Ok people, what's up with this?

Sometimes it's obvious which book is going to win a BAM election. When I nominated "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in one of my elections, I knew right away it would win, the only question was by how much. It turned out to win the largest victory ever in a BAM election up to that point, and got more votes by itself than any previous election had in total votes.

The book that eventually beat HHGTTG's vote total (but not vote percentage), "Interview With the Vampire", was more of a surprise, at least for me. I didn't realize we had so many Anne Rice fans here. I was *hoping* "The Mote In God's Eye" would *finally* win an election, but it was not to be.

But, truth be told, I don't really *like* landslide elections. It's no fun to look at the tally after the first day of voting and aleady know which book is going to win. Although last-minute come-from-behind victories have occured in BAM elections (the most notable being in Sam's last election, where a bunch of die-hard Melanie Rawn fans caught wind of the election in its final few days and managed to propel their author's book to a narrow victory) they're fairly rare and for the most part, the book that leads at the end of day one is a good bet for being the eventual winner.

So this time around, I thought I'd turn the tables on all of you. I went out of my way to purposely choose books from my shelf that nobody but an old book collector or an SF historian would ever have heard of. I fall into the former category, at least for the purpose of this example. All of the books nominated were from a series of gimmick books that were published in the late 60s and early 70s. They were called "Ace Doubles" and were put out by, surprisingly enough, Ace Books. They cost $.75 (or at least the one I hold in my hands right this instant did) and for that small sum you got two complete novels. The gimmick was they were bound back to back, such that you know when you've finished one book because suddenly the print is upside down and backwards. If you hold the book in your hands "normally", you see the cover art for one of the books. Flip it over as if to read the back cover blurb, and there is the cover art for the other book, upside down and backwards. If you flip it end-to-end the long way, you can flip between the two covers. It's actually kind of neat.

So out of my small stack of Ace Doubles I pulled three pretty much at random (I ended up discarding one and picking another one because I actually recognized the author of one of the books) and had Sam post them as my election. I felt sure that by doing this, I was going to engineer a close and exciting election. I felt that since the odds of most casual fans of the genre ever having heard of any of those books was fairly slim, most people would end up voting at random. And a truly random vote would end up being a close election.

Well, you can see the results for yourself by clicking the link below. It was anything but close. It was actually the second biggest landslide in BAM election history, going by percentage of the vote. It didn't get nearly as many votes as Vampire did, and it didn't even come close to touching Hitchiker's 77% of the vote, but it was most definitely a memorable landslide, and one that was completely unexpected.

I've already asked a few people who voted for "Dark Planet" *why* they voted for it. A few of them said it was just a random choice. Some said they thought it was the coolest name (if we're going by coolest name, though, I'd have voted for "Cradle of the Sun" or "The Bane of Kanthos" before "Dark Planet".) Some didn't have any rational explanation.

But somehow, all of you managed to sync up and vote for the same damn book. Why? Those of you who voted for "Dark Planet", I really want to hear from you. Had you actually heard of the book before? Did it perhaps remind you of something else (The movie "Dark City", possibly?) Did you just think it was the coolest name? Or were you truly trying to vote "randomly" as I suspected most people would in this election?

And for those few of you who *didn't* vote for "Dark Planet", I thank you. I'd like to hear what led you to vote for whatever else it was you voted for, just for comparison to the over abundance of people who voted for "Dark Planet."

For the curious, "Dark Planet" is the flip side of "The Herod Men", which came in tied for last. What a team!

-- Dave