Clarkesworld Poll: Best 2007 Story Top Ten Final Results

The Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for Best 2007 Story closed last night. This morning I ran a program to delete any last minute ballot stuffing attempts and then started work on analyzing the data. I looked at the data a few ways to see if I could detect any problems.

Early on, some people suggested to me that we might have a problem with vote recruiting. The most obvious place to look for this would with the voters who only selected one story instead of the three they were allowed. Breaking the data apart was easy. All votes are tracked by IP address and in a few minutes I had the final results cast by singletons and multiples. Interestingly enough, the results changed in very minor ways. Nine of the top ten remained in the top ten and there was only a little movement among them. I know that there had been several attempts at ballot stuffing, but vote recruiting seems to have been insignificant, even when making the false assumption that all singletons were dishonest.

Comfortable with the final data, I can now announce the top ten Clarkesworld stories from 2007:

10 – The Taste of Wheat by Ekaterina Sedia (August)
9 – The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer (April)
8 – Threads of Red and White by Lisa Mantchev (December)
7 – A Dance Across Embers by Lisa Mantchev (October)
6 – Something in the Mermaid Way by Carrie Laben (March)
5 – I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said by Cat Rambo (July)
4 – Excerpt From A Letter By A Social-realist Aswang by Kristin Mandigma (October)
3 – Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky by Ken Scholes (November)
2 – Orm the Beautiful by Elizabeth Bear (January)

And the #1 story is……

The Ape’s Wife by Caitlin Kiernan (September)

Thanks for voting and congratulations to our winners!