The polls are closed and the votes tallied and we’re ready to announce our readers’ choice for the Best Fantasy Story of 2008. Thank you everyone who participated int he poll and particularly those of you who commented on the stories themselves.

Because there were so many great stories to choose from, there were a lot of contenders for the top spot. Four stories pulled ahead of the pack and deserve special mention before we get to our winner:

On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves by Peter M. Ball

This story resonated a lot of our readers and left them with little more to say than “Brilliant” and “This moved me to tears.”

The Shadow in the Mirror by Mari Ness

Willow Fagan said it best: “I think it’s really interesting how, despite the haziness of the setting, the story held my attention and seemed solid, even as so much of the story was about ephemeral things like dreams, memories, shadows. This made it a very interior story, and the vagueness of the external world reinforced that almost all of that world didn’t much matter to the narrator…”

Watermark by Michael Greenhut

“I really love how much this story accomplishes in so little space” editor Cat Rambo remarked, which was a sentiment often echoed in praise for this short and powerful story.

Keepity Keep by Carole Lanham

One of the commenters called it brilliant and said “It bounced along, slowly growing darker.” “The ending is surprisingly dark,” said another, “but perfect nonetheless.”

And finally, the best story of 2008 as chosen by our readers:

One last reminder — vote for the best Fantasy story of 2008 by this Friday. Also, any substantive comment left on the 2008 stories enters you in our drawing for a $25 Amazon.com gift card.

The five stories with the most votes thus far:

• Erased by Elena Gleason
• Watermark by Michael Greenhut
• Yell Alley by Nicole Kornher-Stace
• Keepity Keep by Carole Lanham
• The Shadow in the Mirror by Mari Ness

Read and Vote!

When There Were No Scientists

When Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, science writing was either non-fiction or reserved for natural philosophical reverie. Interests in science and mathematics were still knotted with philosophy, allowing literature to attempt answering vital questions such as: Is man playing god? Does science negate the need for God? What is man’s relationship with nature?

The eighteenth century saw the publication of Gulliver’s Travels and Baron Munchausen’s tall tales, but the above questions began to be answered in the nineteenth century with works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published when Poe was five-years old. Poe came of age in a time when man’s “progress” was touted and the industrial revolution triumphed. As a result, Romanticism was at its height. The romantics were enamored of science, but distrusted man’s discipline to use science for good, as evidenced Percy Byshee Shelley’s apocalyptic poems and Mary Shelley’s novels.

Poe shared the same doubt, best expressed in an early poem “Sonnet: To Science” which argues that industrial progress zapped the romance out of everyday life, thus destroying the mysteries of nature. Even so, Poe avidly studied science, and could not deny that it could carry the individual into unknown terrain; be it Hades or the moon.

This sentiment was not Poe’s alone. In fact, the discoveries of steam engines, electricity, the railway, and Herschel’s telescope created a zeitgeist within nineteenth century American society. Anything was possible–so the nation’s periodicals well knew–leaving the reading public vulnerable to hoaxers, like Poe, who set out to depict what man was capable of by writing stories riddled in scientific expostulations, riffing on journalistic techniques and formats, and most of all manipulating readers’ hopes and fears.

Editor of some of the day’s premier magazines, Poe knew that periodicals published technical scientific articles side-by-side with fiction and poetry. Also at that time, technical scientific writing was written in fictionalized manners, using metaphor and allegory to better illustrate abstract ideas. To appeal to the general audience, many scientists resorted to using the short story form: “The neurologist Mitchell published textbooks about his patients’ phantom limb pains, but when trying to develop his theory that people’s bodies shaped their notions of identity, he turned to the short story form. Ironically, readers found Mitchell’s story so realistic that they mistook it for an actual case,” writes Laura Otis in her anthology Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century.

This mode of fictional science writing inspired Poe to test his own theory: that the reaction of art combined with factual details could yield new realities. The more absurd a story was, the more Poe strived to make it authentic, by writing the stories in what he called the “plausible, or verisimilitude style.” For Poe, a story’s success was based on whether its details were authentic enough to read as truth. This emphasis, executed in punctilious detail, set the bar for modern science fiction