus All-Centuries poll before it closed at midnight on the 30th. I can’t say I blame anyone for leaving it to the last minute, because getting those lists finalised and then ranked added up to a pretty steep time commitment. I hope these eleventh hour participants, together with the consequent surge in online publicity for the ballot, did manage to up the voting figures a bit – I read somewhere that the response to the poll had been disappointing up till then. This is sad to hear, because of course the fewer the votes cast, the less meaningful the final result (shades of BFAs 2011 – either that or the recent Tory police privatisation bill… ) It seems to me that part of the problem in the case of the Locus poll has been the sheer size of the thing – the voting form looked daunting, even if in reality it needn’t have been. This issue could have been offset considerably by the introduction of two simple measures: 1) the poll ‘rules’ should have made it clearer that you didn’t have to fill in all the categories for your vote to be eligible – if you just wanted to vote for novels, or for SF and not Fantasy, for example, that was perfectly OK, and 2) the category for novelette should have been expunged (or, as I saw someone more memorably put it, killed with fire). The novelette is a pretty worthless category in any case – basically it’s just a long short story – and given that it’s difficult, not to say impossible, to obtain the word counts for eligible works outside of the Locus suggestions lists, it made the whole novelette segment feel not only superfluous to requirements but also an active discouragement to people filling in those massive voting forms.

The ballot is a good thing, because it’s interesting to see what the SFF hivemind is thinking, and it deserves to flourish, so let’s hope that Locus learn from their mistakes this year and make the next grand poll a little more user-friendly.

These issues apart, it’s been great to see some voters posting their ballots online. The selections have been genuinely interesting, and it’s been heartening to note how readily those people who did vote have been departing from the suggestions lists to include works more personally important to them. Niall Harrison, Ian Sales, Cheryl Morgan, Rich Horton and Martin Lewis have all posted their excellent lists, there’s another great one at SF Strangelove, and the whole business was discussed extensively on the Coode Street podcast. My own ballot, if you missed it earlier, is here. But the biggest round of applause must go to Matthew Cheney, whose ballot – so imaginative, so ambitious – was a balm to my soul. How wonderful to choose Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (raises fist and yells with delight). And Straub too! (I dithered long and hard between The Buffalo Hunter and The Juniper Tree in the 20th century novella category, eventually plumping for The Buffalo Hunter, so it’s good to see MC’s vote go to The Juniper Tree instead, although actually anything from Houses Without Doors would be a worthy candidate – I still feel bad for not including ‘A Short Guide to the City’ in the short story category, because I love it to bits.) Cheney’s choices could quite easily serve as the basis for a 2013 reading list as they include a good amount of stuff that I’ve had my eye on for some time: Thomas Disch’s 334 (I read the title section in the anthology Anticipations years ago and thought it was amazing), Lydia Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (I saw a ref to that just the other day and noted it down TBR pdq), Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation, and of course Delany, Delany, Delany, who I’ve not read anywhere near enough of and yet feel should be essential to me.

Matt Cheney’s ballot brings so many exceptional works and writers to the forefront of the mind – which should surely be the whole point of the Locus poll in any case – and comprises exactly the kind of radical and unorthodox thinking SFF readers, writers and critics need to be aiming for. Bravo.