2014 Hugo Awards Reaction Post and a little playing with numbers because numbers

[psocoptera]

Ancillary Justice! Time! Gravity! Julie Dillon and Sarah Webb! Sofia Samatar for the Campbell!

I described my feelings about the Hugo awards to crystalpyramid this evening as "a mildly participatory World Cup". carpenter observed that the winning short story, John Chu's "The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere", only barely made the 5% cut-off to be on the ballot (it got 43 nominations - they report to tenths of a percent, and 42 nominations out of 865 would have been 4.9%). I didn't nominate it, but carpenter did, and it's possible that she wouldn't have read it in the first place if I hadn't put it on my list of recommended stories for the year. Of course she might have come across it elsewhere, but I feel like I might get a small share of some joint credit there for influencing an outcome. I was also one of 38 people who nominated Sarah Webb for fanartist; she was the first-place vote for 831 people out of 1522 fanartist voters, so I feel like the 38 of us did something good there too. (The least-nominated fan artist to make it onto the ballot had 31 nominations. Your nomination goes a long way in this category.)

Finally, a quick stab at answering one of this year's interesting questions, "were there "Wheel of Time" voters who only voted for Wheel of Time and nothing else". 3137 people voted in the Novel category, of whom 658 gave their first-place vote to Wheel. Going through the rounds, Wheel never gets eliminated, so there's no explicit breakdown of what% of those votes would dump into which buckets. However, we know that at the end of the first-place race, in the No Award testing, if I understand this correctly, 480 people did not indicate any preference on their ballot between Ancillary Justice and No Award. 201 of those people also did not have any of AJ, Wheel, and Neptune's Brood on their ballot. So I think that leaves a pool of only 279 people who might possibly have had Wheel as the only space they filled in, and of course we don't know how many of them listed Wheel vs Neptune's Brood. (Someone should double-check this in case I'm being dumb somewhere.)

Looking at the question from a different angle, there were 2684 ballots for Short Story. If everyone who voted for short stories also voted for novels, there would be 453 novel voters who didn't vote for short stories. They can't have all voted for Wheel (658 first-place votes) [EDITED: what I actually mean is that at least some Wheel first-placers must thus have voted for short stories], and last year, there were 1649 novel ballots and 1381 short story ballots, so if those 268 people were playing again this year and still care about novels and not short stories, that would leave 185 possible new Wheel-only novel voters.

So, I think we can conclude from these two lines of reasoning that Wheel-only voters could not have been more than 6-9% of novel ballots cast (and can't be conclusively proved to have existed at all).

Comments

[glassonion]

In fact "The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere" is in not in fact my favorite thing i have ever read in the history of ever. But OTOH, i liked it, and, given the set of things that were actually on the ballot, i'm glad it won.

The interaction of the 5% rule and the short story category is clearly broken and has been for awhile --- in the longer fiction categories, the top entry got over 15% of nominations. In short story, the top entry got under 10% of nominations, but the bottom entry is off the ballot if it can't clear 5%? That's broken, and it make the short story category fail at exposing Hugo voters to new stuff, which is not an entirely trivial purpose of this exercise.

In this case, the rocket went to a story that was one vote away from not being on the ballot, not because it lost to something else, but because of this dumb rule. So i can take credit (and you can take partial credit) for helping highlight how ridiculous this is. I feel good about that.