Hugos Awarded!

The 2014 Hugo Awards were given today, and I have to say that I'm very pleased, overall, with the outcome. ladybusiness provides a complete list of winners for anyone who hasn't already seen it.

The big news, of course, is that Ancillary Justice won the Best Novel award in a walk-off. This was more important to me than any other race on the ballot, and so of course I am really happy. Several of my other favorites also won -- let me take yet another opportunity to plug John Chu's wonderful story -- as well as other books, writers, and creators that I didn't rank first but still like quite a lot. Perhaps most importantly in the long run, nothing from the Correia slate* went home with an award, and in most cases they ended up at or near the bottom of the ranking. (Vox Day's novelette came in dead last, even after "No Award".)

One of the things I like best about the Hugos is that they release the raw voting data (link to PDF) every year, so you can see how many votes each work received, how they ranked in each and also how many votes total were cast. They also release the nomination lists, including the ten works in each category that didn't make the nomination cut, and this data can be fascinating. In particular, I noticed right away that "The Sandstorm", the double episode of Welcome to Night Vale, received 30 nominations in the "Dramatic Presentation: Short Form" category. This might not sound like very many, but consider that 38 votes would have been good for fifth place, in a three-way tie with an episode of Orphan Black and an episode of Doctor Who. So just eight more nominations, out of 760 ballots in the category and 1,923 ballots total, and it would have made the cut.

So just a few people can make a big difference. In every single category except Dramatic Presentation: Long Form, the 5th place nominee received fewer than a hundred nominations, and in many cases, sixth place was fewer than ten votes out of contention. When we're looking at those kinds of numbers, it doesn't take much participation to move the needle. So I hope anyone who has been interested decides to participate next year. As much of my time and attention as it took, I'm already looking forward to it (and plotting out how to better plan my short fiction reading).

*If you're not familiar with this particular controversy, Jed provides a succinct explanation with many good links. I will leave it to others to speculate about what effects Correia and his efforts may have had on the awards; my main observation is that, while it seems to have affected the nominations quite a bit, the effect on the final results seems to be minimal to none. And that is a very good thing, both for this year's award and the health of the award process as a whole.