Edit 7/7: 2024 list posted! https://mrphilipslibrary.wordpress.com/2023/07/06/hugo-predictions-2024/
Edit 6/22/23: I posted my final predictions as a new post! https://mrphilipslibrary.wordpress.com/2023/06/22/final-hugo-predictions-2023/
So it’s been a month since the voting period closed, but apparently the finalists are supposed to be announced in early June. Sometime in the next week then? The longer-than-expected wait time caused me to make an adjustment to the model which gives slightly more weight to authors who have a previous Hugo history. This resulted in a change in both predictions as detailed below.
Watch for the 2024 predictions post to go up soon after this year’s finalists are announced! (Expect The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakraborty to debut highly.
Novel:
| Nettle & Bone | T. Kingfisher |
| Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution | R.F. Kuang |
| Nona the Ninth | Tamsyn Muir |
| The Kaiju Preservation Society | John Scalzi |
| The World We Make | N.K. Jemisin |
| Fevered Star | Rebecca Roanhorse |
Novella:
| A Prayer for the Crown-Shy | Becky Chambers |
| What Moves the Dead | T. Kingfisher |
| Even Though I Knew the End | C.L. Polk |
| Into the Riverlands | Nghi Vo |
| Where the Drowned Girls Go | Seanan McGuire |
| A Mirror Mended | Alix E. Harrow |
5/31/23: As mentioned above, I made a slight change in the prediction model and as a result, Fevered Star by Rebeccca Roanhorse replaces Sea of Tranquility on the novel list. Still would not be surprised for SoT to make an appearance on the shortlist, though. Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire, and The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal (possibly Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, but I see that as this year’s The House in the Cerulean Sea) are possibilities as well. I really don’t see anything else having a chance.
In the novella category, it means that A Mirror Mended replaces Spear. With the category confusion surrounding Spear, I’m just not confident that I should include it in the model at all anyway. See my previous comments related to that below.
I have Spear entered in both the novel and novella prediction models and it doesn’t crack the top 16 in the novel list, while it lands in the top 6 in novellas. On the subject of categories and word counts, the official Hugos website states: “The Hugo Administrators have a small amount of leeway to move works between categories… They are most likely to go with the preferences expressed by a majority of the voters.” As Spear is eligible in both the novel and novella categories (which the author acknowledges), I think it will come down to whichever category it is nominated in more often. It was initially marketed as a novella and widely considered as such, but many awards and lists have now placed it in novel categories because its length (45,000ish words) exceeds the 40,000 word limit to be considered a novella. I’m waffling on whether I should double down on this prediction or replace it with the next book on the list. Maybe I’m overthinking.
As was mentioned when I posted my initial predictions on Reddit, the fact that Worldcon will take place in China this year, after a big effort by Chinese fans, means it’s very possible that native authors will take up a lot of these slots! All of my data comes from English-language websites, lists, awards, reviews, etc. It will be interesting to see how the awards are affected by that, especially in these two categories that typically receive the most votes.
