1. I’ve put together an index post linking too all the posts of the past week, plus the contexual posts from earlier in the autumn. If you want to link to the poll or discussions, that’s probably the best place to link to now.
2. Matt Denault asked what a top ten that treated book-length series (ie aggregated votes for, say, Bold as Love and Castle Made of Sand) as a single entry would look like:
1. Natural History/Living Next-Door to the God of Love, Justina Robson
2. The Carhullan Army, Sarah Hall
3. Maul, Tricia Sullivan
4. Small Change trilogy, Jo Walton
5. the Time-Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffeneger
6= Spirit, Gwyneth Jones
6= Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon
8. Bold as Love series, Gwyneth Jones
9. The Castle/Fourlands novels, Steph Swainston
10. The Vorkosigan novels, Lois McMaster Bujold
So new entries for Bujold and Swainston, Walton and Robson move up, and Life, Lavinia and City of Pearl drop out. Treating the two Robson novels as a series is arguable, I grant — they’re a shared universe but share no characters — and if you don’t, Natural History places joint third with Small Change.
3. A couple of dangling links: Tansy Rayner Roberts on Feed by Mira Grant and on The Gene Thieves by Maria Quinn, winner of the first Norma K Hemming Award. The latest Coode St podcast includes a bit of discussion about the list.
4. Follow-up. This obviously isn’t the last word on this topic; I have a few other ideas in mind, but none ready to go just yet.
Thank you for compiling this additional list, Niall. It is interesting, granting the iffiness of considering the Robson books as a series, just how well Carhullan did, then. And Maul as well–it was on my list and I know it was on yours, but somehow I hadn’t realized it was this well-read and appreciated. Good to see (and US publishers, take note!). I’m also maybe a little surprised by how well Swainston did, beating out Bujold, Atwood, and a number of other big names and series (I almost wrote Traviss there, but looking at the complete list it seems that while City of Pearl did well, contra Bujold/Cherryh/Swainston/Jones/Traviss’s own Star Wars books/etc. nobody nominated any of the subsequent books in the Wess’har series, which is interesting, too).
I suspect the relatively low ranking of Bujold is due to the relative lack of Vorkosigan novels this decade — Cryoburn seems to be well received, so if I repeated the poll next year I wouldn’t be surprised to see it doing much better.
But yes, The Carhullan Army really did get very strong support.