Camestros Felapton

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Hugo Award 2023 Nomination Stats

It has been a wait but the nomination stats are out. Are all your questions answered? Not entirely (see Fanwriter especially). https://www.thehugoawards.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-Hugo-Award-Stats-Final.pdf – this has the previously released final voting stats at the start and then the nomination stats

Best Novel:

What happened to Babel? Babel came third on raw votes but lost to The Daughter of Doctor Moreau on the last elimination round [eta: I misread this originally, it didn’t lose]. However, it also has an asterisk with a note saying “not eligible” with no further explanation. Not sure what that means and it is surprising to see EPH knock out a nominee with such a strong first-round vote. However, when you look at the EPH values, they don’t change as other works are eliminated? Was it deemed ineligible during the EPH process rather than put through and then pulled out at the end? The numbers don’t make sense to me yet.

The other missing “favourite”, The Mountain in the Sea, came ninth on raw votes and was eliminated. The numbers make a bit more sense to me there.

The last big question I had about novels was about Chinese works. It looks like there were quite a few Chinese works on the longlist. The highest ranked of which was 造神年代 Age of the Godmakers. The stats don’t give author or publisher details.

The other English-language work on the longlist is A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys.

Best Novella

The next mystery has a clearer answer: what happened to A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers. It came second on raw votes but was withdrawn which let What Moves the Dead onto the ballot.

Again, the longlist appears to have a number of Chinese works that fell just below the cut-off. Eighth place on raw votes was 圣物 Relics. In 12th place was the English-language work High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson.

Best Novelette

A couple of asterisks in the top ranked on raw votes. 涂色世界 Color the World was ineligible (again, not sure of author details). In fifth place Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold by S.B. Divya was withdrawn by the author (if memory serve me right, we knew this already but my googling is failing me).[eta: yes it was withdrawn]

There appears to be an error on the longlist. Turing Food Court appears twice, once at 10th place and once at 12th place on raw votes. It is listed as an English title first, Turing Food Court 图灵大排档, but I can’t find a story with that name (maybe it is too early in the morning and I haven’t had coffee yet).[eta: this was explained later as a copy-paste error with the names]

Best Short Story

In sixth place on raw votes 尽化塔 Fongong Temple Pagoda was deemed ineligible. Overall, this was a strong category for Chinese works.

Best Series

A relatively straight forward category with few surprises but very few contributions from Chinese works. 深海余烬 Ashes in Deep Sea appears to be the highest-ranked Chinese work at 9th place on raw votes. Fans of older fantasy will be pleased to see Elric of Melniboné can still make a Hugo longlist. Sanderson fans may be less happy that Mistborn only comes in at 15th.

I’ll skip through down ballot categories and pick out highlights.

Best Related Work

20 世纪中国科幻小说史 History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century was deemed ineligible because “one of the authors was on the Hugo subcommittee”. 对马岛之魂艺术设定集 The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was ineligible because it had been published in English in 2020. I assume from the way it was listed that this was the Chinese language version, which feels like that it should get a second go but not the way the rules work I guess.

Best DramaTIc PresentaTIon, Long Form

Prey, the fun new Predator movie apparently declined the nomination – which is unusual for this category. Andor and The Sandman went into short form rather than as a series, whereas Severance went the other way around. Our Flag Means Death was on the longlist but didn’t get enough votes to ensure we spent a section of 2023 arguing whether it counts as SF&F.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Sandman Episode 6: The Sound of Her Wings was ineligible but I don’t know why. It is a bit odd and it looks like there is a bit of a bug in the Hugo rules. The Sandman didn’t have an eligible entry in Short Form but was disqualified from Long Form because of its entry in Short Form…

The Deep by Clipping appears to have had a bunch of nominations but was on the ballot a few years ago. Not sure why people voted for it again? [eta: this was another work]

Best Fanwriter

Paul Weimer came third on the longlist but is listed as “deemed ineligible”? [eta] On BlueSky, Paul has said this is the first he has heard of it, so I’ve no idea what is going on there. It would be nigh on impossible to not be eligible for Fanwriter of all categories, never mind somebody as prolific as Paul.

Hey, I’m 8th on raw votes. That’s a sweet spot between feeling appreciated and impostor syndrome :).

That’s it for the time being!

camestrosfelapton

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37 responses to “Hugo Award 2023 Nomination Stats”

  2. I believe Relics is actually a K. J. Parker story that was published in SF World magazine.

    Turing Food Court is by Wang Nuonuo, and is one of the several shorts that are in both the SF World rec list and the Galaxy Awards 1 anthology.

