We are exhaustedly happy to announce the final results of the Tor.com Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novel of the Decade Reader’s Poll!
You voted more than 10,000 times for over 1600 titles over the course of seven days and we spent a long long amount of time hand-counting that, then recounting that over and over in order to shake out a final count free of inaccuracies and ineligibilities. Along the way we assembled some interesting data sets that we’ll be rolling out for you over the next few days.
Oh, but that’s just the cream. The real treat here are the top ten titles that you chose en masse as the Best SFF Novels of the Decade! Befitting novels of such status, we’ll be rolling out appreciations of these novels from a host of guest writers!
The Top Ten:
Without further delay, the top ten Best SFF Novels of the Decade, chosen by Tor.com popular vote:
- Old Man’s War by John Scalzi – 295 votes
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman – 270 votes
- The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss – 231 votes
- Blindsight by Peter Watts – 221 votes
- Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey – 194 votes
- A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin – 179 votes
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke – 167 votes
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson – 141 votes
- Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson – 125 votes
- Perdido Street Station by China Mieville – 124 votes
All vote counts include series votes bundled in, a practice that shot Mistborn into the top ten and funnily enough bumped out Mr. Sanderson’s most recent original release, The Way of Kings.
All of the vote counts changed after recount, some more dramatically than others. Several books also had the benefit of their fanbase’s support, most notably Old Man’s War and Kushiel’s Dart, the former of which never let go of the top spot once it had it and the latter of which benefited from a massive influx of votes in the final few days of voting.
Also notable amongst the top ten is the presence of two debut novels which continually gathered votes with little to no help from their authors or a centralized group of fans, The Name of the Wind and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. These two books seem to have struck a particularly resonant chord along a wide swath of fantasy fiction readers.
Of course, none of the top ten books would be there if they weren’t widely beloved, and its in that spirit that we gathered appreciations for all ten titles!
The Appreciations:
We’ll be posting one appreciation each day in alphabetical order by book title, since that’s what readers were primarily voting for as opposed to author, appreciator, etc. The schedule is as follows:
 |
03/01/11 – American Gods: An Appreciation by Patrick Rothfuss |
 |
03/02/11 – Anathem: An Appreciation by Jo Walton |
 |
03/03/11 – Blindsight: An Appreciation by Elizabeth Bear |
 |
03/04/11 – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: An Appreciation by Lev Grossman |
 |
03/05/11 – Kushiel’s Dart: An Appreciation by Claire Eddy, Senior Editor at Tor Books |
 |
03/06/11 – Mistborn: The Final Empire: An Appreciation by Jason Denzel of Dragonmount.com |
 |
03/07/11 – The Name of the Wind: An Appreciation by John Scalzi |
 ; |
03/08/11 – Old Man’s War: An Appreciation by Ken MacLeod |
 |
03/09/11 – Perdido Street Station: An Appreciation by Eileen Gunn |
 |
03/10/11 – A Storm of Swords: An Appreciation by Elio and Linda of Westeros.org |
We hope you’ll chime in along with your own appreciations!
The Data:
As mentioned above, we’ll be releasing sets of data gleaned from the poll every day this week. The first concerns an executive summary of data, along with voting trends and a voting timeline of the top ten, which you’ll see later today. Further on in the week we’ll be releasing data regarding gender, top authors, awards, and more!
But we also wanted to give the readers a chance to play with the data themselves, so go here to download a Google Docs spreadsheet of the raw collected data. [Edit: It looks like the Google Docs view cuts off about 3/4ths of the way through the sheet. Download the file to get the full sheet.]
An additional note: considering the freeform nature of the votes and general human error, there are bound to be some discrepancies within the data. Please take this margin into account when collating your own stats.
 |
03/01/11 – Best of the Decade Data: Voting Trends, Timelines & More |
 |
03/02/11 – Best of the Decade Data: Votes by Year + Top 50 vs. Awards & Genres |
 |
03/03/11 – Best of the Decade Data: Votes by Author |
This project was a great deal more massive than we envisioned from the outset and none of the results would have been realized without the help and extra effort of the entirety of the Tor.com team. But most of all, we want to thank all of our readers for voting and for being so patient with us.
We hope you enjoy the results!
Wow. Bloody amazing piece of work you’ve done there, guys. I am really looking forward the appreciations etc over the next few days. YAY for awesome, awesome books!! :D
Anyone wanting to run a reader’s poll of ‘best’ books should look at the Guardian’s experience of running their ‘Not the Booker Prize‘ prize. And then beat to death anyone who ever mentions the idea again :)
Thanks guys!
