Hugo longlist thoughts

[psocoptera]

The detailed results and nominee longlists are in this pdf here.

Some thoughts behind this cut.

A lot of my nominees that didn't make the ballot are here in the longlists. It's sort of interesting to me to look at what didn't even make it that far - a Sofia Samatar novella that was only in her collection (not super surprising), a Strange Horizons novelette, a Strange Horizons short story and a short story from Djinn Falls In Love, my middlegrade graphic novels that I knew had zero chance and the short films that also had zero chance, Reiko Murakami for Pro Artist (although I think I saw a Murakami piece up for the Chesleys) and Brenoch Adams who did the Prey of Gods cover, Euclase and Iguanamouth for Fan Artist who are fan artists in more like the Tumblr sense than the convention-program sense, Allison Jamieson-Lucy for the Campbell (who wrote that Strange Horizons short story). I feel like we can conclude that either I have really generic taste, or I have similar taste to a significant population of active nominators, because dang. Really the only thing I would want to change about what I'm doing is to be more engaged in the graphic category and (ideally) be nominating things there that actually make the longlist.

It feels mildly ironic that EPH knocked off Autonomous and Stars are Legion and gave us Scalzi instead - isn't that exactly what they said would happen, rigging it in favor of Scalzi - (please note I'm kidding) but from the standpoint of really wanting Stone Sky to win, honestly I think Scalzi and NY2140 were less direct competition, soooo... whatever.

Ok, those Dramatic Long results that surprised me so much. Looks to me like what happened was that Get Out and Wonder Woman were very close initially but Get Out was much slower to pick up 2nd and 3rd place votes - it did okay with Blade Runner preferrers but very poorly with TLJ preferrers and not so much better with Shape and Thor preferrers. Like either you liked it enough to first-place it or you probably liked a cluster of other things more. (I don't think it's a coincidence that WW, TLJ, Shape, and Thor could be called the "feel good" movies and Get Out and BR the "dark" movies?)

Wow, look at those close results between Roanhorse and Prasad for the Campbell. Neck and neck the whole way, until the Solomon fans just push Roanhorse over.

I've read the first 12 of the 15 novels, nice.

The novella longlist is reminding me I still have never read 17776, almost certainly the most viral sff of 2017 I failed to read. :/

It takes *so few people* to nominate a Fan Artist - honestly that's probably another sign that the category is not working as it currently stands.

Comments

[glassonion]

Misc thoughts:

Do we know why Jemisin declined the nomination for Best Series?

It's really interesting to compare nominating ballots in Novel vs. Dramatic Long. Dramatic Long has somewhat fewer total ballots, but they're a *lot* more concentrated --- there just aren't as many movies. And i'll note that Wonder Woman had more nominating ballots than anything else in the Hugos, by a significant number, and that tLJ is right up there.

When you're comparing nominating ballots to voting ballots in Dramatic Long, i feel like what you are seeing there is the impact of box office numbers. Is ratio of first-place votes to nominating ballots an interesting statistic? It's not apples-to-apples, but nonetheless: there were 2431 first-place votes cast for the six movies, and a total of 2079 nominations between them. So on average a movie should have appeared in first-place votes to nominating ballots at a ratio of 1.17:1. Here are the ratios for our six finalists:

2.33 = 618 / 265  (2) Get Out
1.22 = 318 / 260  (6) Blade Runner 2049
1.15 = 622 / 541  (1) Wonder Woman
1.06 = 318 / 301  (3) Thor: Ragnarok
1.01 = 309 / 307  (5) The Shape of Water
0.61 = 246 / 405  (4) Star Wars: The Last Jedi

That tells me that everybody had heard of tLJ and basically liked it, but nobody thought it was the best movie of 2017. And that WW's popularity was exactly what you'd expect - the set of people who liked it enough to nominate it was directly proportional to the set of people who thought it was the best movie of 2017. And that a lot of people hadn't heard of Get Out, saw it because it was on the ballot, and concluded it was the best movie of 2017.

