Readers’ Choice: The First Month

Is it just us or is time accelerating? How can it possibly be the middle of March already?  But as it is the middle of March, you know what that means? It means that we’ve already had our first month of Readers’ Choice spotlights. How time flies.

Thanks to you, our discerning readers, over the course of February we’ve been able to highlight such disparate – but equally worthy – titles as Alan Dean Foster‘s Icerigger, Star Bridge by Jack Williamson & James Gunn, James P. Blaylock‘s The Last Coin and Jack Vance‘s The Magnificent Showboats. Our profuse thanks to @tanj666, Starman Dave, @prstarky and @CTD, respectively.

When we announced the changes in our home page spotlights back in January (when using the term ‘the New Year’ was not a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act), we said we’d use our analytics to track the click throughs and send a prize of that month’s SF Masterworks to the reader whose selection prompted the most interest. But you know what? We’ve enjoyed seeing these Readers’ Choice submission so much that we thought we’d celebrate the first full month of them by giving everyone who submitted copies of Colin Greenland‘s Take Back Plenty, John Crowley‘s Engine Summer and Nicola Griffith‘s Slow River, which were the new SF Masterworks for January and February. (Except for @prstarky who works at Orion and therefore falls foul of the usual terms & conditions for this sort of thing. Sorry Paul.)

We’ll be in touch with @tanj666, Starman Dave and @CTD in the next couple of days, to arrange delivery. Thanks again for sharing your enthusiasm with the SF Gateway – feel free to send us more of your favourites. There are more Readers’ Choices in the pipeline, which we’re sure will prove just as interesting and illuminating as those we’ve cited above.

And to those who haven’t submitted a favourite yet: our lines are open now (as they used to say in the dinosaur-roaming days before the interwebs).