Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

My priority questions about the Hugo Stats

  1. Eligibility decisions. There are a lot of disqualifications and I think that was to be expected given works in multiple languages and many new voters. However, there are several that need further explanation from the Hugo Comittee:
    • Paul Weimer in Best Fanwriter: this is wholly mysterious. Quite how somebody can be ineligible in this category I have no idea.
    • Babel in Best Novel. It has been deemed eligible in several awards. In what way was it in ineligible for the Hugo Awards?
    • Xiran Jay Zhao in Astounding. Astounding eligibility is complex but this case is unclear.
    • Sandman episode 6 in BDP short: Very unclear why this was ineligible. Also if this episode was ineligible how did that impact the eligibility of the whole series in BDP long?
    • Some general discussion on eligibility and the number of disqualifications would be appreciated.
  2. Counting issues:
    • The nomination statistics for Babel do not appear to be correct. For each round, it is listed as 164.93 regardless of how other works are eliminated. This is very unusual and the number should increase. This does not appear to be connected to its disqualification as other disqualified works do not show the same pattern (eg Color the World in Best Novelette). There are some stories in Best Short Story that have a sort of similar pattern that you might see if they had a “bullet voting” set of votes but even they shift towards the end. I think we can safely rule out mass bullet voting for Babel.
    • Turing Food Court is listed twice in Best Novelette. In position 10 it has 67 votes and in position 12 it has 27 votes. Assuming this is the same story, that gives it a total of 94 votes and the 8th ranked story on raw votes. It is not possible to see how it would have fared in the elimination rounds but that combined number makes it not implausible that it was a finalist.

I’m going to send these to hugoteam@chengduworldcon.com

camestrosfelapton

25 responses to “My priority questions about the Hugo Stats”

  2. Whilst we’re at it, this is a much more trivial issue, but it would be nice to get clarification on when exactly WSFS 3.13 was invoked to delegate all Hugo responsibility to the relevant subcommittee, and if/how that was communicated more widely, as – in theory at least – it’s something that Hugo nominators should be aware of, so that they don’t nominate ineligible works/people.

    Without that, several finalists in multiple categories should have been ineligible due to being closely connected to people on the Worldcon committee. I see that one of the BRW nominees was rejected due to the involvement of someone on the Hugo team in that particular work, so the Hugo admins would appear to be fully cognisant of those rules.

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  4. From Chengdu’s PR2:

    “Eligible members vote according to the “one person, one vote” rule to select Hugo Award works and individuals that comply with local laws and regulations.”

    The URL of the original posting seems to be broken, but there’s discussion from the time about this at File 770 here: https://file770.com/chengdu-worldcon-publishes-progress-report-2/

    Maybe this is something else that should be asked about…

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    • I think you’re absolutely right, and another friend reminded me that Zhao wrote a book (Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor) that touched on Uighur Muslim oppression, and that’s a big no-no over there.

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  5. I know my nominations included both Babel and The Mountain and the Sea plus 2 finalists. So a change in EPH points from .25 to .33 for Babel from round 5 to round 4 on my ballot alone, right?

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  6. Great work, thank you.(So I guessed badly wrong about Babel in the autumn round of speculations and must apologise – good thing that hardlyanybody noticed my comments then, let alone remembers them now, but still.)

    Liked by 1 person

  7. It does look to me as though some of those ineligibility decisions… need further explanation. Xiran Jay Zhao’s first published work of speculative fiction was in 2021, so that gives eligibility in 2022 and 2023, surely? Is someone contending that Babel was first published in 1894, or is not a novel but, in fact, a piece of cheese? And in what bizarre parallel universe is Paul Weimer not a fan writer? I suppose I can see how the Sandman thing might be a plain and simple cock-up… but even that requires something more in the way of explanation, I think.

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  8. There is one way in which the lack of transfers to Babel during the rounds published in the statistics can fully legitimately occur – namely, when absolutely nobody nominates both Babel and any of the works eliminated between two of those rounds. That is just about possible – eight such works were eliminated, six of which (so far as I can judge) were in Chinese. Assuming that Babel has not been available in China, that feels quite plausible for those six – except that it then feels a bit surprising to see transfers from four of those six to all of the top seven novels except Babel (I’ll come back to the other two). And it is not entirely impossible (though rather unlikely) that there were no transfers from either A Half-Built Garden or The Mountain in the Sea to Babel.

    However, the two Chinese works I said I would come back to – Residual Light and The Red Stone – seem to be in a world almost of their own, the only connection being to The Mountain in the Sea. Residual Light, before it gets eliminated, gets no inward transfers; and when eliminated, its nominations transfer either only to The Red Stone and The Mountain in the Sea (and not to any of the top seven) or not at all. The Red Stone gets no inward transfers except from Residual Light; and when eliminated, its nominations transfer to The Mountain in the Sea or not at all. As a result, the nomination calculations seem to show that about two-thirds of The Mountain in the Seas’ nominators nominated one or both of these Chinese works (and nothing else); and that less than a tenth nominated any of the finalists. While the number of nominators for The Mountain in the Sea looks plausible, what they are also supposed to have nominated – does not.

    I do rather wonder whether the contents of some of the nomination ballots kind of got shuffled.

    As (I think) a quite separate final remark for now, I think I have found a small mathematical impossibility in the Best Novel nomination statistics as given. Because of the way EPH works, every valid ballot gets counted in the first round of an EPH count, but ballots get eliminated as and when the last nominee on the ballot gets eliminated. It is therefore quite impressive that, of the 1,637 ballots received for Best Novel, 1,652 remained after all but the final 15 candidates had been eliminated.

    I have done no calculations on the other categories as yet.

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  9. Another bit of numbers oddity: Short stories rarely receive a lot of nominations. With the exception of the Sad Puppy 3 year (2015), in the past ten only seven stories have cracked the triple digits, and none above 200. 

    Which makes it very strange that we have all five finalists getting over 500 nominations, all on at least a third of the 1500 ballots. Even the lowest on the long list (with 128) got more nods that almost all the finalists in the previous five years (only “Fandom for Robots” with a dominating 173 nominations in 2018 getting more, at that represented 19% of the ballots that year.)

    Liked by 2 people

  10. I’m way too tired and sleepy to follow this, but am sure our Paul was shafted.

    So this Worldcon ends as it began — 100% FUBAR all the way through.

    I daresay it will be quite some time before China gets a Worldcon, and would encourage them to have locals, regionals, and a yearly differing-location ChinaCon.

    Liked by 1 person

    • This sounds nice and logical, but seems to be based on “us-vs-them” agency that the WSFS, or Western fandom at large, demonstrably lacks.

      It’s like the proverbial 200-pound panda in the room: how can it not “get” a thing when firmly decided to take it?

      Liked by 1 person

      • On the other hand, and after deeper consideration, the two seated Worldcons in the West(ern coasts) give the Business Meeting a perfect (almost) chance to Do Something, if the Need is Felt — and I think it also unlikely that a serious contender to LA’26 would file until mid-February.

        We are going to live in interesting times indeed.

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  13. I’m particularly interested in the questions around Babel’s apparent ineligibility. I sort of half suspect it’s because of its rather, ahem, touchy subject matter.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. I’ll honestly be surprised if anyone hears anything back. There’s no explanation but they simply decided they didn’t want those works/people as finalists for completely arbitrary reasons.

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