The 2024 Hugo Awards ceremony took place yesterday, August 11th, and the list of winners is now available on the Glasgow Worldcon site.
Even more exciting (for me) was the release of the voting statistics right after the ceremony. Traditionally, these stats are released hours or even days later, but this time, the Glasgow team shared them immediately to demonstrate transparency, especially in light of the calamitous fiasco of the 2023 awards.
Speaking of which, Dave McCarty, the architect of said fiasco, was apparently spotted lurking around the Worldcon venue, despite being banned from the con. This led to one particularly entertaining interaction. He must have been on a lot of people’s minds lately, because my post about him from a few months ago has blown up in the last couple days. I’m curious to see if any more drama involving him unfolds over the weekend.
Anyway, the Glasgow staff members seem to have been highly competent and honorable in their administration of the Hugos, ensuring the process was beyond reproach. They even published an administrator’s report detailing the various measures they took to maintain the integrity of the awards this time around, which I really appreciate.
The complete voting statistics can be found here. After spending some time poring over them, I’ve noticed a few interesting tidbits. Naturally, I also compared them to my Extremely Official Predictions to see if any of my incorrect guesses were close to making it onto the final ballot.
The single novel that I predicted would make the ballot but didn’t—Starling House by Alix E. Harrow—was indeed quite close, ranking 8th in the nomination stage. It would have needed 17 more votes to surpass The Saint of Bright Doors and become a finalist.
As for novellas, there were three that I predicted would be finalists but weren’t: The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill, Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi, and Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire. Of those, The Crane Husband and Lost in the Moment and Found were on the longlist of “also-rans,” with McGuire’s novella coming quite close to landing a finalist spot. It needed just 8 votes in excess of 2.42 EPH points to overtake Rose/House. (I think the administrator’s report goes into detail about EPH and how finalists are determined, but I’ll try to give an overview of the somewhat complicated process at the bottom of the post). Lost in the Moment and Found was also only 2 votes behind finalist Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet, but the latter received significantly more EPH points. This means that many people who nominated McGuire also nominated several other eventual finalists, essentially diluting those votes. In contrast, many voters for Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet nominated that work exclusively, or along with only one or two other eventual finalists, giving more value to their votes.
Notably, LDNAuTM only gained more EPH points after other Chinese-language works were eliminated (The Salt Bridge, Shine, Engineer Memo of Qian Chuang). I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that LDNAuTM, fellow finalist Seeds of Mercury, as well as Salt Bridge and Shine, were all featured on recommended reading/year’s best SFF lists published by various Chinese organizations, as reported by Ersatz Culture. Neither LDNAUtM, nor Seeds of Mercury even made it into my prediction database because they weren’t included on any of the lists or awards I track in my model. It’s worth noting that there were many Chinese-language works illicitly and inscrutably blocked by Dave McCarty from making the final ballot in the 2023 awards, presumably due to racially-motivated gatekeeping on his part. So, it was nice to see some Chinese-language works show up this time around.
On the Best Novel longlist, there’s the bizarre inclusion of Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, which, as far as I can tell, is not even tangentially SFF-related nor does it include any SFF elements. Of its 40 nominators, 36 of them voted exclusively for that work, and the other 4 included some combination of Starter Villain, System Collapse, Cosmo Wings, or The Future. So it’s not like a random bunch of typical Hugo voters just happened to like the same non-SFF lit fic, there was a group of people who each paid $50 for voting rights in an attempt to get it on the ballot. I can’t imagine who would spend that money to nominate a non-SFF book that ultimately wasn’t even close to making it onto the ballot. Weird.
Across the various categories, there’s a recurring pattern of Chinese-language works having a very high number of EPH points relative to the number of votes they received. This is most notable in a few cases: The Far North in Best Novelette (which received the highest number of votes, with a significantly high percentage being “bullet votes” meaning they included only that work—232.42 EPH points in the 95th round of voting compared to 252 total votes); Answerless Journey in Best Short Story (again, the highest number of votes and EPH points—66.5 points from 69 total votes); especially Three-Body Problem in Best Graphic Story (none of the 151 nominators voted for anything else in that category); Discover X in Best Related Work (281.83 EPH points from 343 total nominations); The Wandering Earth II in Long Dramatic Presentation (five other “also-rans” received more total votes, but The Wandering Earth had more EPH points); and 姚海军 / Yao Haijun in Best Editor, Long Form (all 16 nominations were “bullet votes”). This suggests that there was likely a unified effort among Chinese voters to support these various works/people.
Let me know if you noticed anything else of interest!
Here’s my attempt at explaining the voting process for the Hugo Awards. The Awards use a voting system called EPH, which stands for “E Pluribus Hugo.” The system was introduced around the time of the Sad Puppies in an attempt to ensure that the finalists represented a broader range of voter preferences, rather than being dominated by a small group of people voting for the same things.
Here’s how it works:
- Nominations: Voters can nominate up to five works in each category, like Best Novel or Best Novella.
- Counting Votes: Instead of simply picking the top six works with the most votes, the EPH system is used to determine the finalists.
- EPH Calculation:
- Assigning Points: When a voter nominates multiple works, their vote is divided among those works. For example, if a voter nominates five works, each work gets 1/5 of a vote. If they nominate two works, both receive 1/2 of a vote, etc. These vote fractions are called EPH points.
- Elimination Rounds: In each round, the two works with the fewest EPH points are compared, and the one with fewer total votes is eliminated. The votes for the eliminated work are then redistributed to the remaining works that were also on those ballots. So if a voter originally voted for five works—each having .2 EPH points, or 1/5 of a vote— when one of them is eliminated, the remaining four nominations now have .25 EPH points, or 1/4 of a vote.
- Choosing Finalists: This process continues until six works remain. These are the finalists.
The main goal of EPH is to prevent a small group of voters from dominating the nominations by voting for the same slate of works. By considering both the number of votes and how those votes are spread across different works, EPH (in theory) assures a more balanced selection of finalists. This means that works with broad support across many voters are more likely to make it onto the final ballot, rather than just the works with the most concentrated support. This can be circumvented when groups rally around a single work in each category, giving each vote more value—only listing one nomination gives that work one full EPH point instead of a fraction split between multiple works.
Hope this makes sense!