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  5. In Novel and Series there are vast nomination total gaps between the Finalists and the rest of the list. It looks to me as though they whacked out a big chunk of longlisted English-language works so they could get a bunch of Chinese language works to appear on the longlist.

    sigh

    Liked by 4 people

  6. The EPH and nominating numbers are also questionable. Massive gaps between nominated works and those who missed the shortlist that can’t be natural. take a look also at Sunyi Dean’s EPH treatment, which cuts her votes in a quarter like I’ve never seen before

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  7. There is something very strange going on with the gaps in nomination numbers between the top and bottom. It isn’t just a matter of a drop-off after the shortlisted items, and it doesn’t happen in all categories. My first impression was that there must have been a significant infusion of identical block nominations in certain categories, but now I’m wondering about JJ’s hypothesis that a big chunk of items in the middle of the spread were “disappeared” in order to include items from lower in the queue.

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  9. “In fifth place Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold by S.B. Divya was withdrawn by the author (if memory serve me right, we knew this already but my googling is failing me).”Here you go!

    Liked by 1 person

  10. I cannot imagine in what world Babel wouldn’t be eligible. The publication date was August 23, 2022.

    Or Paul, or Xiran Jay Zhao, or Sandman. Chengdu needs to get out in front of this.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. One correction. You say Babel lost to The Daughter of Doctor Moreau on the last elimination round. Babel defeated Doctor Moreau on the last elimination round. The comparison is between number of nominations (Babel: 810, Moreau: 767), not between the points totals.

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      • Hi, I have been looking for an explanation of this so I can correct myself in places where I’d previously said that Babel would’ve missed the ballot with these EPH numbers, but not found a really clear one (yes, I’ve read the relevant bit of the WSFS constitution, no I didn’t quite understand it). Can anyone here explain it to me like I’m… maybe not five, but maybe like ten? Why would Babel make the ballot over The Daughter of Doctor Moreau but not, say, Sunyi Dean over Xin Weimu for the Astounding?

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          • Thank you for trying to explain, and my apologies for being a bit dense. Does the elimination round always pitch the two nominees vying for the last shortlist spot against each other, and does it affect what makes the shortlist in any but the final spot? And is that consistent with what happened in the Astounding? Or was the elimination round there between Xin Weimu and Liu Maijia because Xiran Jay Zhao hadn’t yet been disqualified? (I promise I am trying really hard to understand, but I suspect a visual demonstration of the process would help me here, and I can’t exactly ask for that in blog comments.)

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            • It always puts the two nominees with the lowest points against each other. So Sunyi Dean, and Xiran Jay Zhao both had a lot of raw votes but they both must have appeared on lots of the same ballots as each other and maybe with Naseem Jamnia. But Isabel J Kim had just a few votes less than Xiran but more points because essentially there was less overlap with her voters then the other popular candidates. The system basically has a kind of bias towards variety. If a sub group of voters have voted for A, B & C and A & B have a few more votes than C then maybe the different group of voters who went for X, Y & Z get one of their choices on the list.

              The eligibility issues don’t apply to the end – it would be too complex to check all the nominees at the start, so they only check when the process is all over. So Xiran Jay Zhao being disqualified didn’t effect how the rounds played out.

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          • Ack, I accidentally used my full name in the reply I just sent! Autofill bad! Since it’s awaiting approval, is there any chance you can delete it and approve this version instead? Here’s my original comment:

            Thank you for trying to explain, and my apologies for being a bit dense. Does the elimination round always pitch the two nominees vying for the last shortlist spot against each other, and does it affect what makes the shortlist in any but the final spot? And is that consistent with what happened in the Astounding? Or was the elimination round there between Xin Weimu and Liu Maijia because Xiran Jay Zhao hadn’t yet been disqualified? (I promise I am trying really hard to understand, but I suspect a visual demonstration of the process would help me here, and I can’t exactly ask for that in blog comments.)

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            • Belated revelation: This is what the red numbers are, aren’t they? They’re telling me what nominees faced elimination against each other in each round. Here I was wondering why there were an unspecified amount of red numbers in each row, but there are always two per column. This is the visual I so badly needed, and it’s been staring at me the whole time!

              In my defense, I don’t think this document actually explains the significance of the red numbers, I had to stumble across the explainer while looking at the 2022 stats.

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              • Yes! It is a series of head-to-head battles. Whoever has the most raw votes wins. The points decide who fights (which makes it sound more violent than it is of course!)

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            • Kelsey: Does the elimination round always pitch the two nominees vying for the last shortlist spot against each other, and does it affect what makes the shortlist in any but the final spot?

              Elimination is performed successively between the bottom two nominees from the very bottom of the list of nominees (i.e., the ones which only got 1 or 2 nominations), all the way up to the top of the longlist. That’s why you see one nominee being dropped in each round.

              EPH is supposed to be run to a complete conclusion before eligibility is checked. But it’s obvious that that didn’t happen at least once, in the case of Babel.

              Honestly, there are no real conclusions that can be drawn from the Hugo Statistics document other than that the stats are fraudulent. We don’t know the extent of the doctoring and we can’t trust that any of the numbers are correct, so we can’t really say anything about how any of the nominees actually did.

              Liked by 1 person

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