The Fantasy Poll is starting tomorrow, over in the
Polling Place board. I have selected 96 fantasy works for the contest. The list was culled from what seems to be the best known classics of the genre, my own personal favorites, and almost all the nominations from the thread here. Many are fantasy series or "worlds" since so few fantasy novels are standalone books. Any stories that are set in the same world get one entry, even if there are many authors, as in Thieve's World. Of course there are standalone books in the poll too, and some authors (notably Neil Gaiman) have many entries in the poll.
Okay, so 96 contestants. These are getting split into 12 groups, where you can vote for as many as you like. Only two from each group will move on though. Groups were more-or-less randomly created. Each group has a seed, one of the 12 series that I think will be most popular at my purely subjective guess. Some of my seeds for the SF poll never made it out of their groups, so you never know. There is also a rule that an author can't have two entries in a group, which wasn't so hard since most fantasy authors are primarily famous for a single series.
After the group stage there will be... another group stage! This time four groups of six. You can vote for two, and two will advance. This should be pretty brutal, since not all the group winners can possibly make it out, much less the second place entries.
As in the SF poll, there are several tiebreaker methods for the group stages:
- If two items are tied for first place, they'll both advance.
- If three or more are tied for first, they'll all go into a tiebreaker poll where you can only vote for one item (but two advance).
- All items that are tied for second, from ALL GROUPS, will go into a single tiebreaker poll. So it's possible for more than two from a single group to advance.
After that we'll have eight entries left. Then it goes to 1 vs. 1 elimination until there is a winner.
And congratulations to Dune for winning the SF poll!