Keep up the good work!
This is wonderful. I can’t wait to start on thee books, well the ones I have not read atleast. Thanks for putting this together, I do appreciate it.
Great data! I look forward to seeing the rest. Shame only one of my choices made it to the top ten. At least Way of Kings was close!
All of these top-ten choices (that I haven’t already read) are now on the list of next-reads.
Yay! Old Man’s War is #1. Too bad Altered Carbon couldn’t get into the top ten.
I just realized that I’ve only read three of the ten, although I have two of the others sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. Guess I better get moving, I’m obviously missing out.
It’s kind of exciting getting to see that multiple books/authors I lovelovelove are in the top ten. (Gaiman, Rothfuss, Scalzi, Mieville.) I think in some ways this poll has shown the whole point of Tordot. THERE ARE PEOPLE LIKE ME OUT THERE. And we’re all gathering here to talk about it:) That’s pretty awesome.
“All vote counts include series votes bundled in” should be interpreted as “A vote for the series was interpreted as voting for each book in the series”?
Wait a second….Why does WoT not figure into this?
ToM has 121
TGS has 113
KoD has 112
CoT has 60
WH has 60
NS has 56
I understand leaving New Spring out of the count, but the others total 466 votes. It doesn’t necessarily bother me, because I don’t personally think that Jordan’s work needs any validation, but why should the 3 Mistborn books be counted as 1? Brandon has already said that he’s going to do ANOTHER trilogy, and he’s done this extra “short” novel that’s coming out this year in the Mistborn world. For that matter, WoK and Elantris are ALSO part of the same universe. It seems arbitrary to combine some and not others. Why not combine all the Pratchett books from the last decade, too?
@9. That’s correct. One vote for a series was counted as one vote for each eligible book in that series. (Although in the All Titles tab in the spreadsheet, you’ll see we counted out-of-decade books for GRRM and Harry Potter as a little side experiment.)
@10. Ben, Mistborn: The Final Empire is the proper title of the first Mistborn book in the original trilogy. The included spreadsheet has the placement of the other two, as well.
@10 Ben
I think your mistaken all the series votes were compiled into each individual book. The first book in the Mistborn series is The Final Empire, Which many people just call Mistborn. The other 3 did not make the list only the first one did.
@11 Thanks, Chris. That’s the conclusion I reached from the aggregated data posted.
I guess I have some reading to do! I’ve only read four of these…
Thanks you so much for this (and I have a lot of reading to do! I haven’t even read the book that finished right at the very top …must….rectify….soon)
~lakesidey
Oh man, Kushiel’s Dart.
What does the bottom ten look like?
@16, it appaears from the data that the bottom 10 is a huge tie of books that only had one vote. Don’t think you can pick just ten, there are pages of books with just a single vote.
This is a fun celebration of what readers have liked. I’d overlooked Kushiel’s Dart and forgotten Blindsight along the way, and the voting lists have been very useful as a source for wishlist books — not so much the final tallies (fun from a numbers junkie perspective) but the original lists, where I could match up tastes. “Hey, they liked these 4 books I liked, and also these other 3. I should probably check out those other 3.” From a “if you liked X, you might like Y” perspective the voting lists seemed to overlap a lot, with a little cross-pollination by the big vote-getters, particularly American Gods.
I’m definitely looking forward to the “appreciations” but Nick’s comment begs me to ask: can we get a “roast” as well? :)
Hm.
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/01/best-sff-novels-of-the-decade-readers-poll
Someone voted for Nick Mamatas’ Move Under Ground (comment #428), but Mamatas doesn’t show up in the Google Doc here. (Totally not complaining! Just happened to find one random errata along the way.)
@montsamu. Nick is in there for Move Under Ground, but it looks like Google Docs cuts off the spreadsheet view about 3/4ths of the way in. (The internet is full of surprises!) Download the file itself to see the whole thing. Time to add a disclaimer….
Also, we REALLY wanted to do a wish list type of aggregation — i.e. people who liked this tended to vote for this — but that would have delayed the results significantly.
Regarding a “roast”, well… wait until you read Scalzi’s. :)
Thanks!
This was great while it was going on and now with all this data it is even better.
Great Job! Well done!
Woohoo, I’m a bottomer!