[psocoptera]

Ooh, this is an excellent analysis, go you for coming up with it and doing it.

[ursula]

Wow, AO3 almost made the ballot for Best Related Work!

[psocoptera]

Yeah, so, what the heck was up with that? I feel like it's really weird to describe an archive as "a work" - my library has also added lots of new material in the past year but I'm not going to nominate them for a Hugo for that! If they revise Semiprozine back to Best Magazine and someone wants to nominate AO3 for *that* I think it would be a fascinating attempt - or arguably it is eligible for Best Fanzine right now, I would totally support it in the Fanzine category. Any idea why they went for Related instead? (Anybody?)

[glynhogen]

Is the theory that it's a system--a nomination of the infrastructure as "noteworthy for aspects other than the fictional text," with an assumption that there have been technical updates or a sufficient number of new fictional bits added that it becomes eligible for the year?

...is the best I can come up with, but pretty thin since, well, 2018 and letting people put their words on the web is kind of not new; and the thing's still touting itself as beta and I would assume getting out of beta would be a more significant shift than ongoing development. (Unless the use of "beta" in the title styling is a gag?)

But yeah, that seems like it should've been an easy call to blow away as ineligible in the category.

[psocoptera]

... are systems works? I mean, I guess one of us is a professional archivist and one of us isn't, so if you did want to make a serious claim that infrastructure is an authored work, I would listen to that. I don't think the Hugo rules ever actually define "work", that I could find.

[glynhogen]

I think calling the system a "work" requires more contortions than calling The Wheel of Time a "novel." It perhaps suggests support for some other category (let's call it Technical Hugos, or maybe "Miscellaneous," in keeping with the archives theme); but I don't know that there's critical mass of things to nominate to make it a viable category.

...and now I have "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" in my head.

[ursula]

I saw renay talking about this, and asked; the motivation was definitely "nominating the software, not the individual works".

Personally, I'd be more inclined to nominate Yuletide as a fanzine, to recognize the editorial effort entailed in organizing the whole thing. But then, I guess I'm an editor these days.

[glassonion]

Also, i'm going to go ahead and quote myself from facebook, where i mathed out the EPH thing and corroborated my initial impression that this outcome was fine:

I nominated Stone Sky, Raven Strategem, Autonomous, and Stars Are Legion. So i think that means that my nominating ballot was contributing 0.25 to each of those four until Autonomous and Stars Are Legion got knocked out, at which point it began contributing 0.5 to each of Stone Sky and Raven Strategem. The PDF doesn't show us iterations of this process prior to the round called 9, but it does show us that at the round called 9, ballots with Collapsing Empire on them had an average of 1.52 works left on the ballot, while ballots with Autonomous on them had an average of 2.03 works left on the ballot (to get those, divide the column N value by the column 9 value). Or, in the round called 1, Stars Are Legion ballots still had an average of 1.65 works remaining on them, whereas NY2160 ballots had only 1.19.

Looked at that way, it's hard to quibble with this, as it shows that many more of the NY2160 ballots would have been left without a nominee if NY2160 had been eliminated. And of course the actual EPH mechanics make it so that the raw number of affected people is taken into account.

I loved Autonomous, but i feel pretty good about this outcome, because it shows that people who like the kinds of things i like are relatively ascendant in the Hugo voting population right now (which is neat), but that people who like other things also get a voice (also neat). There's only 6 slots on the ballot, we actually *can't* have our cake and eat it too. Sure, if i were in charge of the universe, i would have rearranged those people slightly, but i am only in charge of 1/1534th of the universe, and i'm okay with that.

[Adding a tl;dr: EPH assumes that you would be equally happy to see any of your nominees get on the ballot. The main takeaway for ballot-gamers is: don't nominate things you don't care that much about, because they might use your slot. That doesn't seem all that pernicious.]

[psocoptera]

I said this in person but just to repeat myself here: I appreciate this analysis (and agree that it's a good outcome/fine system).