Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

First look at Hugo Stats

Stats were a little late being released and currently, the usual nomination data isn’t there.

There are some interesting twists in the distribution preferences. Sometimes, the 1st pref voting order is a close match with the final voting order but lots of exceptions this year.

  • Novel: Network Effect was an easy winner for Best Novel but Piranesi started at 2nd place but came in third after The City We Became.
  • Novella: Come Tumbling Down (Wayward Children) came top of 1st round but came in third after The Empress of Salt and Fortune and Ring Shout.
  • Novelette: The pattern was even more pronounced here. Isabel Fall’s Helicopter Story came top of 1st preferences but after several rounds only came in fifth. Basically a lot of focused support but not a broadly popular story. The original controversy aside, I think that fits with what was a very marmite sort of story.
  • Series: So for once I’d read all of them and voted but in the end Murderbot won anyway which is what I would have voted for if I hadn’t made the effort. Easy win for SecUnit.
  • BRW: I was surprised Beowulf one because it was not an obvious inclusion in the category and the trend had been towards easier, more populist wins. Given FIYAH’s win earlier I thought FIYAHCON would win. No Award didn’t beat anybody but had a strong showing in the voting.
  • skip a few categories
  • BDP Short: Sorry, while I really enjoyed The Good Place, I simply don’t get the Hugo voter enthusiasm for it. Maybe it’s just the thing that most voters have in common? There maybe a Netflix effect (which goes for The Old Guard as well) in that the streaming service that most people have has an advantage.
  • Semiprozine: Strange Horizons neither suffered nor gained from the minor fuss about their cast list.
  • Fanzine, Fancast: I have nothing interesting to say
  • Fanwriter: Cora was second! It was a really close second as well. She led on 1st preferences and it was a close choice on each pass. [Seriously though, fuck those arseholes who keep No Awarding in this category.] Tough field with Jason Sandford, Alistair Stuart, Paul and Charles Payseur.
  • Best Video Game: Hades seemed a likely choice. I voted Spiritfarer 1 and it came 3rd.
  • Lodestar: Kingfisher absolutely romped home. It’s a very loveable book but I thought the others would be stiffer competition. Worth it for the Slime Mold speech and I’ll confess that my first thought when she was annouced as winner was “Oh, this will be a great speech”.

That’s all I’ve got.

camestrosfelapton

57 responses to “First look at Hugo Stats”

  1. The stat title says that Alasdair Stuart was 4th place, but the stats themselves show Paul winning 4th place.

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      • The least dramatic error is that the names have switched place in the table for fourth place results, but everything else is correct.
        A more dramatic error is that Paul took fourth place, and the vote counts given for Paul in the fifth place table are for Alasdair Stuart.
        An even more dramatic error is that everything is jumbled up.

        The numbers given for Paul Weimer in pass 1 in the fifth place table fits with the numbers for Alasdair Stuart in pass 3 in the fourth place table – the count goes from 230 to 239 but that is a reasonable number to gain when Stuart wins fourth place. That supports the least dramatic error, imo.

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  3. I’ve read very little this year and voted only in a few categories. My first place picks won in a few categories, and came far behind in others, which is about what I should expect.

    BRW: “No Award didn’t beat anybody but had a strong showing in the voting.”
    Indeed. 27% of the people who voted in that category, and 15% of voters overall, preferred No Award to a certain blog post. Several other candidates have double the No Award votes of what’s common in other categories. Depending on the overlap, plausibly over a third of voters in that category had No Award over at least one candidate. (Possibly more, but there’s certainly some overlap.)

    Semprozine: “Strange Horizons neither suffered nor gained from the minor fuss about their cast list.”
    Not enough to matter, at least, but I suspect the cast list is the main reason the runoff shows more opposition from Noah Ward than the other semiprozine finalists.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. And I’ve spotted at least one thing in the stats that shows that the Tyop Partol was not at work there (I assume they weren’t invited) – in the Best Novel figures, in the count for first place, there is no figure given for Piranesi on Pass 2.

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      • Three other finalists had unchanged vote totals but did have those filled in. But assuming that the third pass total is correct, this omission doesn’t really matter.

        I do notice that the “total number of ballots” for Best Novel gives the total number of ballots that had something in first position, but omits the ones that had No Award first. That seems odd to me, especially given that not all of them had No Award first and nothing else listed.

        Liked by 2 people

  5. Tyop Partol!

    >came in third after The Empress of Salt and Fortune and Riot Baby
    Ring Shout (Riot Baby was 6th) <– I get those two titles mixed up too. (The R and two similar length words, I guess.)

    I do wonder about the long list delay. I'm guessing something about the double Hugo admin team switches. The last team not wanting to misrepresent earlier decisions?

