2023 Hugos - ballot voting stats!

[psocoptera]

Finally, the stats! Or rather, half the stats - we still don't have the nominating stats yet. But it feels like a good sign that we're getting *any* of them.

Link to PDF of voting stats.

First observation: 1674 total ballots, down from 2235 in 2022 and 2362 in 2021. Right there, I think that's a pretty clear "no" to the question of whether there was a large influx of Chinese voters. Very curious whether this downturn represents a) past in-person attendees who couldn't or wouldn't travel to China, b) boycott due to China and/or Lukyanenko, c) something else.

More observations behind the cut.

Novel - Nettle and Bone was a strong lead the whole way. Also, numbers tracking, 1068 ballots in the category.

Novella - Drowned Girls was a strong lead the whole way, baffling but apparently true. Depressingly little love for Into the Riverlands.

Novelette - Our first category with a Chinese-language finalist, and 966 ballots, further evidence that there isn't, like, a significant pool of Chinese voters who are only voting on categories with Chinese finalists. Space-Time Painter does have a strong lead the whole way.

Short Story - 927 ballots in this multiple-Chinese-finalists category. Rabbit Test dominates overwhelmingly, more than all four Chinese-language stories put together. (Hypothetically, those 348 voters could represent the max extent of the Chinese voting pool? I mean, that's an oversimplification, I'm sure there were some Chinese voters who voted first place for an English-language story and some Anglosphere voters who voted for a Chinese story, but in the model where everyone is either Anglophone or Sinophone and will always favor a story not in translation, it looks like there's about 560 Anglo and 350 Sino.)

Series - I think I lose track of how few people love Locked Tomb given how wild for it its fandom is, which I am in.

Graphic - 706 ballots.

Dramatic Long - bit satisfying to see Avatar do poorly :)

Pro Artist - Huh, very interesting to see Enzhe Zhao have such an overwhelming lead here, I would not have guessed that. 708 ballots, and he's got over half of them? I still don't really know his bio, is this someone who is really beloved in China, such that the whole hypothetical 350 person Chinese voting pool would favor him over Jian Zhang? Are there a bunch of people voting in this category who didn't read the short fiction, but figured they could vote for artists? Interesting.

Semipro - Strange Horizons briefly in the lead! :)

Fancast - 572 ballots, I think the least of any category. (Is this number related to my 560 Anglophone voters in the Short Story category? Probably not particularly... there are 1674 total ballots after all, there's a lot of room for non-overlap...)

Comments

[elysdir]

Good points about numbers of Anglophone and Sinophone voters and such.

(Number of voters being way down is especially interesting in light of the fact that by total attendance this was (if I understand right) the largest Worldcon ever. Suggests that many attendees didn’t know about, or decided not to vote in, the Hugos? Or bought their memberships after the voting deadline? Dunno.)

Locked Tomb: Yeah, I get the impression from what I see online that it’s universally adored, and I can’t tell how much that’s just the social bubble that I’m in. But at least the first book does seem to have been quite popular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_the_Ninth#Reception

…More generally, I’m never sure how representative Hugo nominators and voters are of fandom in general.

(I was just thinking about that this morning—I think of myself as having a reasonably good sense of what’s going on in the sf field, but then every so often I come across mentions of apparently hugely popular series where I’ve never before heard of the books nor the author. So I suspect that there’s a lot that I don’t know that I don’t know.)

Re Semipro: More than briefly! SH was in the lead all the way up to the last round of the instant runoff, which I think is much better than it has ever done on a Hugo ballot before, but I haven’t gone back and checked.

[psocoptera]

Thank you for pointing that out about SH, I was skimming a bit, but yeah, that's so close!