The official Hugo Awards website posted the 2023 Hugo nomination voting statistics today.
Detailed statistics for the nominating and final ballots are available in the 2023 Hugo Award Stats Final PDF file.
The document includes several unexplained rulings by the Hugo Administrator that works like R.F. Kuang’s Babel or people like fan writer Paul Weimer, who otherwise would have made the final ballot, were “not eligible”.
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Eh, it’s more the voting stats that seem odd versus the nominations. Nomination numbers were unusually high (if somewhat irregular), but there were over 1600 Best Novel noms but less than 1100 Best Novel votes. Usually the ratios are the other way around (more votes than nominations) IINM.
Members of the preceding Worldcon can nominate for the next Worldcon, but can’t vote (unless they also have membership for that Worldcon, of course). It doesn’t strike me as odd that a lot of Western fans who attended Chicon sent in nominations, but didn’t bother to buy membership for Chengdu.
What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of homegrown Chinese SF/fantasy: the 11th highest-grossing film in China in 2022 was Moon Man, a humorous SF movie; the most popular TV show on the Chinese streaming service iQIYI in 2022 was Love Between Fairy and Devil, a fantasy romance which is exactly what it says on the tin.
That no movies or shows like this received a single nomination (or at least not above the very small number needed to show up on the list) means you have to make some strange assumptions about these passionate Chinese fans that cared so much about Worldcon that they sacrificed $100 each just on the off chance to bring a Worldcon to their country (e.g., they all hate Chinese SF/fantasy and only nominated Western works, they are all highly educated on how to vote for site selection but strangely knew nothing about how to nominate works)… or, you know, they were all paper members generated so that whoever was organizing this thing could make it happen.
Western fandom is homogeneous enough that it’s not strange that the same TV shows/movies/books are nominated whether Worldcon is in Scotland, Australia or the U.S.; we’re all consuming the same stuff, more or less. That’s not true in China. A legitimate nomination slate produced by Chinese fans wouldn’t have looked like this.
You could theoretically get this kind of result if you were parachuting Worldcon into a country (as arguably happened in 2007 with Japan), but that’s not what happened here. The story we’re supposed to believe is that Chengdu was the result of an outpouring of support from ~1000 Chinese fans… who all mysteriously seem to have disappeared after site selection.
Brian, I think you’re overlooking how very peculiar the nomination stats look, in many categories. The peculiarity is similar to how the numbers would look if a substantial number of nominations were added to a pre-specified small subset of the organic nominations.
As for either nomination or voting numbers being lower than site-selection numbers (or attendance numbers), it’s pretty common for only a small subset of Worldcon members to nominate or vote for Hugos.
Yes, I just followed the Hugos for many years. Then the first couple years I only particpated in the final voting. It’s two completely seperate things to want a Worldcon and to participate in the Hugo part.