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    • I assume they have something to do with EPH, but I’m not sure how to interpret them. I’d love to see a detailed explanation

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      • They are the points per nominee. So if 1 person voted for book X and only book X then that’s 1 point. If they voted for Boox X and Book y then that’s 0.5 points etc. Add them all up and that’s your total.

        As nominees get eliminated then the points go up. eg person votes for book X and book Y and book y get’s eliminated then book X gains half a point.

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        • In the last column, James has a number higher than the number of the person who was on the final ballot. Which column determines the final ballot’s contents?

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          • It’s a series of one-to-one battles.
            To be drawn into a battle you have to be in the two lowest by POINTS in the list.
            To win the battle, you need to have the most RAW votes (i.e. not points).
            So James’s points kept him in the running to the last round where he lost by 5 straight VOTES 🙂

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          • It comes back to total nominations for the finalists. Points are for narrowing down. See how James is in 7th place even though he has less nominations then the 9th place longlister.

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                • No, O. Westin eliminated Adri Joy by having more points in round 64. It’s not until we’ve finished the eliminations or there’s a points tie in one of the battles that we look at raw votes.

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            • Okay, thanks to Johan P I’ve got it now: Stuart eliminates Joy in round 64 (more points and votes). Then Stuart eliminates Westin (less points but more votes). Finally Stuart eliminates James (again less points but more votes). It seems like I have to refamiliarize myself on the details of both nominations and final voting every year.

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          • EPH works in three phases:
            1. the number of points are calculated.
            2. The two nominees with fewest points are selected for comparison.
            3. Of those two, the nominee with fewest nominations – the column marked N – is eliminated.
            After that, you go back to phase 1 and recalculate the points.

            So Alasdair Stuart and James D Nicoll was put against each other, since their 25,42 and 26,08 points is fewer than any of the the five names above Stuart. James lost the elimination round since he had fewer nominations than Stuart. (41 vs 46)

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        • To win the elimination phase against Alasdair Stuart, you would have need 5 nominations more.

          But: If you had 1,51 points more at the end, your 26,59 points would have saved you from the final elimination phase. The elimination would have been between Elsa Sjunneson and Alasdair Stuart and you would have been a finalist.

          Liked by 1 person

  8. Fan Writer: Cora also led with the most nominations.

    BDP-Short: All I can say about that is, thank deity that show is over and it will never show up on a ballot again. (If you can’t already tell, I hated it.) Although with such competition as WandaVision, Loki, The Wheel of Time and The Witcher this year, one hopes it wouldn’t have made the ballot anyway.

    I was really happy with FIYAH’s win. About time somebody broke the Uncanny stranglehold.

    Best Related Work: I didn’t particularly care for either of the top two finishers, but at least they were books. Cons and Fringes for Related Works are kind of…ehhh, as far as I’m concerned.

    Liked by 4 people

    • I’ve rarely been so happy that a show I neither watch nor care for was cancelled as I was when The Good Place was cancelled. I have no idea why that show keeps winning over much better works, but at least it’s over.

      Also really happy for FIYAH and Sara Felix in fan artist.

      And related work was a pleasant surprise, since the winner was an actual book.

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      • The Good Place was not cancelled: it was intended from the start to have a four season arc which brought the series to an end.

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      • I wish you’d won because you deserve to, and also I wanted to see your dress.

        I like that the winners on Zoom dressed up. A touch of class, although nothing beats NKJ’s cape in 2018.

        Liked by 1 person

          • 1: Except all Dutch people are ass holes. And maybe all of the men in Nathan’s family.
            4: It’s kind of amazing Jamie isn’t.
            6: There’s no poisonous anti-trans hate speech, which seems to have replaced vilifying Polish plumbers as the dominant religion in the UK these days.
            7: Has the word “Brexit” ever appeared in Ted Lasso?

            Liked by 1 person

          • 1. Not at first. At first, no one is nice, though a few pretend to be nice.
            3. And yet it snows for Christmas
            4. Roy Kent’s father is racist, but we have yet to meet him.

            There is a WWI curse. Does that count? There are a bunch of mentions: Ender’s Game, A Wrinkle in Time, The Iron Giant, etc.

            Liked by 1 person

  9. Is it just me or was there less correlation than usual this year with having the plurality of first place votes, and being the eventual winner? By my count, fully 8 categories out of 17 had a lower ranked underdog move up to win. (I am including the Astounding Award in there.)

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  10. The GRRM denigrophy also started out relatively strong (2nd place) but ultimately fell to fourth place.

    Regards,
    Dann
    Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome. – Isaac Asimov

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