Hard SF discussion

The poll for November 2009 is up for the HardSF BotM at Yahoo groups.

For your research, the books are:

» The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

» Weapons of Choice by John Birmingham

» Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge

» Hyperion by Dan Simmons

» Fool's War by Sarah Zettel

» The Golden Age by John C. Wright

Vote soon!

Great choices, as always. You made it hard to pick!

Whoa, not any single person's choices. These books are nominated over at the Yahoo Group, although I'm not sure what obscure rules are used to whittle down the nominations. Username can tell us, I suspect.

Go vote, and remember you can vote on more than one book (which somehow just doesn't seem right).

Sorry, I meant the collective you. (darn ambiguities of English!) I'm quite new to the Yahoo group, so I probably still think of the group over there as something separate. From the GR side, the picks appear somewhat magically.

And, I had no idea I could vote for more than one!

Richard wrote: "Whoa, not any single person's choices. These books are nominated over at the Yahoo Group, although I'm not sure what obscure rules are used to whittle down the nominations. Username can tell us, I ..."

OK, here it goes: it must be a hard SF book (in a quite loose sense, apparently), available as a mass market paperback (although we have made exceptions with books that were available as free downloads) and we use as benchmark of what's available amazon.com.

With respect to being able to pick more than one book, I've found it works a lot better: there are less ties, we can get everyone's second favorite instead of arguing endlessly for which one should be the top choice. You can still vote for just one of the choices if doing otherwise makes you feel a sell-out ;-)

Or, if you really don't want just one book, you can vote for all of 'em except that one. I almost did that to Hyperion, since I've already read it. But it really is a worthwhile read, so I couldn't deny it to others.

After defending the multiple vote, I had to go and set the tie-reaker as a one vote per person thing... but its really not that usual to have ties. Happened maybe five times in eight years.