2024 Hugo stats
Aug. 11th, 2024 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThoughts about the Hugo voting and nominating stats, available here.
Martha Wells declining for System Collapse apparently let Saint of Bright Doors onto the novel ballot, so I now particularly appreciate her having done that.
So many Seeds of Mercury fans! And yet in the end they were outnumbered by people who preferred all the English-language stuff downballot. Although, hm, well. It's interesting to me that none of the other Chinese-language finalists have numbers like those 881 first-place votes for Seeds of Mercury - Gu Shi's novelette only has 188, the two Chinese short stories have 187 and 165, the Three Body Problem comic has 338 and Wandering Earth II has 247. I am not trying to say all Chinese-language voters must like the same things!! Obviously Anglophone voters disagree wildly about things and presumably Chinese voters do too! Just, like, trying to understand whether there actually is a block of Anglosphere voters who will always prefer English things, and a block of Sinophone voters who will always prefer Chinese things, and how big those blocks actually are, and what categories they care about. (Friends have made a good case that Seeds of Mercury is probably the finalist that was targeted by the disqualified fraudulent votes, and that some number of its remaining votes may well also be fraudulent, so, enh, I think I'm going to conclude this isn't actually an interesting number.)
Re novella nominations, on the one hand, Untethered Sky was a much better book than Rose/House, on the other hand, if the latter hadn't been in the packet, I would never have gotten to read it and would still be frustrated that I couldn't, so, I guess I have to appreciate this outcome.
Re novelette nominations, interesting to me that Sarah Pinsker's "Science Facts" came so close to making it - afaik this story was only available in her collection Lost Places, and while it's not unheard-of for stories to make the ballot out of single-author collections (Ted Chiang's "Omphalos" in 2020 did, and Meg Elison's "The Pill" in 2021), it's unusual enough that I find it interesting when it happens.
Graphic: I have already said ugh, but ugggh. If part of the problem is in fact that people are less likely to read unfamiliar Graphic finalists, and thus end up throwing downballot votes to the familiar rather than stuff they didn't make time for, is there any way to get people to read more? I personally dislike reading print comics on screens, and so read everything that I voted for by having a best friend who buys print comics, which is terrific for me but doesn't scale.
I'm so upset that not even 37 people nominated Scavengers Reign as a dramatic long. It was so good! And clearly lots of people watch television - all those dramatic short voters - just baffling.
Q was interested in what happened in the games category and so I got to explain to him about instant-runoff voting, and then we went and looked at the Dramatic Longs to see how something could start out not in first place but win by picking up more votes, so, yay for these stats as a teaching tool/yay for the Hugos as propaganda for ranked choice voting.
Wow, what a come-from-behind close victory for Strange Horizons. I'm so, so pleased to finally see them win (and Uncanny has won plenty).
Martha Wells declining for System Collapse apparently let Saint of Bright Doors onto the novel ballot, so I now particularly appreciate her having done that.
So many Seeds of Mercury fans! And yet in the end they were outnumbered by people who preferred all the English-language stuff downballot. Although, hm, well. It's interesting to me that none of the other Chinese-language finalists have numbers like those 881 first-place votes for Seeds of Mercury - Gu Shi's novelette only has 188, the two Chinese short stories have 187 and 165, the Three Body Problem comic has 338 and Wandering Earth II has 247. I am not trying to say all Chinese-language voters must like the same things!! Obviously Anglophone voters disagree wildly about things and presumably Chinese voters do too! Just, like, trying to understand whether there actually is a block of Anglosphere voters who will always prefer English things, and a block of Sinophone voters who will always prefer Chinese things, and how big those blocks actually are, and what categories they care about. (Friends have made a good case that Seeds of Mercury is probably the finalist that was targeted by the disqualified fraudulent votes, and that some number of its remaining votes may well also be fraudulent, so, enh, I think I'm going to conclude this isn't actually an interesting number.)
Re novella nominations, on the one hand, Untethered Sky was a much better book than Rose/House, on the other hand, if the latter hadn't been in the packet, I would never have gotten to read it and would still be frustrated that I couldn't, so, I guess I have to appreciate this outcome.
Re novelette nominations, interesting to me that Sarah Pinsker's "Science Facts" came so close to making it - afaik this story was only available in her collection Lost Places, and while it's not unheard-of for stories to make the ballot out of single-author collections (Ted Chiang's "Omphalos" in 2020 did, and Meg Elison's "The Pill" in 2021), it's unusual enough that I find it interesting when it happens.
Graphic: I have already said ugh, but ugggh. If part of the problem is in fact that people are less likely to read unfamiliar Graphic finalists, and thus end up throwing downballot votes to the familiar rather than stuff they didn't make time for, is there any way to get people to read more? I personally dislike reading print comics on screens, and so read everything that I voted for by having a best friend who buys print comics, which is terrific for me but doesn't scale.
I'm so upset that not even 37 people nominated Scavengers Reign as a dramatic long. It was so good! And clearly lots of people watch television - all those dramatic short voters - just baffling.
Q was interested in what happened in the games category and so I got to explain to him about instant-runoff voting, and then we went and looked at the Dramatic Longs to see how something could start out not in first place but win by picking up more votes, so, yay for these stats as a teaching tool/yay for the Hugos as propaganda for ranked choice voting.
Wow, what a come-from-behind close victory for Strange Horizons. I'm so, so pleased to finally see them win (and Uncanny has won plenty).