@20TorChris, I’d be happy to take a shot at doing that kind of correlation study, but I can’t do it from the “raw” data you posted. In fact, aside from trending publication dates, there’s not much to generate. Like the timeline graph generated for your newer post, you clearly have additional data that you’re working from.
@22Nick. If someone doesn’t go Michael Scott on that comment, I will be so sad. :)
@23quis60. We do have other data we’re utilizing that isn’t included in the sheet, but nothing that would help with a correlation study. That would have to be sourced from the original voting thread.
I find it slightly unbeliveable that not a single one of The Wheel of Time books actually made it into the top 10. I can honestly say that I haven’t even heard of some of these authors, but that would be a failing on my part, most people would say. The rest would just say that I need to get out from under my rock/bridge more.
How many votes did Peter F. Hamilton’s “Void” trilogy get? That was one of the best stories I’ve read in the last TWO decades.
BoothReviews.com
@24TorChris, that’s too bad. I don’t have quite that much time available either.
Also, when I looked at total titles by author, John Ringo had the highest number (31), but that includes titles with multiple authors which may not be the intent of “most books on the list by a single author.”
Just glad none of the Wheel of Time books made the list. They seem to have so many fans on this site but seem to appeal to more of a Dungeons and Dragons mentality than a literary one. I found them very mediocre-to be kind.
quis60-I’m surprised John Ringo got any votes. A terrible writer.
@28 Most of the best books of the WoT were written in the 20th century.
Wow. A considerable amount of effort for what seems like only a few hundred people.
Great to see Jacqueline Carey’s ‘Kushiel’s Dart’ getting recognition at last. It was definitely one of my top 10 reads of the decade and has been long overlooked.
That’s certainly an excellent selection. There are a couple of books in that list I’ve yet to read, so I have something to look forward to!
Have read 4 of these, and the other 6 have just been added to my Wishlist. Thanks guys!
Firstly, thanks for all the effort and energy spent!
Secondly, hmpph! Everyone knows the Best 10 Books of the Decade (or so) are the 10 titles in The Malazan Book of the Fallen.
How is Storm of Swords not in the top 3 at least. I liked the name of the wind quite a lot, but it didnt hold a candle to a storm of swords.
I also can’t believe none if the WoT books made it in the top ten. What a complete joke. How many of these others ever made any ranking on the NYT best seller list? I’ve never even heard of most of them!
Whatever….
Interesting list, I love classics books and when it comes to classic sci-fi, you should check out ‘Slaugther-house Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut.
Of the Top-10, 2 were among my 5 nominations. I’ve read 3, 3 more on the TBR pile, and the rest will likely join ’em…
Personally, I love the “I’ve never heard of these” comments. As one recognized- that’s entirely your own fault. All of these have been extremely well-received and highly lauded over the past decade, so it ain’t no one’s fault but your own. And if the “Bestseller” list is your measuring stick, well, I have some Britney Spears CD’s to sell you…
As far as the WoT goes, I’ve been there since the beginning and love ’em but you can’t tell me you’re a fan of the genre and still say that any of the books published in the last decade were particularly great standing on their own.
@39. Knife of Dreams is a top 5 book for the entire series and I voted for it in the poll. Lots of highlights (Egwene’s Honey in the Tea chapter, the Golden Crane, Under an Oak and, my favorite, the Mat portion of the As if the World Were Fog chapter when Tuon finally realizes exactly what she has tied herself to over the preceding books). The rest…not so much, although the two RJ/BS books are enjoyable, worthy efforts.
Thank you for making the list. I was very pleased to see four I voted for on the list and will definitley be reading the ones that have yet to make it to my shelves. The appreciations are a very nice touch.
not sure if I should feel proud for reading 7 of the top 10, or embarrassed for reading only “the popular ones”. My hipster friends would be so disappointed…if I had any hipster friends.
Amazing that you used Approval Voting, instead of some overly complicated paradox-prone system like Instant Runoff Voting (used by the Hugo award). The results are simple, and no voter ever had an incentive not to vote for his favorite book.
Plus, Approval Voting is more representative according to extensive Bayesian Regret calculations.
ScoreVoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
Top 10 is okay.. but I would have liked to see a top 100 list or something too..
I thought I was a sci-fi reader? I haven’t read any of these but I do have four on my to-be-read list. Guess I should start them.
Old Man’s War, really? I thought a better title would have been “hey look, i rewrote star ship troopers”.
I like American Gods by Neil Gaiman, but my favourite book of him is
Good Omens