Mark Kelly, posting about the recently released Locus Poll and Reading List, wrote:

The online Locus Poll ballot is up … Special this year is a category for ‘best all-time fantasy story’ … Jonathan Strahan was the inspiration behind this category, and I’ll leave it to him to comment more about it in his blog.

Um, okay. I hadn’t really planned on saying much about it, but I always try to be responsive to suggestions. As a lot of you know, I spent some time last year working on The Locus Awards anthology. It was a lot of fun, and took into account not only results of the Awards but of various polls we’d done. I noticed, in looking at past polls, that we’d never specifically asked about fantasy short stories and though it would be interesting to see what readers thought were really excellent and important stories. I’m not sure what’s been written up in the magazine, but I had in mind stories published between 1900 and the present day. Hopefully the poll will give an interesting overview of what the magazine’s readers think are the best, the most important, the most enjoyable fantasy stories of the modern era.